The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

Research has found that people who do “dirty” jobs tend to have a positive view of their professions. It is not that they love what they do, but that they dislike their jobs much less than the people with supposedly “good” jobs. The key for most workers is not what they do but what it means to them and how they relate and compare themselves to others. Like many other aspects of live, “[o]ur relationship with our work […] is relative” (178). This relationship was first discovered by sociologist Samuel Stouffer, who found that, paradoxically, soldiers were the most satisfied when working in areas where they had the least opportunity for promotion. In areas with flat hierarchies with little chance for promotion, soldiers were happiest, while hierarchical areas bred resentment between soldiers. This led Stouffer to a theory of relative deprivation, which asserts that relative standing in a hierarchy matters as much, or more, than the tangible rewards associated with rank. Because the workplace is where most people directly experience inequality on a daily basis, equality and inequality in pay, status, and power shapes the meaning we assign to work.

Workplaces are organized in hierarchies, as is just about everything humans do as a group.