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1/ A new excerpt from The Once and Future Worker: The Culture War on Work. You can see our withdrawal of respect from the American worker in our sitcoms. The Emmy used to go constantly to stories about working and middle class families. Not any more. medium.com/@orencass/the-…
2/ From 1992 to 2017, Emmy went almost every year to a show about white-collar adults working in LA, Seattle, Boston, NYC, or DC. Has a lineup starring characters male and female; gay and straight; black, white, and Hispanic, ever looked so little "like America"?
3/ The one exception, by the way, is telling too: The Office was about paper salesmen in Scranton, but its primary vein of humor was the evidently miserable lives and meaningless jobs of its provincial subjects (none of whom seemed to have a family, either).
4/ This doesn't reflect market demand. Look at The Goldbergs: the father is a furniture salesman and the kids learn to value his commitment to working every day in a job he doesn't like to provide for them. But its whole premise is to be "retro," set in the 1980s.
5/ Or take This Is Us: a blue-collar family in Pennsylvania; the dad worked construction and struggled with alcoholism... also 30 to 40 years ago. In the modern-day segments, the now-grown-up kids are a singer, an actor, and a businessman, all working in NYC or LA. Huh.
6/ This goes along with the rise of the concept of the "dead-end job" and the message that work should be about your "passion." It is no longer enough for a job to meet a family’s needs; it also should offer a path to self-actualization. (Chart from Google Ngram Viewer.) 
7/ In his iconic commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs analogized a job to a lover. "As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. . . . So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle." By that standard, most work is inadquate. news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/job…
8/ We are perfectly capable of awarding respect and status on the basis of sacrifice and social contribution. What we lack is recognition that just about any job fits these criteria, that work is inherently deserving of respect.
9/ This has large, tangible costs. Work's rewards are social as well as economic, so the consequences of ideas and experiences like these are very real and painful: a "respect cut" to accompany the decades-long stall in paycheck growth.
10/10 Those rewards shouldn't hinge on type of work, its glamour, or its salary. If anything, people who do harder jobs for lower pay deserve the most admiration. So the renewal of work in America requires not only economic policy, but cultural change too. bit.ly/theonceandfutu…
