Kicking. Squealing.
In America, we’re bipolar on jobs. On the one hand, our public policy is concerned with jobs, jobs, jobs. Presidents and other politicians are weighed based upon how many jobs they can “create”. Amid culture wars and the increasingly-extreme poles of our pols, the economy and jobs becomes the go-to point of contention for the prestige press.
Anyway, America is a hard-working country relative to other nations. And if you listen to the media we’re in a sort of jobs crisis. But when my neighbor, over the weekend, expressed her sympathy at my having to trot off to work – I was in my uniform and she let out an “Aww I’m sorry you gotta go to work” – I thought about what her statement said about how we view work in America.
It was just a one-off exchange. But it does expose something I’ve criticized left-leaning people for (if my neighbor is liberal or not, I don’t know) and it’s something that’s been discussed by Christopher Lasch in the books of his that I’m reading. Leftists and progressives have a strange relationship with work and jobs. On the one hand, they enjoy the idea of jobs. They laud the working man and claim to be his friend. But on the other hand, they despise actual work and the components that are required to sustain a workplace i.e. managers and rules. They abhor the bourgeoisie lifestyle.
This could also get back to Charles Murray’s argument in Coming Apart. Did people in 1960 express sympathy for people trotting off to work? How did conversations like that go? Were they the same then as we are today? The fact that people have the privilege, even in these rough economic times, to lament jobfulness tells me that we’re not as bad off as advertised.
What lefties deplore is work which isn’t socially or politically intellectual. They don’t deplore working as a journalist, pundit, politician, academic, teacher (though they do pity them sometimes), doctor or nurse. They don’t really deplore working as a lawyer or prosecutor. Yeah they do deplore conservatives in these intellectual or helping professions, but that’s not about the nature of their job but their political stance.
What they look down on or affect doing so, is working for capitalists and businessmen outside of those capacities, whether as an executive, manager, accountant, in house lawyer, cubicle dweller or executive assistant. They also look down on all manual labor including even the skilled trades like plumbing, electrician, carpenter, auto mechanic, or factory worker.
Doug is on to something, but let’s take it a step further. To a modern lefty, “work” has to be a personally fulfilling endeavor. This rather fits in with the theory I read a couple days ago that all lefties are narcissists at heart. It has to be something that makes them feel they’re out there making That Difference in the World™ about which we keep hearing that everyone regardless of ability is capable. Cue some trite drivel about how they’re fine with spending $50,000 on a liberal arts degree so they can work at an air-conditioned non-profit and have a nice work-life balance.
Chuck,
How do you like waiting tables? I’ve worked a ton of shit jobs and waiting tables was one job that I found to be particularly intolerable, although I’m sure a lot of it depends on location, the general type of clientele, type of food, etc. Just curious to hear your take.
“Do something you love, and you will never work a day in your life” That’s the old adage.
But like Inkraven pointed out the fleshy headed mutants today think work must be “fulfilling”. They cant wrap their minds around the fact some jobs just SUCK, but they gotta be done. It used to be and in some way still is that the jobs nobody wanted to do were open to the unskilled, or if the job required allot of skill or training they were compensated with high wages. This logical system has been crippled by crybabies who feel that the clean, safe “satisfying” job they perform is of “equal worth” to another job one that is likely not to be clean safe or nice.
here are some examples i found on a comparable/equal worth pdf.
• Primary school classroom assistant – library service driver messenger.
• School nursery nurse – local government architectural technician.
• Wholesale news distribution clerical assistant – warehouse operative.
• Cook – shipboard painter.
• Head of speech and language therapy service – head of hospital pharmacy service.
• Nursing home sewing room assistant – plumber.
• Motor industry sewing machinist – upholsterer.
• Canteen workers and cleaners – clerical workers.
clearly having your head up your ass must pay well too.
And just as clear they don’t care about jobs, they care about the tax dollars those jobs will put into their coffers. So they can fund unneeded programs, that in turn pay for the salaries of their unneeded “fulfilling” jobs they got after they earned their useless unneeded degrees.
Narcissism.
The core of the modern (though not pre-1940) socialists.
The baby boomers were narcissists no matter what they touched.
“They also look down on all manual labor including even the skilled trades like plumbing, electrician, carpenter, auto mechanic, or factory worker.”
Unless those workers are unionized and donate heavily to Dems.
In some ways this is a return to the norm. It was the middle class work ethic of 19th and 20th century America that was the historical anomaly.
Most people for most of recorded history have viewed work as a curse and tried to do as little of it as they could get away with. Look at the culture of medieval peasants or antebellum slaves — or the Book of Genesis, where “earning your bread by the sweat of your brow” is presented as punishment for Adam’s sin.
Lasch mentions this in The Culture of Narcissism and talks about it in great detail in The True and Only Heaven. The American work ethic is the product of a middle class republic of farmers, small business owners and skilled tradesmen — autonomous producers with direct responsibility for the quality of their own work. But this group has been shrinking for over a century as a result of improved mass production techniques.
American culture managed to paper over the problem for several decades by giving blue collar workers and white collar middle managers respect as providers and heads of households, but eventually technology (automation, reliable contraception, etc.) made the provider role obsolete.
Lasch believed that the cultural left’s disdain for bourgeois values was as much a symptom as a cause of this shift. But unlike most leftists, he mourned its passing instead of celebrating it, correctly realizing that if you want a republic of free, independent citizens, you need a culture with a strong work ethic, *especially* for the jobs which are unglamorous but necessary.
Anyways, Stickman’s comment nails it. Most work sucks, and the best reason to do it is to get paid. If you try to “do what you love” without regard for supply and demand, you’re setting yourself up to be exploited, as I’ve said before wrt Girls and the publishing/media world.
People who don’t do enough work become Democrats.
My 70-year old parents think I’m slacking off when I take a single vacation day from work. From time to time they forget what day it is, and when I show up dressed in shorts and a t-shirt at their house on a Saturday, I get questions about why I’m not at work. I tell them, “It’s Saturday, the office is closed!” “Oh yea, well still…”
“Do what you love, the money will follow.” Ha ha ha.
totalesturns got it right. All of what we call economic progress is an effort to return to the Garden of Eden. In an age when automation and outsourcing have eliminated thousands of jobs, we could celebrate but for the fact that those whose jobs were eliminated are all too often those who cannot afford to lose them.
What we need are policies that would tax labor at very high rates, exempting labor income invested (similar to current 401k plans), and dividends and returns on capital not at all. In this manner, those at the top would be encouraged not to stay there too long and become “idle rich”, giving everyone below a chance to move up. The Ph.D. in economics driving a cab could then become an economist, and the unemployed could then drive a cab.
Working sucks; being unemployed also sucks.
@sestambi
OR
I got a better idea.
How about we let low IQ people unable of creating more value than it takes for us to feed their dipshit mouths to breathe, to just die off?
A lot of people don’t like their jobs – long hours, high stress, boring, often pointless – but feel trapped in them as they need the money. If you spend your life living this way then no wonder someone is going to express sympathy for those heading off to work.
I spent about 10 years working as a lawyer (I’m not American) and then quit to travel a bit and work in London a bit (again as lawyer). Over the next 5 years I probably only worked for about 2 years. I thought that I had a protestant work ethic but to my suprise I found that I really enjoyed not working and in particular living in London and traveling around Europe where there is an endless amount to see and do. Just enjoying walks in the park, visiting museums, reading books, contemplating life, hanging out with friends. Not working can be a lot of fun provided you have the money to get away with it. Don’t regret my time out at all.
I’m sensing a vague overarching connection between leftism, laziness, disomfort with authority, aversion to hard and fast rules, and the likelihood of growing up with an absent father.
Chuck, it seems like people are working more hours, weekends and holidays nowadays. The world doesn’t shut down on Christmas, New Year’s, etc. like it used to. It’s one of the bad sides of secularism. Work will always be important to Americans, but family was equally important. In today’s world work is everything: identity, family, community, life. The corporate world expects the working classes to work pretty much 24/7. That is more what Charles Murray is getting at. The rich have no connection (Christianity/Americana) to their fellow citizens anymore.
Actually I think work used to be more important compared to family life for more men from after WWII (if not before) though the Mad Men era and really up until the 90s. Then there was a big feminist push, which yes started coming in in the 80s for men go to their kids soccer and baseball games, spend less time at the office and more at home, helping with housework and also childcare, and so on.
Yes the elites may be working longer hours than ever, but elite men also usefully feel that have to/morally should make at least token gestures about attending their children’s events even if that means taking some time off from work, made up by working later on other days.
I have a hard time believing that more people worked the important holidays in the past compared to modern times. Another product of secularism: no more Christmas bonus!