One of the first things that pleasantly surprised me about Americans upon my arrival in 1978 was the strong American work ethic, “the belief in work as a moral good.” The Webster’s Dictionary claims that the word “work ethic” was first used in 1951. I was contrasting it with the socialist workers’ paradise work ethic I saw in my twenty years of life under the communist party regime – “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”
