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Albert Felipe – Work Ethic, Weber – Assignment 1

I work as a Youth Program Manager at a non-profit organization in Washington Heights; Northern Manhattan improvement Corporation. My experience and career has focused in the area of workforce development. I have held positions in the field as a case manager, a facilitator, developing curriculum, program management and director. While each of these areas of experience has provided me with various perspectives of workforce development, I believe my work ethic comes from my father and his work history.

Growing up, I had known my maternal grandmother to be a childcare provider (babysitter) since she took care of me and my cousins. She cared for 8 of us to allow our parents to work; so her “work” was caring for us. I don’t know my grandfather’s work history since I did not get the chance to know him; he passed away when I was 2 years old. From what my mother tells me, he was a tailor in the Dominican Republic and by the time he came to the U.S., he had a brief work history in a factory before he passed. I also did not get to know my paternal grandmother, since she passed away giving birth to my dad. My paternal grandfather worked as a driver for a major radio station in the Dominican Republic and after Trujillo was assassinated in the 60’s, he came to the U.S. and worked in a factory.

My mother worked briefly in a factory where her brother was a foreman; she worked for about 5 years and then became a stay at home mom taking care of my sister and I. My dad worked at a printing press for over 25 years. His work history had been in factory work, but settled in the printing press where he would stay the majority of his work history. My relationship to work does come from his work ethic. Visiting him at his job instilled the ideas and principles of work. I learn that he put in hard manual labor to earn money, which paid the rent, gave us food and provided our basic everyday necessities. My father made sure I understood that this is what needed to be done in order to make money. But he also let me know that “my” job should be my education. His rational was that I should work just as hard in my studies as he did in the factory. He also let me know that my education would be essential in my life in order not to work as hard as he did. Basically, If I treated education as work, and worked hard; I would be able to provide for myself and my future.

I believe Weber’s idea of work ethic is what we know it to be today; The idea of economic growth combined with the morals and values of how we do it. It was pretty interesting to see how he used religion as a way to help the reader understand the idea of work ethic; Catholicism to represent values, ideas and beliefs of prosperity, while the Protestant perspective brought on what we know as capitalism and earning money to provide the material aspects of life. As I use my history and work experience to reflect on this idea, it fascinates me that my perception of work ethic focuses a bit more on the morals and values side than the “material gain” and economic growth. I believe this is derived from how I interpreted work ethic in my own personal work history. As I reflect, I see that my ethic of work may come from the idea of day to day survival, rather than long term economic growth. Interesting.