The Dignity of Any Job

One of the ads for freecreditreport.com shows a young man working at a small seafood restaurant singing a song of woe; it seems that he hadn’t been keeping up with his credit report and someone had successfully stolen his identity, thus ruining his credit and putting him in such a bad situation that he was now lowered to having to work in this demeaning job. And the whole commercial makes clear the point that greeting customers in a low-paying service industry job is indeed “demeaning”, if not outright humiliating. The attitude of all working there (apparently, they all had been neglecting their credit reports) was that of being far below their station in life. As a former low-wage earner in a restaurant, I find this commercial to be degrading and insulting.

The great, late Martin Luther King Jr. once exhorted people to treat any job they had seriously and with respect: to do the best they could do, no matter how insignificant others may regard it to be. And he was right. The dignity that one lives by depends on how much respect he/she shows others and by how much pride is derived from doing excellent work, without regard to what kind of work it is or how much pay comes from it.

Throughout my work life, I have encountered co-workers who have put me down for working hard at my job. The idea is apparently that if the powers-that-be aren’t paying you enough (in your own personal estimation, of course), then you need to cut back on your efforts to meet your conception of your work’s worth. That, to me, is a very unethical and self-defeating philosophy to live by. And (to risk a very bad pun), to their “discredit”, freecreditreport.com is guilty of promoting this elitist and (to me) antisocial mentality. Shame on them!