The Toxic Nature of Hustle Culture.

Author Note: This is not an indictment of entrepreneurship or side-hustles. This is an indictment of a political economy that promotes and necessitates hustle culture in the absence of worker protections. UNFTR began as a side hustle and remains as such. So to all those who hustle and grind to put together a living, you are seen.

When we talk about work in America, we’re really talking about mythology. Not the mythology of the noble laborer, but the more insidious mythology of the hustler, the entrepreneur, the self-made individual who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps and transforms grit into gold. This mythology has become so pervasive that it’s poisoned our understanding of what work should be, what workers deserve, and how an economy should function for the people who actually make it run.

Over the past several months, we’ve talked a lot about the labor participation rate in this country. While economists like to quote prime age labor participation, which counts the productive workforce between the ages of 25 and 54, the reality is that only 62% of Americans aged 18 and over are gainfully employed in our economy. That means more than one in three adults—people who could and often want to work—are sitting on the sidelines. This isn’t a sign of laziness or lack of ambition. It’s a sign of an economic system that has fundamentally failed to create the conditions where work provides dignity, security, and a pathway to prosperity.

Instead, what we’ve built is a system that glorifies precarity and calls it freedom. We’ve taken the legitimate desire for autonomy and meaningful work and twisted it into a culture that demands self-exploitation. This is the essence of hustle culture—the transformation of labor from a collective endeavor deserving of protection and dignity into an individual performance where success or failure rests solely on the worker’s shoulders.

The Bipartisan Consensus on Self-Reliance

The most striking aspect of contemporary American politics isn’t the polarization we constantly hear about—it’s the remarkable consensus between both major parties on the question of work. Democrats and Republicans may disagree on the margins, on tax rates and regulatory frameworks, but they share a fundamental belief in entrepreneurship and self-reliance over robust worker protections and guarantees.

This consensus runs so deep that when President Biden became the first sitting president in modern American history to join striking workers on a picket line—walking with UAW members in Michigan during their 2023 strike—it was treated as a radical departure from presidential norms. And in many ways, it was. For decades, American presidents have positioned themselves as neutral arbiters in labor disputes, or more often, as defenders of business interests wrapped in the language of economic growth and competitiveness.

But even Biden’s historic gesture came with contradictions. While he stood with autoworkers, his administration also intervened to end the railroad workers’ strike in 2022, imposing a congressional resolution that gave workers far less than they were demanding. The message was clear: worker solidarity is acceptable when it’s politically convenient and economically contained, but the broader system of prioritizing business interests over worker welfare remains intact.

This bipartisan embrace of entrepreneurship over worker power isn’t accidental. It represents a ideological shift that began in earnest during the 1980s and has only accelerated since. Both parties have bought into the idea that the solution to economic insecurity isn’t stronger collective bargaining, universal social programs, or redistributive policies—it’s creating more entrepreneurs, more small business owners, more people who can bootstrap their way to prosperity.

The problem with this approach isn’t that entrepreneurship is inherently bad. The problem is that it’s been deployed as a substitute for the hard work of building an economy that provides security and dignity for all workers, not just the lucky few who manage to successfully monetize their skills and ideas.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

This opening salvo from the Communist Manifesto has come to define entire schools of thought. So to suggest that there is a single turning point in the history of labor is folly. But in the modern era, if we’re to point to an American inflection, it would be the 1980s and 1990s, when the foundations of the modern American labor market were laid. In so many ways, Ronald Reagan’s presidency marked the beginning of a sustained assault on organized labor that transformed not just the legal landscape of work, but the cultural understanding of what workers deserve and what employers owe them.

The most symbolic moment came in 1981, when Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who had gone on strike for better working conditions and pay. This wasn’t just about breaking one union—it was about sending a message to the entire labor movement that the federal government would no longer serve as even a nominal ally to organized workers. Predictably, private sector employers began adopting increasingly aggressive anti-union tactics, knowing they had the implicit support of the federal government.

Union membership, which had peaked at around 35% of the workforce in the 1950s, began a precipitous decline. By 1990, it had fallen to just over 16%. Today, it hovers around 10% in the private sector—a number that would have been unthinkable to the generation of workers who built the American middle class in the post-war era.

But the Reagan revolution wasn’t just about union-busting. It was about reorienting the relationship between workers and the economy. The idea that work should provide not just wages but security—through pensions, healthcare, job stability—was systematically dismantled in favor of a model that transferred risk from employers to individual workers. This was sold as flexibility and freedom, but it was really about creating a workforce that had no choice but to accept whatever terms employers offered.

If Reagan began the assault on worker power, it was Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” who completed it by co-opting the language of progressivism to advance policies that further undermined collective worker power. The Clinton administration’s embrace of entrepreneurship and small business development wasn’t just economic policy—it was a form of political triangulation that allowed Democrats to sound pro-worker while actually advancing policies that individualized economic risk.

This was particularly devastating in parts of the country that lacked the economic density to support widespread entrepreneurship. Rural America and post-industrial cities were told that their salvation lay in becoming more entrepreneurial, in attracting small businesses and startups. But entrepreneurship requires customers, capital, and infrastructure—precisely the things that these communities lacked after decades of deindustrialization and capital flight.

The result was a cruel irony: the communities most in need of collective solutions—strong unions, public investment, social programs—were instead offered individualistic remedies that couldn’t possibly address the scale of their economic challenges. A laid-off steelworker in Ohio was told to become a small business owner, as if the fundamental problem was a lack of entrepreneurial spirit rather than a systematic abandonment of the industrial base that had supported entire communities.

This entrepreneurship trap has only intensified in recent decades. The gig economy, with its promise of flexibility and autonomy, is really just the latest iteration of this decades-old project of transferring economic risk from employers to workers while calling it empowerment.

The Psychology of Rugged Individualism

What makes this system so pernicious is how deeply it’s embedded in American psychological and cultural frameworks. The mythology of rugged individualism isn’t just an economic theory—it’s a form of identity that shapes how Americans understand themselves and their relationship to work.

We celebrate entrepreneurs, not workers. Our cultural heroes are the founders and innovators, not the people who actually build and maintain the infrastructure of daily life. This isn’t accidental. It’s a systematic cultural project that serves specific economic interests by making collective action seem unnecessary or even anti-American.

Think about how we talk about economic success and failure. When someone succeeds, we attribute it to their hard work, innovation, and individual merit. When someone fails, we assume they didn’t work hard enough, didn’t adapt quickly enough, didn’t hustle enough. This individualization of both success and failure makes it almost impossible to see the structural forces that actually determine economic outcomes.

The psychological toll of this framework is enormous. Workers are not just dealing with economic insecurity—they’re dealing with the constant message that their insecurity is their own fault. If you’re struggling financially, it’s because you haven’t found the right side hustle, haven’t developed the right skills, haven’t embraced the entrepreneurial mindset that supposedly separates winners from losers.

This is the heart of hustle culture’s toxicity. It takes the real economic pressures facing workers—stagnant wages, rising costs, job insecurity—and transforms them into personal failings that can only be addressed through individual effort and self-optimization. It’s a system that profits from anxiety while blaming workers for being anxious.

To understand why hustle culture has become so prevalent, we need to examine the broader transformation of the American economy over the past several decades. The decline in union density isn’t just a political story—it’s connected to the shift away from a manufacturing economy toward a service economy increasingly dominated by financialization.

As economist Giovanni Arrighi described in his analysis of capitalist cycles, financialization represents the final stage of hegemonic decline, where profits are increasingly extracted through financial manipulation rather than productive investment. In the American context, this has meant the systematic hollowing out of the industries where workers had the most leverage—such as manufacturing and transportation—and their replacement with service industries where workers are more isolated and harder to organize.

This dislocation from the means of production has profound implications for worker power. A factory worker has a clear relationship to the productive process and can see exactly how their labor creates value. When they withdraw their labor, production stops, and the impact is immediate and visible. But a service worker, particularly in the gig economy, has a much more attenuated relationship to value creation. Their individual contribution feels replaceable, their leverage minimal.

This atomization of work has been accelerated by technology platforms that promise to connect individual workers directly to customers while actually inserting themselves as intermediaries who capture most of the value. The Uber driver owns their car but doesn’t control the app that determines their income. The DoorDash delivery worker sets their own schedule but has no say in the algorithms that determine which orders they receive. This is the Technofeudalism that Yanis Varoufakis describes.

According to recent data from various sources, the measurement of this transformation remains frustratingly incomplete. The Bureau of Labor Statistics struggles with internal disagreements about how to even define and measure gig work. Different surveys use different terminologies—“platform workers,” “independent contractors,” “freelancers,” “1099 workers”—making it difficult to get a clear picture of how many Americans are trapped in these precarious arrangements.

What we do know is telling. According to Upwork, 38% of workers engaged in freelance work in some capacity in 2023, representing 64 million people—up from 34% in 2014. ADP data shows that from 2010 to 2019, the share of 1099 and short-term W-2 workers grew from 14.2% to 16.4% of workers hired. MBO Partners reported that 72.7 million adults participated in independent arrangements in 2024, representing about 43% of the workforce.

But these numbers still don’t capture the full scope of work precarity. A Harvard study of gig workers in 2020 revealed conditions that would have been shocking in any other context: about one in seven gig workers earned less than the federal minimum wage on an hourly basis, and more than a quarter earned less than the applicable state minimum wage. Three out of every five gig workers lost earnings because of “technical difficulties clocking in or out,” compared with just 19% of traditional W-2 service-sector workers.

Perhaps most damning: one in five gig workers went hungry because they could not afford enough to eat, and 30% used SNAP benefits within a month of the survey—twice the rate of traditional service-sector workers. This is the reality behind the entrepreneurship mythology: workers taking on all the risks of business ownership while receiving none of the protections or benefits of traditional employment.

The AI Acceleration: Nothing New Here

As if the existing pressures on workers weren’t enough, the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to accelerate the displacement and devaluation of human labor. This isn’t science fiction speculation—it’s the explicit goal of many AI developers and the companies implementing these technologies.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has been notably vocal about the scale of job displacement that AI adoption will create. This isn’t coming from a labor advocate or a critic of technology—this is coming from someone at the forefront of AI development who understands exactly what these tools are designed to do. They’re designed to eliminate layers of the workforce, to reduce labor costs, to minimize the human element in production and service delivery.

The irony is that this technological displacement is happening at exactly the moment when workers have the least collective power to respond to it. In previous eras of technological change—the Industrial Revolution, the mechanization of agriculture, the computerization of manufacturing—workers had stronger unions and more political leverage to demand retraining, social support, and a share of the productivity gains.

Today, workers are told that the solution to AI displacement is more entrepreneurship, more self-investment, more personal responsibility for staying relevant in a rapidly changing economy. The worker whose job is automated away isn’t offered retraining or support—they’re told to learn to code, start a side hustle, embrace the gig economy.

None of this is new. The tension between workers and employers, between those who own the means of production and those who sell their labor, has been the defining conflict of capitalist economies since their inception. What’s changed is how we understand and respond to this tension.

In earlier eras of American labor organizing, this conflict was explicit and acknowledged. The use of Pinkerton detectives to break strikes, the violent suppression of labor organizing, the deployment of state power on behalf of employers—these weren’t hidden or denied. They were part of an open struggle over who would control the conditions of work and the distribution of economic rewards.

The Pinkertons, for instance, weren’t just private security—they were a private army used by corporations to intimidate, surveil, and attack workers who dared to organize. The Homestead Strike of 1892, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the countless battles between miners and company guards—these were literal battles over the fundamental question of worker power.

But even within the labor movement, there were profound disagreements about strategy and goals. The split between socialists and more moderate union leaders reflected a deeper question: should workers seek accommodation within the capitalist system, or should they seek to transform it?

The socialists argued for worker ownership of the means of production, for democratic control of the economy, for the elimination of the employer class altogether. The more moderate union leaders argued for better wages, shorter hours, and improved working conditions within the existing system. As we noted in our socialism series, this split ultimately led to the marginalization of socialist voices within organized labor.

The unions chose accommodation over transformation, and in doing so, they accepted the fundamental premise that some people would own the means of production while others would sell their labor. This choice, while perhaps pragmatic in the short term, left workers vulnerable to the systematic assault on their power that began in the 1980s.

The result of this accommodation is the system we have today: an economy explicitly designed to prioritize shareholder returns over worker welfare. This isn’t a side effect or an unintended consequence—it’s the stated goal of corporate governance in America.

The doctrine of shareholder primacy, which holds that corporations exist primarily to maximize returns to shareholders, became dominant in American business schools and boardrooms in the 1970s and 1980s. It provided an intellectual framework for the systematic transfer of wealth from workers to owners that has characterized the past four decades of American economic development.

Under this framework, worker wages become a cost to be minimized rather than an investment in productivity and social stability. Benefits become inefficiencies to be eliminated rather than shared investments in worker welfare. Job security becomes rigidity that prevents optimal allocation of resources rather than a foundation for worker dignity and community stability.

The contrast with other economic models couldn’t be starker. The Mondragon cooperatives in Spain, for instance, represent a different approach entirely. These worker-owned enterprises have created thousands of jobs, generated billions in revenue, and maintained a commitment to democratic decision-making and equitable profit-sharing for more than six decades.

But again, as we demonstrated in our un-cooperative essay, creating similar institutions in the United States faces enormous structural barriers. Our financial system is designed to channel capital toward investor-owned enterprises, not worker cooperatives. Our legal framework makes it complicated and expensive to establish cooperative structures. Our cultural mythology celebrates individual ownership over collective ownership.

The Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) took modest steps to restore some worker rights that were systematically undermined over previous decades. General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo pursued cases against illegal employer retaliation, worked to expand the right to organize, and challenged some of the most egregious forms of corporate union-busting. Combined with Lina Khan’s work at the FTC to dismantle monopolies, it looked as though labor might make a comeback. Christian Smalls became a national hero alongside Shawn Fain. There was even hope that the Pro Act, which would represent the most significant expansion of worker rights since the 1930s, might gain some traction.

Now it seems that it was all for naught as Donald Trump moves to dismantle not just organized labor but the entire federal agency infrastructure of the United States. This means that future democratic administrations won’t be building on the modest progress of the Biden era, they’ll be starting over.

Reimagining Work

One crucial area that future administrations can look into is the promotion of worker cooperatives. Instead of continuing to subsidize investor-owned enterprises through tax breaks and preferential lending, government policy should actively encourage cooperative development. This could include tax advantages for cooperative conversion, low-interest loans from public banks specifically for cooperative development, and technical assistance for workers seeking to buy out their employers or start new cooperative enterprises.

One of the core proposals in our 5 Non-Negotiables of the Left is the call for a civilian labor corps. A civilian labor corps would recognize that much of the work our society needs—caring for children and elders, maintaining infrastructure, protecting the environment, creating art and culture—doesn’t fit into the profit-maximizing framework of capitalist enterprise. These forms of work create enormous social value but limited opportunities for private profit extraction.

Instead of forcing this work into gig economy platforms or leaving it underfunded in the public sector, a civilian labor corps would create dignified, well-compensated employment for work that serves genuine social needs. Workers would be employed directly by democratic institutions, with full benefits and job security, to do work that makes communities stronger and more resilient.

This isn’t just about creating jobs—it’s about redefining what work means and who it serves. Instead of work being something that individuals must hustle to secure from profit-maximizing employers, work becomes a collective endeavor to meet collective needs and create collective prosperity.

When we tell workers that their economic insecurity is their own responsibility, that their salvation lies in more entrepreneurship we’re not just being psychologically cruel—we’re providing political cover for policies that make workers more insecure and employers more powerful.

The alternative isn’t to abandon the legitimate desire for meaningful, autonomous work. The alternative is to create economic institutions that provide security and dignity for all workers while still allowing for creativity, innovation, and genuine entrepreneurship within a framework of democratic ownership and control.

This means strong unions, robust social programs, and aggressive regulation of capital in the short term. But in the long term, it means something more fundamental: a society where the fruits of collective labor are shared collectively, where work serves human needs rather than profit maximization, and where every person’s contribution to the common good is valued and rewarded.

Here endeth the lesson.