We’re working in St. Louis, but not all that hard,” Joe Holleman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote on February 22 in an article entitled “St. Louis in lower half of ‘hardest-working’ cities.” Holleman’s article was in response to personal finance company WalletHub publishing their annual list of the “hardest-working cities in America,” with St. Louis coming in at number 65 out of the 116 cities included in the report. As Holleman noted, this marks an improvement over the city’s 2020 spot at number 76 and its 2019 spot at number 80. 

To determine how hard a city works, WalletHub uses a combination of ‘Direct Work Factors,’ such as the employment rate and average workweek hours, and ‘Indirect Work Factors,’ including average commute time and average leisure time spent per day. ‘Direct Work Factors’ are weighted more heavily than ‘Indirect Work Factors,’ and each city is given a score out of 100. The report is unclear as to whether more hours of leisure time spent per day would count against or in favor of a city, but it is clear that a higher number of hours worked per week gives cities a bump in the rankings. 

St. Louis ranked 71st in ‘Direct Work Factors,’ suggesting that St. Louisans work relatively fewer hours per week, experience a lower employment rate, and have a higher unemployment rate of youth aged 16-24 who are not in school than other cities in the United States. On the other hand, St. Louis ranked 21st in ‘Indirect Work Factors,’ suggesting that a relatively higher number of St. Louisans work multiple jobs to make ends meet but also spend more hours volunteering than other cities.

What WalletHub lauds as signs of ‘hard work’ are, in reality, indicators of the gross exploitation of workers in a highly rapacious economy. The framing of the report and the list glorifies workers in cities working extremely long hours per week, leaving vacation time unused, and holding multiple jobs. Such a framing is reprehensible. Not only should workers in the United States not have to work more hours than workers in other comparably developed countries-on average, workers in the U.S. worked 1,779 hours in 2019 while workers in the UK worked 1,538 hours, and workers in Germany worked 1,386 hours-but workers should never have to hold two jobs in order to survive. WalletHub’s rankings valorize and legitimize sadistic labor practices that set the U.S. apart from the rest of the developed world in the worst way possible. 

Instead of scolding St. Louisans for not working enough hours per week or celebrating the fact that many work multiple jobs, as WalletHub and Joe Holleman of the Post-Dispatch implicitly do, the focus should be on the decades of policies, especially city planning policies, that have ravaged the working and minority communities of St. Louis, with Black workers in particular facing the brunt of the blows. 

Following the second World War, St. Louis embraced a ‘suburban logic’ of city planning; city planners sought to construct a central city that would predominantly serve the needs of the increasingly prominent suburbs. Urban renewal was the tool by which planners accomplished their goals of redefining the meaning and purpose of modern cities, as city planners and officials razed areas of the city that they considered to be ‘blighted,’ ostensibly using the cleared land to further reindustrialization efforts, provide better housing, and rejuvenate the economy of the city. Indeed, urban renewal was happening all across the country as cities attempted to reimagine themselves in an age of white flight, suburbanization, and the loss of inner-city jobs to the suburbs or to foreign countries. Predictably, urban renewal and the suburban logic of city planning had the direst consequences for St. Louis’s working class and Black populations.

At the core of the suburban logic of postwar city planning was an effort to rework the economy of the metropolitan region, manipulating the inner-city’s structure to serve the interests of largely wealthy and white suburbanites. As historians Joseph Heathcott and Máire Agnes Murphy explain, the ‘metropolitan’ focus of St. Louis city planners was not “an inclusive and even scale for investment but rather [was] a nodal system that channeled resources in ways that linked the new downtown with the sprawling suburban residential, office, and industrial tracts, ultimately bypassing the old urban core.” Facing industrial decline in the inner-city, planners in St. Louis generally began to favor strategies to bolster high-tech R&D and the entertainment-tourism industry downtown, sidelining efforts to revitalize the city’s old manufacturing base. In other words, as the old manufacturing core of St. Louis fell into precipitous decline, planners shifted their attention to developing a city to cater to the needs of suburban, affluent whites instead of attempting to address the issues that would come to define the struggles of St. Louis’s largely Black inner-city population. 

Highways connecting the suburbs to the downtown business district are the most potent example of the physical impacts of the suburban logic of postwar city planning. I-64, linking Clayton and other suburbs of St. Louis to the city’s downtown was made possible by the deliberate destruction of over 450 acres of buildings in the predominantly Black community of Mill Creek Valley. Over 20,000 St. Louisans were displaced as a result of the planned demolition, 95% of whom were Black. Though they were promised compensation with adequate housing in exchange for the obliteration of their community, fewer than 20% were housed in the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing complex that was developed in the city in the late 1950s, and most of them ended up in substandard housing on the city’s North side.

Today, the scars of urban renewal and suburban-focused city planning are clear. In St. Louis County are three of the nation’s 25 wealthiest suburbs; in St. Louis City, one in every five residents lives in poverty. Nearly two out of every five children in the city live in poverty. The destitution north of Delmar Boulevard provides a chilling contrast to the over-the-top mansions of the city’s Central West End. As historian Walter Johnson notes, “significant differences in virtually any marker of social well-being in the city of St. Louis” can be charted along Delmar Boulevard. Meanwhile, in the area formerly known as the Mill Creek Valley, over 30% of the area’s Black inhabitants live in poverty, a disproportionate rate compared to the already astronomical rates of poverty the city as a whole experiences.

Given St. Louis’s record of literally destroying the physical and economic foundations of Black and working class communities, to write that “we’re working in St. Louis, but not all that hard,” or to publish a list of the hardest-working cities in the country with the sort of asinine criteria that WalletHub employed, is a gross insult to the communities most negatively impacted by the city’s policies. In the context of an economic system that has left entire communities behind by design, how can anyone conscientiously make the claim that any group of people is not working hard enough? And it is important to point out that the suburban logic of city planning and urban renewal have not been unique to St. Louis, but have played out across the country. Instead of chastising any city’s inhabitants for ‘not working hard enough,’ a frustratingly juvenile accusation in the first place, we need to re-evaluate the way that we determine what ‘hard work’ is and what amount of it is actually appropriate for any person. 

Yet in the face of oppressive economic, political, and spatial regimes, the city of St. Louis has been the site of incredible political and social activism throughout its history, a form of hard work that is unsurprisingly ignored in mainstream discussions about the American work ethic. In fact, St. Louisans have been fighting against such a perverted conception of hard work since the 19th century. What is widely regarded as the first general strike in the United States took place in St. Louis in 1877. Newspapers at the time referred to the events as the ‘St. Louis Commune.’ In 1933, hundreds of Black women walked off their jobs at the Funsten Nut Company, demanding a living wage. Their efforts shut down Funsten’s plants throughout the city and resulted in a doubling of their wages by management. In the 1960s, activists such as Ivory Perry and Percy Green of ACTION were at the forefront of guerrilla activism in St. Louis. Green and fellow activist Richard Daly climbed the then-incomplete Gateway Arch to protest the lack of jobs given to Black construction workers by the company building the Arch. Ivory Perry was outspoken against the urban renewal projects that St. Louis enthusiastically undertook, blasting such projects as “negro removal by white approval.” He “served as a one-man strike force during the later 1960s in St. Louis, whether he was chaining himself to doors in support of the protests or simply walking out into the street, lying down, and stopping traffic.” His and ACTION’s strategies informed the resistance of Black Lives Matter, a movement that gained significant traction following the 2014 murder of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. 

This is the sort of tradition of hard work that goes unappreciated and undiscussed but should instead be front and center when considering the character of work in America. It is the people protesting against oppression and exploitation, against the very conditions that WalletHub celebrates, who are in fact working the hardest.