Real and Unreal “Work”

“Work” has positive connotation when its meaning is to create something or get some necessary task accomplished—be that using hands-and-bodies or using only hands-and-mind. The “creation” here, needless to say, is actually a kind of transformation, be it of physical substances or of ideas. For many people in corporate life today “work” has come to mean something quite different. The actual doing itself happens outside to the corporation. The employees’ job inside is to get other people to do the work—and the pressure is on Big Time to get the work done at ever lower prices. That’s what words like out-sourcing, farming-out, and contracting signify.

This sort of thing began with the industrial revolution—which itself began with textiles. So-called producers obtained cotton, flax, and wool. They farmed it out to individuals who spun the yarns in a highly fragmented cottage industry. Then the yarns were farmed out again, to a similar network of individuals working on their own, to be woven into fabric. The fabric, in turn, was farmed out to individuals who cut and sewed to the producer’s specifications, again paid only for the work accomplished, never for their time. Those who worked had virtually no power—many although in numbers. When we arrived in America as immigrants, the first job my mother held was in a textile operation where she was paid by the piece. Yes, she was an employee, but this practice, piecework, harked all the way back to the dark beginnings of industrialization. In this structure producers did no work and workers had but a minimum economic share in the manufacturing process.

In the evolution of industry there was a period—we’re still largely in that period—when workers were hired, paid for their time, had a stake in the enterprise, and also had a role in product design and creation (as defined above). But now we are gradually going in the other direction again. In many corporations, only tiny minorities of employees actually do work; they are either at the lowest administrative levels or they are engineers-designers who specify the work to be done. Its actual accomplishment is sourced out. Most employees do unreal work: they must find, qualify, negotiate with, and pressure outside agents who will then do the work specified.

Is it real work to lean on suppliers to produce to spec at ever lower prices? Or is that something else? What pride arises from being able to say: “I got the bastards to move up the deadline and to swallow the new price. They hated it, but I got the signature.” Now those who have to do this sort of work are themselves but peons, are themselves under pressure, and the more they succeed, the more the pressure mounts. They, but indeed also the people who live in more square feet above them, are all slaves of the Devil himself who wants infinite expansion of meaningless numbers to enrich the very few who only talk to lawyers and no longer actually really need the wealth.

History has cycles. Times of equilibrium, when justice more or less reigns, are transitory. Then the cycles either turn up—justice increases—or they turn down—the reverse effect. Our times now trend downward. May the process accelerate. May Modernity soon die its soul-less death. Here and there the change upward is sometimes glimpsed, but the instances are still too few. May they multiply.

Those Who Finish, Those Who Don’t

I don’t know what the proportions are, but quite a lot of people start jobs but never really finish them. The worst of these are people who deliberately stop short because they can’t be bothered—and they don’t mind leaving their mess for others to handle. A classic cluster around here is formed by people who take their dogs on walks, carry plastic sacks, collect the poo, tie the sack at the top, and then just surreptitiously drop it near some bush along their path. Those who walk their dogs in the dark and don’t carry a sack at all—why they are beneath contempt. They belong to another category.

I feel for those who start things but don’t know they haven’t finished. One observes this sort of thing constantly in places of work. People write reports, but the damn thing’s incomplete. It misses the point of the assignment. You stare at pages and realize: you’ve just been handed a list. It lacks analysis, comes to no conclusion. People make sales calls but fail on the necessary follow-up. People make trips and fail to observe the very thing you sent them to observe.

A variant of this, at the higher levels, is excruciatingly hard analytical work—say in science—which is admirable in its own narrow field but obviously ignores the greater whole. Thus, lacking a feel for comprehensiveness, such people are blind to their own most glaring errors.

I go on walks and therefore daily see gardening projects abandoned half-way through, mowed lawns but unswept walks, abandoned tools that, sometimes, have begun to rust away.

Then there are those who finish things. This spring I passed a yard where an elderly gent had started to restore patches of bad grass in a strip next to a lovely line of flowers. The job looked hopeless to me, his method not very promising. We’re dog-sitting again, and taking Katie on her walk, I passed this place again. I only usually follow that path when I am with a dog. Big surprise. The unsightly patches of grass were, today, virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the lawn. I could still detect the areas, however, faintly: they were a deeper, richer green.

When I set out on that someday journey to discover the mythical bird, Simurgh, it is people like that old man I want to be in my company.