When I was a kid, growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, my mother
arranged for a part time job for me where she worked at the now defunct
Hercules explosives plant. It was my first, and last, salary job.
The plant was a historic facility that had been producing nitrocellulose
for artillery applications from very early in the 20th century and was
notable for its occasional massive explosions (often associated with
union conflicts...), which could shatter windows as far away as the
neighboring state of Pennsylvania. I was assigned a simple task of file
sorting in a very old, decrepit brick building the staff referred to as
the 'bag house' because it was used to store records that had simply
been stuffed into large canvas bags and dumped there to be forgotten for
decades. My task was to go through some bags of old medical records and
sort out which would be saved and which would be sent for incineration.
There was no heat in the building and only one working overhead light so
I was left there alone with a kerosene space heater to keep me
more-or-less warm through the evening. For a teenager it was a simple,
easy, job, but I didn't last long.
You see, the files I was sorting were medical records for deceased
workers going back as far as WWI. Each file listed a few details, their
cause of death, and a passport style photo. And as I sifted through
them, I found that nearly all these workers had died in much the same
way; black lung and its complications caused by the constant exposure to
graphite dust common on the plant. (so common, all the squirrels that
wandered the wooded area were black) Night after night I was there alone
reading these files, looking into the faces of these men in their
thousands, and seeing their ultimate fate. Black lung, lung cancer,
black lung, esophageal cancer, black lung. On and on. I came to realize
what a horrific meat-grinder America was. How these thousands of men had
died trying to earn a meager living making stuff to kill other people in
other countries. It was a bit much for a teenager, and the worsening
kerosene fumes and encroaching autumn cold and darkness didn't help. I
gave up after a month, vowing to never work for a corporation and
choosing a life of entrepreneurship instead. Of course, I didn't have
much choice in the matter, later succumbing to environmental illness and
chronic bronchitis myself from too many years subject to NJ's pollution
and the common abuse of antibiotics by doctors back then.
On 1/5/17 4:00 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Subject:
[P2P-F] Fwd: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion)
From:
Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>
Date:
1/4/17, 10:51 PM
To:
p2p-foundation <[email protected]>
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Great Transition Network* <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 5:34 AM
Subject: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion)
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>From Eva-Maria Swidler <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
-------------------------------------------------------
Hello everyone,
The degradation of work is an issue largely ignored in academia today,
perhaps reflecting the fact that academics, who are the ones who do
most writing about work, like their own (craft) work a lot. The actual
lived day-to-day reality of a strong majority on the planet is that
work is a demeaning experience of frustration. So thanks very much to
Kent Klitgaard for raising this issue!
I have here a series of somewhat unrelated thoughts inspired by this
very important subject.
1) The key feature of degradation that Klitgaard points out takes the
form of a lack of control over the immediate labor process, leading to
what I would call alienation. But that problematic powerlessness of
workers also extends into many other facets of an undemocratic
workplace. Workplace decisions that exclude the actual workers include
the choice of the purpose or mission of work (to use corporate
parlance), the creation of strategies and priorities, juggling
trade-offs, and formulation of pay and profit distribution structures.
In many ways the labor process is merely the endpoint of those
undemocratic workplace decisions, as the labor process is shaped by
the economics and efficiencies demanded by those larger institutional
decisions. I would like to see our idea of and hopes for worker
control, even as we pragmatically imagine it or fight for it in the
immediate future, expand from struggling for control over the labor
process itself into these wider contextual realms of
workplace decision-making, which after all ultimately drive the labor
process itself.
2) Economists such as Steven Marglin and David Noble, but also many
others, have shown that technological “progress” often does not
produce greater efficiency. Efficiency itself is always a relative
term—maximizing A in terms of B—and not absolute. For instance, an
agricultural technique may maximize calories grown per acre-foot of
water used, but at the expense of more labor. Is that an efficient
technique? Yes, it is water-efficient, but no, it is not
labor-efficient. Beyond the fact that the terms of efficiency must
always use defined inputs and outputs, however, is a larger and
oft-ignored fact that often new production processes are less
efficient in terms of all inputs and outputs, but are adopted because
they afford greater control or predictability to the boss. Here we can
see how the economic and institutional context of a workplace—that
un-democraticness of priorities, strategies, purposes, etc.—actually
does directly impinge on the details of the organization
of the labor process. Often bosses mechanize at great expense merely
to be able to guarantee less possible disruption by discontent
workers. So we have to be wary of assuming that technological
developments that degrade work actually equate to greater output. They
often don’t. They may just equate to an interchangeable worker who can
be replaced during a strike, or who can’t effect a slowdown or some
other work disruption now that skill or decisions have been automated.
In other words, what we have seen in the development of increasingly
degraded workplaces is not necessarily a simple exchange of the higher
quality of work for a greater quantity of output or profits. Sometimes
the quality of work degrades and output does not rise, or may even
fall. And sometimes the increased work that is required is never even
tallied. How many of us have wasted hours on hold with a phone company
or health insurance? Those hours I would argue are unpaid work and
result in high inefficiency in any complete economic calculation.
If there is not a direct relationship between the degradation of work
and efficiency of output, the scenario to be tackled to create
meaningful, undegraded work is on another order of complexity
altogether than a simple continuum of trading one for the other.
3) I approach many of the issues raised in this piece with a more
central location of economic concepts such as “capitalism” (not
mentioned by name here in this essay) and the “productivity dividend”.
After all, as Klitgaard points out, the technology for vastly shorter
work weeks is there. It is used or spent to produce greater profits
rather than fewer labor hours, by making people work just as many
hours even though they produce more, and thereby making workers
produce greater profits rather than being able to enjoy a shorter work
week. This way of distributing the productivity dividend is a question
of workplace struggles and political economy, and I find economic
concepts such as capitalism and the productivity dividend to be
essential in understanding the situation we are in.
4) An important question is certainly how to make work meaningful, but
also whether we need work to have meaning. It does seem to be a
capitalist preoccupation to define ourselves and our lives’ meaning in
terms of work. In fact, I’d say it is the fundamental
spiritual/personal/psychological lie of capitalism—that without work,
we are nothing. We tend to create an opposition between work/meaning
on the one hand and leisure/individualistic hedonism on the other.
What if by leisure we include participation in community, social life,
and cultural creativity, not merely what you could call entertainment?
Could we not attain all the meaning we want or need through that
leisure? What about instituting a campaign for meaningful leisure (by
which we don’t mean volunteer work, but something else altogether)?
Benjamin Hunnicutt describes the development of what we could call a
leisure ethic rather than a work ethic in his most recent book, Free
Time: The Forgotten American Dream. Paul
LaFargue’s classic pamphlet “The Right to Be Lazy”, or Kathy Weeks’
The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work Politics and
Post-Work Imaginaries take an even stronger anti-work view. I’d
venture that a working-class leisure ethic is what has served
historically as the cultural foundation of a rejection of constant and
increasing consumption, expressed through various forms of work
resistance. My piece “Radical Leisure” in Monthly Review this past
summer has more thoughts on this
monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/radical-leisure/
<http://monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/radical-leisure/> .
In fact, I think that the meaningfulness of much of caring work has
more in common with the kinds of meaning a well-developed leisure
ethic can provide than with the meaning that stems from a craft work
ethic. A struggle for meaningful leisure might shed light on caring
work that the current discourse on work has a hard time with.
Certainly there are craft issues of skill in caring work (as an RN and
midwife of 20+ years clinical practice, I staunchly support this
view), but many satisfactions of care work stem from the rewards of
companionship, accompaniment, support, and love, which are experiences
that might be more likely to come from meaningful leisure rather than
meaningful craft work. The craft-work-oriented rewards of mastery or
the “transcendence of setbacks” Klitgaard describes are rewards that
result from what is to me a somewhat gender-limited experience of
work. Renewed intellectual attention to leisure, which seemed as
though it would be an academic field of note a
few decades ago, might allow a different kind of understanding of care
work.
Thanks again for this essay raising a topic of crucial importance. I’m
looking forward to the conversation to come.
Eva Swidler
Goddard College
*************************************
On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Great Transition Network wrote:
>From Paul Raskin
-----
Dear Great Transition Network,
As we bid adieu to 2016, a banner year for the Fortress World
scenario, what can we do but turn with renewed resolve to the work of
transition? There is no alternative (to hijack TINA, Margaret
Thatcher’s infamous justification for neoliberalism). Anyway, the work
itself is a privilege and a gratification.
This brings me to the topic of our JANUARY discussion: “The Struggle
for Meaningful Work.” Kent Klitgaard’s Viewpoint, so titled, argues
that the degradation of work, like the degradation of community and
the environment, is inherent in the logic of capital accumulation, but
receives insufficient attention. The struggle for meaningful jobs, he
contends, ought to stand alongside parallel struggles for justice,
equity, and sustainability as core components of a transformative praxis.
Kent’s thoughtful piece is inspired by his own search for meaningful
work in a career that has spanned cabinet-making to ecological
economics. It highlights a critical dimension of a Great Transition
that warrants heightened emphasis, or so it seems to me. Do you agree?
Would you revise its formulations? Please read it at
www.greattransition.org/publication/meaningful-work
<http://www.greattransition.org/publication/meaningful-work>, and
share your thoughts.
This Viewpoint will be published in February, along with selected
comments drawn from the forthcoming discussion and an interview with
Nancy Folbre on “The Caring Economy.”
Comments are welcome through JANUARY 31.
Warm wishes to you and yours for a healthy and meaningful 2017.
Looking forward,
Paul Raskin
GTI Director
-----
Hit reply to post a message
Or see thread and reply online at
greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/187-the-struggle-for-meaningful-work/2194
<http://greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/187-the-struggle-for-meaningful-work/2194>
Need help? Email [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
--
Eric Hunting
[email protected]
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