Good Work
by Rev. Ricky Hoyt
September 6, 2009

In the Buddhist system of religion, they speak of an eight-fold path to salvation:  eight strategies of living that lead to the best possible life and relief from suffering.  The first is right belief, then right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, mindfulness, and finally right contemplation.

The fifth path, right livelihood, could also be called, “good work.”  It means choosing a career in line with your values, a job that furthers your spiritual development rather than subtracts from it.

For the Buddhist, right livelihood means supporting yourself in a job that respects the basic moral behaviors of Buddhism known as the Five Precepts. If there are anything like a Buddhist Ten Commandments, I suppose they are the Five Precepts.
They are:

1. Refrain from taking life.
2. Refrain from taking that which is not given.
3. Refrain from misuse of the senses.
4. Refrain from telling lies.
5. Refrain from self-intoxication with alcohol and drugs.

Buddhists should not murder, steal, nor misuse the senses, which means avoiding over indulgence in sensual pleasures such as sex.  Buddhists should not lie, and Buddhists should not drink or use drugs.   For work to be good, in the Buddhist sense, it must follow the values of the Five Precepts, and it also must not support a system in which other people are drawn into breaking one of the Five Precepts.  This means that Buddhism specifically forbids making a living through robbing, or murder, but it also forbids jobs which require or invite other people to lie, or steal, or take a life, or misuse their senses, or become intoxicated.  And if murder also applies to the job of a soldier, or a butcher, or if stealing also applies to exorbitant prices, or charging interest on a loan, then finding “good work” gets very difficult.

A wonderful compendium of actual jobs done by actual people came out a few years ago.  It’s a book called called “Gig,” subtitled “Americans talk about their jobs at the turn of the millennium.” (John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, Sabin Streeter, eds. Three Rivers Press, pub. 2000.) The book consists of interviews with people about their jobs. The variety of jobs represented are wonderful: basketball player; crime scene cleaner; gun store owner; food stylist; super model; palm reader; prison guard.

I’m going to read excerpts from five interviews. Each of these represents a job that would probably be forbidden by one of the Buddhist Five Precepts and thus would not be considered “Good Work” from a Buddhist perspective.  But I invite you to listen to them from your own value perspective, and ask yourself whether these jobs would be “good work” for you.  Whether or not you would ever do this job yourself, could you support someone else taking this job, within the values that are important in your life?  And also listen to the way that each of these people talks about the values that are important in their life, and whether they find that their job promotes or hinders those values.

Here’s the first job.  This one goes against the first of the Five Precepts: refrain from taking life.  It’s the testimony of a woman named Sandy Wilkens.  Sandy doesn’t take life herself, as part of her job, but in her role as Human Resources Director for a slaughterhouse she participates in a system that involves the constant taking of life.  Here’s her story:

I’m the director of the plant’s human resources department.  It’s a multitasked position, but mostly I hire and train our employees—the people who process the cows and do the slaughter.  I’d hoped that I would come in here and use some of my background.  My master’s degree in counseling and guidance, and I thought I’d be able to take care of the employees if they had any problems and write safety policies and make sure everything was going smooth.  And I do write policies a bit, but really, the job is a lot more basic than that.  It’s all about getting people in the door, getting workers.  We just need bodies in this place.  We’re desperate.  Because even though we pay a very decent wage, the working conditions are terrible.  It’s not a job that normal people want anymore.  It’s just very tough.

It’s a big operation.  We need to have at least two hundred and seventy workers every day to run the plant.  And like I said, we’re just desperate for workers.  Last month, I hired eighty-five people and ninety-two left.  That’s not uncommon.  We’re bleeding people.  I hire them and they leave.  No matter how I sell them on the job, they go down there and find it not exactly to their liking.  Some people will quit fifteen minutes after they get on the floor because it’s so ugly to them.  It’s a special kind of person who wants to work in a meat-processing plant.

Here’s the story of Isabelle Quinones describing her job as a pretzel vendor, and a thief.

When I was a senior in college, I got a part-time job selling pretzels at a farmer’s market.  It was [one] day a week, ten bucks an hour under the table, which was really good money.  And, in reality, it was even better than that because, since it’s an all cash business, it was really easy to steal—sometimes like forty bucks a shift—to supplement your earnings.  [Laughs}  At the time I thought well, this is just a silly something to do while I’m a student, but the money was so good that after I graduated, I switched to full-time.  I ended up selling pretzels for four years.  Way too long.

The pretzels cost five for a dollar.  Eleven for two dollars.  They were hard pretzels, made by the Mennonites in Pennsylvania.  The way they’re made is they’re boiled, which is what soft pretzels are, and then they’re baked, which takes all the moisture out and makes them hard.  People loved them.  They were addictive.  We sold a ton.  About twelve hundred dollars was a good day.  All cash.  It was enough so that, like I said, I could pocket a five here and a ten there and no one would notice.  I stole all the time, every shift, and never got caught.  It was one of those jobs that was sort of like the golden handcuffs thing—totally menial, thoughtless labor in one way, but it paid really good.  With stealing, I was making almost a hundred and fifty a day, cash.

Here’s Sara Maxwell, a stripper, which the Buddhists would probably categorize as a job that encourages others to break the third precept:  mis-use of the senses.

I moved to San Francisco, alone, after graduating from a very small college in a very small Virginia town, and I didn’t come out here to sit in my apartment and watch TV.  I wanted to meet people and enjoy myself, so I went out a fair amount.  And one night I accepted an invitation to go to a lesbian nightclub with some friends.  On this particular night at this club, [they were] hosting an amateur strip show. Well I had a few beers and watched the pretty awkward volunteers dance onstage, and I thought, “I could do that,” And after a few more beers, I did.

…about an hour later, a hippie-ish woman in Birkenstocks leaned over to ask me if I would consider dancing professionally…

At first I said I wasn’t interested, but I took this flyer she had anyway and at home later I started to think about it….  So I finally decided it might be a really easy way to bring in some extra money and I went in for an audition.

I took the bus to the Lusty Lady, a generic club near the financial district.  I told the bouncer at the door that I was there to become a stripper…  he brought out the stage manager, Shannon, who took me into the dressing room…  I danced three songs on a stage with the regular girls and I guess I did well enough even though I was the only one who seemed to be sweating—because Shannon offered me four nights a week.  I took it.

The Lusty Lady was a glorified peep show—this wasn’t a gentlemen’s club where you actually go up to the tables and do lap dancing or anything like that.  The dancing stage was u-shaped, encased in Plexiglass and surrounded with booths that customers could enter, pay twenty-five cents, and a curtain would rise to let them see the dancers.  The shifts weren’t that bad because you were physically separated from the customers by the glass.  They couldn’t talk to you and you could only see their heads.

I wouldn’t recommend the job to anyone.  It was a negative experience.  You have to be extremely tough, and even then, I think it gets to you deep down.  The dancers I met who said, “I love stripping” had only been working at it for a month.  Be a waitress.

Here’s the fourth job and the fourth precept: refrain from telling lies – a telephone Psychic named Ken Jorgarian

Six years ago, I was unemployed and looking at the classifieds.  One week I saw an ad that said, “Astrologers/Psychics,” and I just gave them a call.  I had no special training, but I made it through a series of auditions.  They test you out, so to speak, for accuracy and ability to carry on a conversation and things like that.

Accuracy is very subjective because what happens is the clients are paying three dollars and ninety-nine cents a minute and they have a vested interest in getting their money’s worth.  They don’t want to feel like a fool.  They want to be able to tell their friends they talked to this wonderful psychic, not that they got gypped.  So the main requirement is just listening skills, having the ability to tune in to a client.  I’m not talking psychically, I’m just talking about being sensitive to what the client is saying and wants to hear.

If you can listen to what somebody has to say and give them some positive encouragement, then most people are going to think that you’re an accurate psychic if you’re even close with your predictions....  People are just really eager to have a phenomenal psychic in their lives.

But some calls are actually a matter of life and death, so if you have any genuine feelings for the client base, it can make you feel awful—really helpless and conflicted.  Some psychics actually think that they are Nostradamus-types or New Age healers who can heal people through the sounds of their voice inflections.  They may have it rationalized and think that they’re really helping these people, but I know that they can get better help somewhere else.  And it’s hard for me to reconcile that they’re often taking three-ninety-nine a minute from a person who’s calling for financial problem, and sometimes feeling suicidal about those problems.

Finally a fifth job, and a fifth story.  This one is from a Drug dealer, Chris Muller, who enables his clients to go against the fifth precept of Buddhism, keeping the mind sober and confronting reality unhindered.

I started selling mushrooms six years ago when I was a junior in high school.  I was living in Brooklyn and it was a good gig because I had the connect.  He was my friend.  He lived right down the block from me.  I’d known him since I was a kid, and he had the mushrooms.  I don’t know how he got them, but no one else had them.  So what I did is I hung back and picked out these three kids, gave them some of the mushrooms and they just flipped.  And I told them, “I’m your connect, you’re the man, don’t tell anyone I exist.”  And they were cool with that.  They would roll up in their neighborhoods and be like, “Yeah, I got the connect, it’s me.”

They were promoting for me without saying who I was.  They were making money, I was making money and my friend was making money and it was going really, really well.  Basically I was a junior in high school and I was making like twenty-two hundred bucks a week profit.  And I didn’t have to do anything, you know because I had a niche in the market.  No one else had mushrooms, and everyone wanted them.

I’m twenty-two and time’s passed and I can safely say I’m glad to be done with those crazy mushrooms and the whole hallucinogenic scene.  Even though I miss the crazy money, there’s really too much that can go wrong with that.  The reason why I started selling bud is because people can hold real jobs and smoke bud every day.  People who have real jobs, they don’t take mushrooms every single day.  I just want to deal with people who have more to lose than I do.  You know?  It’s much safer.  My target market is models, actors, and doctors and their friends.  Doctors are great clients because they have more to lose than I do.  [Laughs] Way more.  Like ten years of school.  And a license.

We work to support our lives but the work itself becomes a major part of our lives.  We live while we work not one and then the other. Work for some is a trial they must endure so that they can live during those times away from work.  Meanwhile the hours they spend at work must be subtracted from their life:  hours used up in order to live, but not actually lived themselves.  But if we’re not living while working, then even those precious hours away from work become necessarily spent on recuperating from work that has left us spirituality dead.  People who don’t enjoy their work usually don’t enjoy their time off very much either, because the accumulated stress of work lingers into Saturday, and the impending return to work ruins every Sunday. 

I admit it isn’t very profound or worth preaching about to say that working at something we love would be better than at something we hate.  And the criticism to that mundane homily is equally commonplace.  How many enjoyable jobs are there?  Is the choice really between a bad job and a good job, or between a bad job and no job?

But if life satisfaction is one of the goals of spirituality, and if one half or more of our waking lives is spent in work, then unless spirituality is just a joke, there must be such a thing as life-giving, soul-nurturing, good work for each of us and all of us.  If we believe in joy and satisfaction, not to mention peace and love our first task has to be to find for our lives work that is meaningful, satisfying, and life sustaining.  And once we’ve found that for ourselves to act from the peace and strength we get from our own good work to make sure all people everywhere have good work available.

For the Buddhist, good work, or “Right Livelihood,” is defined as work that follows the Five Precepts of Buddhism:  don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t over-indulgence in sensuality, don’t lie, don’t get drunk or high.

But we could turn those negatives around and use them as a guide for the work we ought to seek.  We value life, therefore we should find work that nurtures life, and in doing so our work will become spiritually nurturing.  We don’t lie because we value truth and justice, therefore we should find work that spreads truth and advocates for justice, which, by fulfilling our values, fulfills our lives.

The first question in developing both a spiritual life and a working life is what do I value?  For Unitarian Universalists our values are expressed in our 7 Principles:  human worth, truth, justice, democracy, a web of interdependent ecological and human community.  When our work supports our values then spiritual lives and working lives become one.  Our work becomes our spiritual practice, and the whole of our lives becomes life fulfilling and soul nurturing.

And guess what?  Furthering the values of human rights, truth, justice, ecological and social community requires a lot of work and a lot of workers and people get paid to do it!  Those UU values employ a lot of workers applying a lot of effort and skill and talent and time and mental power and muscle strength to making them appear in the world.  Not only do people make a living working for human rights, justice, ecological and social welfare, more importantly people who do that work make a life.  The choice really isn’t between a bad job and no job. The choice is between taking the time to define our values and find or create work that supports them, or disparaging our values and our lives enough to accept something less. 

The goal of work is not to save up enough money and accumulated time-off so we can at last enjoy a spirit-nurturing vacation.  That’s a false compromise that ends up wasting the one life we’re given.  The goal of work is to nurture our spirits while we work.  Our physical bodies require rest.  Weekends and vacations are important for that, but our spirits require work in line with our values.  Whether we’re punching a time clock Monday morning, or lying on a beach on a July afternoon, our spirits need to feel in every moment of life that we are contributing our lives to the creation of a world in line with our values.

As we celebrate Labor Day, consider the relationship between labor, and the quality of life, your labor and your life, and the work and lives of others in our world.  Let us seek work that enables us to live by the highest values of our lives, and work that increases those values in the lives of other people and the world at large. May we all find “Right Livelihood.”  May we all find “Good Work.”