Good work if you can get it
US politics and the central issue of what our working lives should be
Two days before Thanksgiving, I realized that one of my car’s headlights was out. I called the garage on Wednesday morning, the day before Thanksgiving, to make an appointment to have the bulbs changed.
Bob answered the phone himself, with a sigh. I explained. Another sigh. “Come in and 1.30 and I’ll fit you in somehow.”
“Oh, not today,” I said, “Later’s fine.”
Bob’s tone flattened. “I’m not working this weekend.”
“Of course not!” I said. “It’s Thanksgiving.”
His voice brightened. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “you’re the first person who didn’t think I should be working every single day of the year. These people, they act like we’re second-class citizens.”
I commiserated, honestly, and arranged to come in Monday. As I thought about what I’m thankful for, Bob came to mind. and not just because I trust him to keep my car going for as long as that’s possible. There’s something comforting about seeing someone who knows his business and does the work because it’s his work, his contribution, his way of life.
He would probably think I’m turning something ordinary into something abstract and philosophical. And he’d be right: it is normal, in terms of human history. But in the expensive rural region where I landed many years ago from London, people like Bob are few and far between.
New York City shoemaker
There is a shoe repair shop in Great Barrington. It smells of leather and the work is skilled, but like everything else here it is expensive and slow. Very slow. I was living half the week in New York and one day wandered down a lane not far off Wall Street. Tight between two modern shops was something out of the 1950s, an aluminum-framed door on one side and a dusty window showing uneven rows of shoes.
People working on Wall Street wear nice shoes, I realized, and just as they need drycleaning they must need soles replaced and expensive boots mended. The man behind the counter growled when I returned the next day with a bag of shoes. “Cash only,” he said. “In advance. Let me see them.” He held out his hand and looked them over carefully.
“And you have to pick them up tomorrow.” I explained that that was impossible and negotiated a reprieve until Monday, then paid him the modest amount (half what I would have been charged in Great Barrington).
When I returned, I brought two more pair. We discussed the first one—no problem. Then I handed over the other pair, saying I knew I should throw these away but could he just take a look. They had been a favorite and carried a lot of memories, especially of one wet night in Beijing when we couldn’t get a taxi and had to trek through muddy corridors to get the subway. I’d thought the shoes were goners, but one of my hosts had rescued them, sending me out again once they were dry and polished.
The shoemaker turned them up and over. He looked at me sideways and pursed his mouth reproachfully, “These are good shoes. Of course I can take care of them.” Once again I got a lecture about picking them up promptly. “This shop is too crowded. I don’t have room to store your shoes.”
I’m glad I had all my favorites fixed up while he was still open—it’s hard to imagine that the shop survived the pandemic, but I hope it did, so I can again turn up with shoes in hand, and ready to pick them up the next day.
This story has an environmental message—slow fashion instead of fast fashion—but what matters more is what it tells us about good work.
Death under fluorescent lights
Meaningless work is forced on more and more people, not only the urban mother who travels by bus and holds three different service jobs but suburban white-collar cubicle professionals, and people like Paul Lundy, who took over a typewriter repair shop1 instead of retiring. “His colleagues were sure he had lost his mind. But Lundy knew he was trading security for meaning, predictability for possibility.”
Eleven years ago, Paul Lundy was dying a slow, workingman’s death under fluorescent light.
For three decades, he had worked in facilities management — an honest trade that ground him down until, in his mid-50s, he had money, an authoritative title and a soul that was being sucked dry. He managed buildings for Seattle-area biotech firms, where people in lab coats made discoveries that saved lives. He kept the infrastructure running. He was good at it, maybe great, but facilities managers are overhead, essential but invisible. Nobody notices until something breaks.
Lundy had reached a ceiling. No college degree meant no room to grow in a world that valued credentials above experience. Retirement at 65 stretched before him like a prison sentence. The three-hour commute was killing him — a ritual that thousands endure to afford living near Seattle.2
Read the whole article: “How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life” [New York Times gift link]
In the original The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg acknowledged the social aspect of workplaces, describing their “camaraderie and banter.” But how much of that is left to many workers today?
The 37-year-old US congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez owns an auto repair shop with her husband. A recent article about her differences with the mainstream Democratic Party is worth reading.
Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.
Wendell Berry on work
Wendell Berry is a Christian and a poet. He was also much admired by the UK Greens when I first got involved in environmental work. I still have a stack of Berry’s books and I flipped through them to see what might be inspiring Rep Gluesenkamp Perez.
“[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.
The New York Times article explains that, “Her central argument is that academics, economists and political consultants tend to fixate on a set of narrow, divisive issues that obscure what’s really driving alienation and anger in our society today. That angst, for many, is about a basic worry that neither party is seriously listening to today: a fear that we are losing what the philosopher Henri Bergson once described as an ‘open society’ and replacing it with a society of the “anthill” — with most people living a drone-like existence, reduced to data points in a system run by technocrats and corporations.”
I have some reservations about Wendell Berry, but his commentary on work has stayed with me, too, and it seems more relevant than ever.
Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think that they live, beyond the bad effects of their bead work. / A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by the name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale.
A chapter called “Higher Education and Home Defense” is useful reading for those who wonder where the Democratic Party lost the working class. Berry was writing about ordinary careerists, working in old-fashioned big companies that are now dwarfed by Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and their ilk.
The second requirement for entrance into the class of professional vandals is “higher education.” One’s eligibility must be certified by a college, for, whatever the real condition or quality of the minds in it, this class is both intellectual and elitist. It proposes to do its vandalism by thinking; insofar as its purposes will require dirty hands, other hands will be employed.
My father, who spent his career in the computer industry, once admonished me for thinking I could do something meaningful and enjoyable as a profession. “All jobs are miserable,” he said, “face up to it.” The idea of vocation was beyond him, but I sympathize to some extent because men of his generation knew that their first responsibility was to support a wife and children. I’ve come to think that the European approach to holidays and work hours is superior to ours, but Wendell Berry had a few things to say about the call for a 4-day work week.
Neither side, so far as I know, has produced a reliable distinction between good work and bad work. To shorten the “official workweek” while consenting to the continuation of bad work is not much of a solution.
The old and honorable idea of “vocation” is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.
Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.
But aren’t we living even when we are most miserably and harmfully at work?
And isn’t that exactly why we object (when we do object) to bad work?
And if you are called to music or farming or carpentry or healing, if you make your living by your calling, if you use your skills well and to a good purpose and therefore are happy or satisfied in your work, why should you necessarily do less of it?
Abraham Lincoln on work
And here is historian Christopher Lasch in the reissued edition of The Culture of Narcissism (any guesses about why the publisher decided to reissue the book in 2020?) on President Abraham Lincoln’s response to a defense of slavery as offering care and protection to workers that Northern factory owners did not provide.
It was a measure of Lincoln’s political gifts that he understood that this was the strongest argument for slavery and had to be confronted head-on. He also understood that the most effective rebuttal was to expose the argument’s premise: that every civilization has to rest on one or another form of forced, degraded labor. The mud-sill theorists, he said, assumed that nobody labors, unless someone else, owning capital, somehow, by the use of that capital, induces him to it.
Having assumed this, they proceed to consider whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent; or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far they naturally conclude that all laborers are necessarily either hired laborers, or slaves. They further assume that whoever is once a hired laborer, is fatally fixed in that condition for life; and thence again that his condition is as bad as, or worse than that of a slave. This is the “mud-sill” theory.
Lincoln did not quarrel with his opponents’ disparaging view of wage labor. He took the position, however, that “in these Free States, a large majority are neither hirers nor hired.” There was no “such thing, as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.” Wage labor in the North, insofar as it existed at all, served as a temporary condition leading to proprietorship.
This has been central to the “American dream,” not just having more money than your parents but having new opportunities and more autonomy. I have known several immigrants to the US—women who can barely speak English, who clean houses and work in a nail salon—with children in college and graduate school. This is the trajectory of my Minnesotan family, too (my father was the first in his family to go to college, thanks to the GI Bill). It is the trajectory of millions of white American families, and it’s what people around the world have long admired about the United States. I remember this, as I read the news from Minneapolis, and prepare to talk about our life outside work at the Third Place Summit on Monday. Perhaps I’ll meet you there?
Blue Dog Democrats on work
What I’d love to do is talk face-to-face about the questions raised by Rep Gluesenkamp Perezand the “Blue Dog Democrats.”
Together, they’ve tried to articulate a friendly and Americana-inflected cultural politics “for people who still believe in community, country and the common good,” as the intro to one of the podcast episodes put it, coupled with an economic vision that is arguably more radical than programs offered by many leftists. It encompasses antimonopoly policies, right to repair and regulatory changes to smooth the path for people to start businesses, buy and work land, even build their own houses and invent things. . . .
The economic historian Nic Johnson recently depicted the global economy as a vast “conveyor belt”: Capital continuously flows into safe and fungible American assets, offering American financial institutions, as well as the federal government, huge pools of money and raising the value of the dollar, which, in turn, makes material goods, from timber to phones, expensive relative to those produced abroad. The money gets lent out at mass scale, driving economic dynamism in sectors like tech, which powers G.D.P. growth, while making manufacturing, logging and farming less and less relevant to how we create and measure value in this country.
This is what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez means when she says that “work has been devalued” in America today.
What is The Way We Live Now trying to accomplish? (The title comes from a Trollope novel.) Read about it here. Who is Karen Christensen? Find out here.
Affiliate book links go to Bookshop.org, where you can purchase print and ebooks while supporting independent bookshops.
I would be remiss not to mention Scott Conner of Stephentown Typewriter here. He repairs typewriters, too, and put mine into good working order. I now treasure people like him, and Bob, as much as I value what they preserve.
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