The “passion tax”: How loving your job makes you more exploitable
“Do what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life.” Career and productivity gurus have long been drumming this belief into the minds not just of the working class but also students preparing to enter the workforce. We’ve been taught that having passion for what we do is the key to success, that being willing to go above and beyond our responsibilities raises our value in the workplace.
But what if passion merely makes us vulnerable to exploitation?
This is the idea behind Duke University’s 2020 study on the passion tax, which is the cost levied against those who show enthusiasm for their work. Researchers stated in their report that “although passion may indeed be beneficial in many ways, we suggest that the modern cultural emphasis may also serve to facilitate the legitimization of unfair and demeaning management practices—a phenomenon we term the legitimization of passion exploitation.” (Emphasis mine.) The specific management practices they cited were employees getting assigned tasks beyond their scope of responsibilities, laborers being forced to work beyond work hours, and workers not getting paid fairly, if at all.
Labor issues have been coming to a head ever since the pandemic changed the way most people work. From the Great Resignation wave of 2021 to the growing unionizing efforts across industries, more workers are realizing how employers have been undervaluing their labor. They’re becoming more aware of how showing dedication to their work has been manipulated by companies to make them take on additional load without proper compensation.
A tax levied across different sectors
Passion tax isn’t limited to a specific industry. The 2,400 participants surveyed for the Duke University research cited various circumstances demonstrating passion exploitation. Some believe it usually happens in creative and humanitarian fields traditionally associated with passion, such as the arts, education, and social work. Others noted that workers who show love for their jobs, regardless of their position and industry, get exploited more.
Correlating one’s life purpose with work is deeply ingrained in American culture. NPR’s Life Kit tracks how financial and job security were the primary career considerations during the 1940s and ‘50s but were replaced by identity-driven and identity-based fulfillment from the ‘70s until the ‘90s. However, increased outsourcing in the early 2000s and then the 2007 to 2008 global financial crisis led to the decrease in available long-term, stable jobs. The shaky job market facilitated the creation of the gig economy, which later on became the foundation of the hustle culture that has people monetizing their hobbies and working (or looking for work) beyond the traditional 9-to-5 schedule.
“The cost of following one’s passion ‘is largely paid by working-class and low-income students and workers’—meaning people who rarely have access to systemic support that could allow them greater chances of upward mobility.”
This mindset remains prevalent among students and college-educated workers, as sociologist Erin Cech discovered while writing her book The Trouble With Passion. “Believers in this idea trust that passion will inoculate them against the drudgery of working long hours on tasks that they have little personal connection to,” she writes in The Atlantic. “For many, following their passion is not only a path to a good job; it is the key to a good life.”
An individualistic solution to systemic problems
However, not everyone can afford to put stock in this belief. The Clayman Institute for Gender Research notes that the cost of following one’s passion “is largely paid by working-class and low-income students and workers”—meaning people who rarely have access to systemic support that could allow them greater chances of upward mobility.
Successful people often laud having passion for work as a powerful factor that overcomes any obstacle. Remember Steve Jobs’ advice to Stanford University’s graduating class of 2005? “[The] only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” While this is easy to follow for those with resources to pursue what they love and have a safety net to fall back on, it is a costly risk for those who have neither.
It also presents passion as an individualistic solution to a systemic problem—that essentially, if someone isn’t accomplished in their career, it’s simply because they’re not driven enough to succeed. “It helps culturally legitimize an underpaid and overworked white-collar labor force while reinforcing class, race, and gender segregation, as well as financial inequality,” Cech points out in Fast Company.
“It is scary to think that when we see someone in a bad work situation, our mind may jump to the conclusion that they must be passionate about their work.””
This harmful mindset also affects blue-collar workers. While there are those who genuinely find meaning in doing manual or trade labor, many are also simply trying to make ends meet. Their reliance on their jobs makes them exploitable too, especially when they buy into the idea that their hard work will eventually be rewarded by their employers.
Passion as a job requirement
Tying one’s life purpose with work also normalizes how workplaces exploit their employees’ work ethic and enthusiasm. Take a look at the openings listed in various job portals: How many of them include “passion” and its many iterations in their requirements? Companies looking for employees who’ll take on more responsibilities for no additional pay would value an applicant’s eagerness to go above and beyond as much as their competency.
Cech opines in her The Atlantic piece, “When people place paid employment at the center of their meaning-making journey, they hand over control of an essential part of their sense of self to profit-seeking employers and the ebbs and flows of the global economy.” Unfortunately, there’s no lack of workers who buy into what she calls the “passion principle,” where fulfilling work is prioritized over stability and financial security. This further perpetuates the labor market’s longstanding issues of inequality and abuse.
“It is scary to think that when we see someone in a bad work situation, our mind may jump to the conclusion that they must be passionate about their work,” Troy Campbell, a participating researcher in the passion tax study, tells Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. The hustle mindset, which remains pretty strong on social media, doesn’t help either, with people still praising the rise-and-grind lifestyle popularized by the Silicon Valley work culture. Campbell warns, “While not always factually incorrect, this [perception] may serve to legitimize instances of mistreatment.” Such is the case in the visual effects industry where grueling hours of unpaid work have long been the norm.
The need for Diversified sources of fulfillment
To be clear, loving your job isn’t inherently bad; it’s incredibly fulfilling to do work you find meaningful. But valuing it more than other, equally important aspects of your life—your time, health, hobbies, personal relationships—leaves you exposed to a capitalistic system intent on squeezing the most out of the workforce at the lowest cost.
“[Our passion tax research is] simply a warning that we should not let the current cultural emphasis on finding passion in our work be co-opted by the human tendency to legitimize or ignore exploitation,” Jae Kim, the Duke University report's lead author, explains. Recognizing how deeply ingrained this tendency is can raise your awareness of when and how your workplace is “charging” you with a passion tax.
If your enthusiasm for work feels like an all-encompassing force, Cech’s statement to Nature might clarify your perspective: “There’s no systematic evidence in the social-science literature that says people who are passionate about their work are producing better products than people who aren’t.” Although they feed into each other, your passion isn’t a measure of your competence. In fact, being too passionate can actually cause burnout—and this will definitely affect your capabilities and productivity.
More importantly, your salary, job position, and career don’t dictate your worth.
Cech advises shifting your personal philosophies about work, writing in The Atlantic, “The more pertinent question [to ask], then, isn’t ‘How can I change my career path to do work that I love?’ but rather ‘How can I wrangle my work to leave me with more time and energy for the things and people that bring me joy?’” This can help make your approach to passion more holistic rather than have it be hinged solely on work. Intentionally channel it into non-work interests that would balance the hours and effort you pour into your job. That way, you create space for finding healthier sources of fulfillment and self-expression. Cech described this to NPR as “diversifying your one’s meaning-making portfolio.”
Addressing the wider problem
Image by Drazen Zigic via Freepik
Freeing yourself from paying the passion tax starts on a personal level but ensuring widespread protection for all workers requires collective effort: from employees, employers, and, for younger generations, from their parents and mentors.
Quiet quitting or “acting your wage” is merely an individualistic, short-term solution. Fostering bigger discussions about the overt and insidious ways industries abuse employees is more effective. It leads to communities proposing equitable, long-term solutions to deeply entrenched unfair labor practices. There’s a precedent for this already: the long history of unionization in America. Organizing also pushes the government to legislate better labor practices. If not for generations of workers organizing to demand changes in their industries, seven-day workweeks, child labor, and other abusive policies would remain legal today.
Collective action develops trust between colleagues too. Knowing that you’re all looking out for each other can make the workplace feel safer and more supportive, whether the actual work is drudging and/or difficult. The ongoing Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, for example, earned support from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) whose members who have also gone on strike, demanding their fair share from massive streaming profits and protection against the potential abuse of artificial intelligence against creative talents. (The SAG-AFTRA has also expressed their support for reality TV personalities possibly forming a union themselves so they could receive residuals from the studios’ and production companies’ use of their images, names, and likeness.) This show of solidarity could force studios and streaming companies to come to an agreement with both unions to effect industry-wide improvements that would also benefit non-creative entertainment workers.
It’s great to find purpose in your job but it shouldn’t crush your body and soul in the process. There’s more to life than work.
An edited version of this story was published on Women.com. Header image by Simon Abrams via Unsplash.