Professor’s Perspective is a part of the Op-Ed section in which the editor invites a member of the faculty to engage a topic of their choosing.
There is something strangely—but significantly—slippery about the idea of a “profession” and what it means to have one. There is, no doubt, a lot of symbolic status that comes with professional identity, and sometimes considerable money. But I’m wondering if it is worth the bread. Professionals seem to work without end—long hours that stretch into night, workweeks that infiltrate weekends, and obligations that vitiate vacations. If all that work is simply the unavoidable path to a fat paycheck, so be it. But there may be signs that professionals aren’t even in it for the dough so much as an identity. That is, professionals don’t do a job—they are a job. This may be a symptom of privilege, but it might also turn out to represent a pretense for profound exploitation, class dogma that masks an increasingly raw deal.
In some contexts, professional activity appears to be all about getting paid, as in the distinction between the unpaid amateur and the professional. The world of professional sports and entertainment seems to be unabashedly about big money and neither professional athletes nor media celebrities are particularly shy about it. Many sports professionals hire agents and/or belong to labor unions with the understanding that both agent and union are supposed to drive a hard bargain to win the big money. It’s Jerry Maguire’s, “Show me the money.” You remember.
Most of the time, however, the idea of the professional suggests the exact opposite: lofty indifference to the profane world of money and the market. Inside and outside of academia, all professionals are really professors; they profess a kind of sacred public vow, a religious or quasi-religious calling that implies a notion of service. Professional “ethics” trump the all-mighty dollar. Isn’t this at least one of the reasons why most professionals and professional institutions—unlike business-types and commercial enterprises—traditionally stay clear of advertising? Sure, there is Dr. Zizmor, the self-promoting NYC subway dermatologist, and all the ambulance-chasing attorneys who ply their trade on television. But everyone knows that these are the fallen angels willing to sell their professional birthright for a mess of pottage.
Professional status also signifies a collar color. Blue-collar workers do manual labor; white-collar professionals engage in more cerebral activities and bring to bear advanced knowledge. Blue-collar-workers join labor unions, at least in the iconography of the collar wars. Professionals go to college. Although the whole aloof orientation of college ostensibly abjures the instrumentalism of trade unionism, college may actually be the one place where professionals sometimes adopt some of the practices of traditional guilds. Trade unions issued membership cards that afforded access to lucrative work, at least insofar as the unions were able to effectively limit the supply of membership cards on the market. Within the skilled trades, the difficulty is not getting paid so much as getting in; membership was necessarily exclusive because the whole market strategy required minimizing labor supply relative to demand. Admission was always the site of the greatest contention and bitterness, especially insofar as the easiest way to become a member of the guild is to be the child of a member. Contemporary colleges operate according to an almost identical logic: they issue membership cards (diplomas); admission is both necessarily and intentionally limited; admission is the site of the most contentious and bitter battles; and parental membership (“legacy”) remains a relevant admission criterion.
There is, however, one crucial way in which professionals depart dramatically from the strategic logic of the guild. Guilds always put tight controls on the hours of labor. They knew that a labor supply logic demanded shorter hours. Less work and more pay; it was the rallying cry of every trade union. Professionals don’t watch the clock. In fact, professionals negotiate pay, but never even discuss hours. With great pride and fanfare, professionals boast about being paid an annual salary instead of an hourly wage. It is precisely the annual salary, however, that lays the foundation for endless work because pay is fixed even if work hours are dramatically inflated. This is hardly the stuff of trade unionism, although employers could be forgiven for being delighted.
In fact, within the United States, this attribute of professionalism is inscribed in law. The Fair Labor Standards Act features some very specific language about what it means to be a professional. According to the most recent Labor Department definitions, a professional must perform work “requiring advanced knowledge, defined as work which is predominantly intellectual in character and which includes work requiring the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment.” In order to distinguish between blue-collar skilled trades and white collar professionals, the law also specifies that the advanced knowledge “must be in a field of science or learning” and such knowledge “must be customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction.”
The government didn’t get in to the business of defining professional work in order to congratulate those who fit the bill. The Fair Labor Standards Act is the law that enshrines the forty-hour week as the social norm, but not for professionals. Professionals are special. They have the privilege of being exempt from the wage and hours law. Everyone else earns premium pay for any hours worked beyond the forty-hour weekly standard, a provision that effectively discourages endless work. Little wonder that employers are eager to “concede” professional status to anyone who will accept it.
As a technical matter, it wouldn’t be that difficult for professionals to get back into the trade union game. Although many professionals are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act that provides the legal framework for unionization, this isn’t even necessarily the key legislative domain. Formal recognition of professional unions would be an important step, but even more immediate consequences would flow from a few small amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act: end the professional exemption and—just to take it out for a spin—amend the law to provide overtime after 30 hours, rather than 40.
Employer opposition to these amendments would be tremendous, and maybe professionals would lose more battles than they would win in a fight for shorter hours and higher wages. But the real barriers to change are neither technical nor political. The battle cannot be won so long as professionals refuse to take up a cause that challenges the dogma of work and the cultural politics of disinterested professionalism. Work shmirk, job shmob. Show me the money.
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