Working 9 to 5 Should be Enough
By Jay Malone
During this year’s Super Bowl, tens of millions of Americans watched a reworking of a Dolly Parton classic. 5 to 9 celebrates the modern American hustle, making its vision of American worklife clear from the opening line — “Working five to nine, you’ve got passion and a vision — cause it’s hustlin’ time, the only way to make a living.”
The ad is the latest in a long cultural effort to deify the hustle. In the song, your side hustle is “…gonna change your life, do something that gives it meaning”. According to the hustle hype, our day jobs are drab and soul-crushing, and the only pathway to personal fulfilment can only be found through…more work.
This portrayal of the side hustle as a way to find meaning is recreated in thousands of YouTube videos, clickbait articles, and pitches for life coaches. All of which, ironically, are often side hustles themselves. We’re told that we aren’t working a second or third job — we’re hustling.
But for most workers, the hustle is anything but glamorous — it’s the only way to keep the lights on. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 200,000 Texans work for the minimum wage of $7.25/hr or less, and millions more earn less than a living wage.
Many of these workers support families. According to MIT, in the Houston area, a couple with two children needs to each make at least $15.37/hr each to make ends meet. For the 27% of Texans making less than $15/hr, hustles are a requirement of life, and free time is a luxury they can ill-afford.
The fight for time to rest has defined the American labor movement since its inception, and progress was paid for with the blood of hundreds of worker activists. From the 1860s through the 1930s, activists struggled to enshrine the idea of the 8 hour work week in our laws and cultural imagination.
The slogan of that era, ‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will,’ became law first with the Adamson Act in 1916, which established an 8 hour workday for railroad workers, and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937, which extended maximum work hour protections to most American workers, but excluded many, including the ever growing category of independent contractors, or gig workers.
The memory of those fights and the incompleteness of the victories is present in Dolly Parton’s original 1980 hit, 9 to 5. The song was inspired by the women’s rights movement of the same name, and celebrated their struggle to improve working conditions and equity for women in the workplace. Their vision was one of workplace dignity, something that is completely absent from the grueling reality of the hustle.
The hustle takes our eight hours of rest and transforms them into more work. In her recent book Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe writes of our modern work culture: “We have turned into work the things we might have done for pleasure, and then made even that relatively pleasant work accessible to only a few.”
Americans may not spend 14 hours a day on factory lines today, but our work is just as endless and all consuming. And the ever growing gig economy is only making it worse.
Dolly, we love you. You’ve been a powerful ally in the fight for workers’ rights and economic justice for more than 50 years. But the hustle is nothing to celebrate. There’s a better life out there, and everyone deserves to get by working nine to five.
Jay Malone is the political director for the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, AFL-CIO
