Eroding Humanism: How Colliding Beliefs about a Living Wage Shape Personal Fulfillment and “Professional-class” Identities in Working-class Jobs

In a society dominated by market-based approaches to management that prioritize financial considerations, some organizations are shifting toward humanistic approaches that emphasize human welfare. To understand this attempted transformation in the case of pay-setting practices, we studied a U.S. company that introduced a living wage for its low-wage workers. Interviews with 64 participants across two sites revealed intended and unintended effects. Motivated by humanistic aims, the living wage was designed to reduce financial insecurity; indeed, workers felt more financially secure and fulfilled in their personal lives. However, the humanistic intent of the living wage conflicted with organizational members’ deeply-held market-based beliefs linking wages to performance, causing concerns about whether these workers deserved the higher pay. To reconcile this sense of undeservingness, managers and workers altered expectations for working-class jobs to reflect two key aspects of professional-class jobs: autonomy and overwork. By embracing these new expectations, workers transitioned to professional-class identities, despite remaining in working-class jobs. From these findings, we theorize a multilevel model conceptualizing how organizational members’ identity work, informed by market-based beliefs, undergirds the erosion of humanistic practices. We contribute to research on humanistic management and research on the dynamics connecting wage and class to work roles and identity.

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