Just Doing Your Job: What We Do for a Living

For decades, we have been caught in a false dichotomy. On one side: the insistence that everyone must "take responsibility for their actions," which in practice means blaming individuals for outcomes produced by the structures in which they live. On the other: a reflexive denial that treats all responsibility-talk as victim-blaming, and that thereby avoids an uncomfortable truth. Namely, that we are actively socialized and expected not to take responsibility for our actions — specifically, for what we do when performing institutional roles. When we are "on the job," acting as employees, managers, bureaucrats, soldiers, or professionals, we learn to treat our actions as not fully our own. We follow rules, carry out orders, meet targets, and defer to authorities — and we learn to regard this compliance as morally neutral, or even as a virtue.

Yet institutional roles are not performed in a vacuum. Most of us spend the majority of our waking lives acting within such roles, and what we do in them — the goods we sell, the claims we deny, the orders we carry out, the people we manage — affects real human beings, whose needs are no less real for being invisible to us in the moment. The question this essay takes up is not whether individuals are to blame for structural problems (they are not), but why we have been taught to suspend moral judgment about what we do within institutions — and what this suspension reveals about how class-structured societies reproduce themselves.

The structural logic: how institutions suspend moral agency

It is common on the left to point out that replacing individual executives or politicians changes little, because the structures they operate within select for and reward certain behaviors regardless of who fills the role. Individual moral reform is not the answer; the structures must change. But this insight has an underexamined corollary. It is not only that structures constrain individual action. It is that institutional roles teach people to stop seeing their actions as morally significant: "work" comes to feel like a domain with its own rules, separate from the rest of life, where following orders is not quite the same as choosing to act. And the people affected by those actions become categories — "employee," "client," "applicant," "officer" — displacing need-perception with evaluative sorting: not "what does this person need?" but "do they meet the criteria?" The role trains a cognitive orientation — seeing through institutional categories rather than seeing the person — that makes it possible to treat people in ways we would never treat someone we recognized as a full human being with needs equal to our own.

This role-reduction is not accidental. It is the mechanism through which class-structured institutions get people to participate in exploitation without experiencing it as such. It operates through what, elsewhere on this site, I have called meritocratic reasoning: the logic through which any form of class exploitation is rationalized and made to appear natural. The positive formulation — "those who contribute more deserve more" — sounds innocuous. But it is inseparable from its corollary: "those who are or do less deserve less." Together, they produce the cognitive infrastructure that allows us to treat different categories of people as deserving different treatment, and to experience this as reasonable rather than as a moral failure.

When we act within institutional roles, meritocratic reasoning does double duty. It justifies the institution's treatment of those it affects (the denied claimant didn't meet the criteria; the fired worker wasn't productive enough), and it justifies our own compliance (I'm just doing my job; I need to earn a living; this is how the system works). The role becomes a shield — not only against external accountability, but against our own moral awareness. "I was just doing my job" is structurally a claim to innocence: by attributing the action to the institution rather than to the self, the performer maintains the moral status of someone who has not chosen to harm. The role does not merely suspend moral agency; it preserves the performer's moral identity intact through actions that would otherwise destroy it.

The continuum: from mundane to monstrous

The suspension of moral responsibility in institutional roles is easiest to see in extreme cases. But its significance lies in the fact that the same logic operates at every point on a continuum — from the mundane to the monstrous — and that the mundane end is where most of us live.

Consider everyday cases. A salesperson pushes a service on someone who clearly does not need it, because meeting the target means keeping the job, and exceeding it means a bonus. An insurance adjuster denies a claim on procedural grounds, knowing the claimant has a legitimate need, because the institutional rule is that a certain percentage of claims must be denied. A nursing home worker goes along with staffing levels and care protocols they know to be inadequate, because raising objections risks their position. In each case, the person acting is not a sociopath. They may well recognize, if pressed, that what they are doing harms another human being. But the institutional role provides a frame within which the harm becomes invisible, or at least tolerable: "I'm just following the rules." "It's not my decision." "That's above my pay grade."^[1]

When these conditions intensify, the consequences escalate. Mark Ames's Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion (2005) argues that the wave of workplace and school shootings in the United States since the 1980s — a phenomenon virtually unknown before that decade — should be understood not as random eruptions of individual madness but as responses to a systematic degradation of working conditions that began with the Reagan-era assault on unions, wages, and job security. Ames notes that the perpetrators overwhelmingly targeted their own workplaces and the specific people within them, and that those who refused to participate in earlier instances (as in the postal service, where the phenomenon first appeared) consistently cited their lack of career ambition — the same pattern Robin identifies in Battalion 101. The argument has limits, and Ames's framing is narrowly American and periodizing (the institutional logic is far older than Reaganism). But the core insight — that institutional conditions, not individual psychology, explain why people who had shown no prior propensity for violence eventually turned to it — is sound, and it points to the same mechanism this essay describes: the sustained pressure of institutional roles on human beings who are expected to suppress their own needs and moral responses indefinitely.

International analogues confirm that the phenomenon is structural rather than culturally specific. In Japan, karoshi (death from overwork) and karojisatsu (suicide from overwork) have been documented since the 1960s; in 2023, nearly 2,900 Japanese workers took their own lives due to work-related causes, and the WHO and ILO jointly estimated approximately 750,000 overwork-related deaths globally in 2021. At France Télécom (now Orange), a restructuring plan designed to push 22,000 employees out of 120,000 led to at least 35 suicides in 2008–2009, many by skilled engineers in their fifties who had been forcibly redeployed into degrading roles; the company's executives were eventually convicted of institutional harassment — the first such conviction of a major French corporation. At Foxconn's Chinese factories producing Apple's iPhones, a wave of worker suicides prompted the installation of suicide nets around dormitory buildings — addressing the symptom while leaving the conditions intact. In each case, the institutional response followed the pattern this essay would predict: the causes were individualized (personal fragility, pre-existing mental illness), the institutional conditions were defended as normal, and the structural relationship between those conditions and the outcomes was denied. See Waters and Chan, "Workplace Suicide and States of Denial: The France Télécom and Foxconn Cases Compared," tripleC 15, no. 1 (2017): 191–213, for a comparative analysis.

Now consider how the same logic scales. Corey Robin, in Fear: The Intellectual History of a Dangerous Idea, discusses the mentality he calls "careerism": the willingness to trade other people's wellbeing for personal advancement, understood as pragmatism rather than as a moral choice. The careerist, Robin notes, sees themselves as realistic and practical — caring for their own interests, not grand ideas. That careerism might itself be an ideology, that treating self-advancement as morally self-evident might facilitate collusion with serious harm — these possibilities are obscured precisely because they conflict with the self-image of the age.

Robin illustrates the point with the case of Reserve Police Battalion 101 — a unit of five hundred ordinary men, drawn from Hamburg's lower-middle and working classes, who were responsible for the execution of 38,000 Polish Jews and the deportation of 45,000 others to Treblinka. They did not act under threat of punishment; their commander informed them they could opt out, and 10 to 15 did. The remaining 490 stayed. Among the reasons Browning identifies: anti-Semitism, peer pressure — but critically, career ambition. Those who refused were forthright about their lack of interest in advancement. Those who stayed were young career policemen who, as one refuser put it, "wanted to become something."

I cite this case not because it is typical, but because it makes visible a logic that usually remains hidden behind its own banality. The willingness to trade others' needs against personal goals — financial security, status, career advancement — operates across the entire continuum. The difference between the salesperson and the battalion member is not in the structure of reasoning but in the stakes.

What makes the continuum so pernicious is precisely its continuity. We do not move from "benign compliance" to "participation in atrocity" through a clean break. We move through gradations, each normalized by the one before it. The person who has learned to sell unnecessary services without moral discomfort has practiced exactly the cognitive operation that, in different circumstances, enables far worse.

But compartmentalization is not always complete. Some people in institutional roles continue to see what the role is designed to screen — the teacher who watches the sorting system destroy her students, the claims adjuster who recognizes the legitimate need behind the denied application, the development worker watching structural adjustment dismantle the communities she is paid to "develop." When recognition persists but the conditions for acting on it are absent — no material margin to absorb the cost of refusal, no organizational infrastructure through which individual seeing could become collective action — the result is not political awakening but individual pathology: burnout, PTSD symptomatology, substance abuse, moral exhaustion. The empathic capacity fires continuously against conditions that make both exit and transformation impossible, and the damage falls on the person who sees. This is not a failure of individual resilience. It is what recognition looks like when it cannot be translated into action — structural understanding without the organizational conditions for acting on it.^[2]

The continuum extends further than most accounts acknowledge. The same role-reduction that makes it possible to treat human beings as "applicants," "targets," or "human resources" also makes it possible to treat nonhuman animals as "stock," "units," or "product." The slaughterhouse worker, the factory farmer, the laboratory technician all perform institutional roles that require the same suspension of moral awareness as any other: the reduction of a living being with its own needs and capacities to something from which use values — labor, flesh, data — are extracted; the location of responsibility in the institution rather than the self; the treatment of compliance as morally neutral. The institutional and ideological infrastructure required to treat living bodies as raw material does not stay neatly contained on one side of the species line. It is available for redeployment whenever political conditions shift — and as I argue in a companion essay on the material conditions of emancipation, it rests on a shared material foundation: the organized extraction of work from living bodies, which is the substrate on which all class relations are built. It is the psychological mechanism through which that infrastructure operates, in us, every day.

Neither bad habit nor historical anomaly

If the suspension of moral responsibility within institutional roles were merely a bad habit — a kind of moral laziness that better education or awareness could fix — then the solution would be straightforward: teach people to think more carefully, encourage moral reflection, promote empathy. And if it were a specifically modern phenomenon — a product of capitalism, bureaucratic rationality, or the particular character of liberal societies — then the solution would be to overcome the specific social form that produces it.

Neither account is adequate.

The role-reduction and moral compartmentalization described above are not bad habits. They are structurally produced by the way class societies organize social life. As I argue in more detail in the essay on competing solidarities, class domination operates by appropriating the integrated fabric of social reproduction — the set of practices through which human communities address their members' needs — rigidifying it and locking it into distinct institutional domains, each under class-structured control. The market claims subsistence. The state claims protection. Religion or its secular equivalents claim meaning and identity. The family claims care and affection. Each domain operates by its own rules and serves its own masters.

This separation is what makes moral compartmentalization feel natural. When subsistence is assigned to one institution (the labor market), protection to another (the state), and care to a third (the family), it becomes intuitive to believe that different domains of life operate by different moral rules — that "business ethics" is categorically different from personal ethics, that what counts as acceptable at work would be unacceptable at home. We learn this not through explicit instruction but through immersion in institutions organized on these principles from early childhood onward: in the family (where authority is patriarchal and economic dependence enforces compliance), in the school (where moral compartmentalization is first practiced systematically: children learn that institutional contexts operate by different rules than personal ones, and that compliance rather than moral evaluation is the appropriate response to institutional authority), and in the workplace (where survival depends on performing one's role to the satisfaction of those above).

Nor is this compartmentalization a specifically capitalist or modern phenomenon. Tributary, feudal, and slave-holding societies all produced their own versions of it — the separation predates capitalism by millennia. The feudal serf, the colonial administrator, the temple laborer all inhabited institutional roles that demanded compliance and discouraged moral reflection about the human costs of that compliance. What changes across historical forms of class rule is which institutions do the separating, which roles are assigned, and which categories of people are designated as deserving less. The underlying structure — the parceling out of social life into domains, each with its own rules, its own authorities, and its own mechanisms for discouraging moral awareness — is consistent.

This is also why the common perception that need-satisfaction is zero-sum is so deeply entrenched: class-structured institutions make it zero-sum by parceling it out conditionally: you get subsistence through the market (if you can sell your labor), protection through the state (if you are a citizen), belonging through the nation or the community (if you conform). When every domain of need-fulfillment is conditional and competitive, the experience of life as zero-sum is not a misperception — it is an accurate description of how class-structured institutions actually work.

The deeper bind: material stakes in compliance

Socialization, habit, and fear are part of the picture, but not the whole of it. Many people, including many workers, have real material stakes in the arrangements that produce moral compartmentalization. This goes well beyond the obvious fact that people need income to survive. As I argue in the essay on class rule and worker ambivalence, workers derive tangible use values from class relations that are not reducible to wages: status from credentials, authority over others in the workplace or the household, access to social spaces that exclude those deemed inferior, the protections and infrastructure provided by national belonging. These advantages are real, and they give large sections of the working class a genuine — if partial — interest in maintaining class arrangements.

The careerist logic Robin describes — the willingness to trade harm to others for personal advancement — is not a pathology but a rational response to a system that rewards compliance and punishes refusal. And the rewards are not only financial. Institutional roles provide experienced agency: the sense of being someone who acts, decides, advances. Status hierarchies are played — with rules, advancement markers, improvisation within constraints — and the play-character of the game generates its own motivation independently of belief in the game's justice. People pursue status not because they believe the hierarchy is just but because status pursuit is the available avenue for power-to — and power-to is a need. The person who recognizes the system as rigged and keeps playing is not failing to act on what they see; they are acting rationally within conditions where the game provides agency and stepping outside provides clarity at the cost of the capacity to act.

Moreover, the costs of refusal are not evenly distributed. The most precarious workers — those with the least bargaining power, the fewest credentials, the most fragile social position — bear the highest costs for noncompliance. The worker who refuses to meet a harmful production target risks their livelihood; the professional who raises ethical objections risks their career; but the worker in a precarious, easily-replaced position risks destitution. Nonhuman animals, for their part, resist exploitation regularly — but their resistance is systematically rendered ineffective by the institutional arrangements that contain them, and the rare cases that become publicly visible (a cow that escapes a slaughterhouse, a horse that refuses to be loaded) tend to provoke inconsistent flashes of empathy that only underscore how thoroughly the institutional framing normally suppresses it.^[3] This distribution of vulnerability means that moral appeals to "just refuse" are themselves a form of meritocratic reasoning: they implicitly assume that everyone has equal capacity to bear the costs of moral consistency, when in fact the capacity to refuse is itself a class-structured resource — one that some beings possess in limited measure, and others are institutionally prevented from exercising at all.

What this reveals

The insight of the original "personal responsibility" discourse — that our actions have consequences, and that we are the ones performing them — is not wrong. It is incomplete. Individual moral awareness is necessary but structurally insufficient, because the same system that produces the moral compartmentalization also produces the material incentives that sustain it. Telling people to "take responsibility" without addressing the structures that make irresponsibility rational is itself a form of mystification.

The strategic implications — for how movements organize, for what kinds of institutions the left must build, for how to address the competing solidarities that currently organize most people's social existence — are developed in the essays linked above. The everyday, familiar experience of "just doing your job" is not as innocent as it appears. It is the ground-level mechanism through which class rule reproduces itself — not mainly through repression or propaganda, but through the ordinary compliance of people who have been taught not to notice what they are doing, and who are materially rewarded for not noticing. The question is not whether we are responsible for our actions within institutional roles. We are. The question is what kind of social arrangements would make it possible to act on that responsibility rather than be punished for it.^[4]

Bibliography

Ames, Mark. Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Waters, Sarah, and Jenny Chan. "Workplace Suicide and States of Denial: The France Télécom and Foxconn Cases Compared." tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 15, no. 1 (2017): 191–213.