Why work?
In Wim Wenders latest film Perfect Days, full of zen shots of wind in the trees and dawn against the Tokyo skyline, the protagonist is a cleaner of public toilets. And not just any cleaner: probably the most conscientious cleaner employed by the city. He gets up before dawn, rolls up his futon bed, drives to one of the public toilets, and scrubs, mops, disinfects all day with great skill and dedication. After work he bicycles to a public bath, and then to the same noodle place for dinner. Home, in bed, he reads. The job suits him. It’s a matter of principle to do the job well, whatever the job, is what he would say if anyone asked. (There is little dialogue in the film.) There’s a back story there that we never learn: his much wealthier sister arrives in a shiny car to collect the runaway teen daughter and asks him in disbelief, “Is it true, that you clean toilets?” But Hirayama (played by Koji Yakusho with a twinkle in the eye) is not unhappy. There are hints that loneliness might be weighing on him as the only complication in his sensibly-led life—but also a development near the end that may resolve that issue.
The film brought to mind David Sedaris, who often wrote about his years as a house cleaner and gladly talked about cleaning in interviews. “Cleaning houses gives a feeling of accomplishment that writing lacks”, he says in a 1997 interview, in which he also describes his pedantry. Today, as a star humorist and property owner on multiple counts, he happily discusses his voluntary cleaning of the vast swaths of the Sussex countryside.
In one of my long-ago jobs in property management, everybody was able to tell who had had the janitorial shift the day before by the state of the building. Some people phoned it in, while others did the job as it ought to be done. They were both paid equally.
Is there anything obliging somebody on an underpaid and physically demanding job to be excellent? Especially if they are working for a temp agency or a large corporation, not for their own business. What do we betray, if anything, with a job done half-assedly? Do we let down something in ourselves, or the society? Or should we, faced with an impersonal corporate behemoth, treated like a cog, carve out a space of freedom by quiet-quitting? And the post-Covid question, can we do our job well at home and isolated, never risking meeting a stranger, always in control?
The answer lies in what we see as the point of work.
According to Marx, it’s what makes us human—and what, if unjustly organized, turns us into a cog. While some animals work too, he wrote, what makes a human is conscious, purpose-driven, goal-oriented work that is not the same as work towards satisfying immediate biological needs. “[Animals] produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need; …their products belong immediately to their physical bodies, while man freely confronts his own product.” Humans also produce beautiful things for their own sake, “according to the laws of beauty”.
This understanding of human nature and of the place of work in it lies at the heart of his concept of alienation – which is still relevant though Marx wrote in the context of the rise of manufacturing and industrialization. As workers, we are alienated from the product of our work because it belongs to someone else. In manufacturing it is the product which leaves our hands; in the techno-corporate world and service industries the ‘product’ has dissipated and is often nothing tangible or measurable. We are also, Marx wrote, alienated from the activity of work. My job is a means of preservation, not of self-actualization. My real life happens in leisure time. (Communism, as we know, did not disalienate work, and actually found ways to alienate it in new ways. “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.”)
Can we really be nostalgic about the economies of the small-scale and work that involves practical skills? Some of the feminist historians have looked back wistfully at the time when economic production was inside the (feudal, landed) home, when women took part in the production by performing specific tasks (spinning at the wheel is particularly mythologized). Industrialization and the turning of the peasantry into the proletariat confined women inside the home, with raising children their only purpose. It would be much much later, probably not until World War One, that women return to the public worksphere en masse.
But there is no turning back the clock, although technology can give the illusion of a working life within a family unit to some members of the laptop classes who work from home. What about the nostalgia for the jobs of making things with your hands versus providing, say, administrative support or managing projects? A few years ago I came across Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Dr Crawford, (PhD in Political Philosophy, University of Chicago) abandoned his job at a DC think tank to become a motorcycle repair mechanic. The book is a paean to manual competence, and teases out the connection between the well-being of the psyche and the employed and dexterous hands. Mind is body; if one side is inert, the other is too. What trade would I like to do, if I were to have a career in trades, I often wondered. I like baking bread, but wouldn’t want to do it non-stop. Welding sounds fun. Landscape gardening must be good for quieting the mind, but you have no work in winter. Carpentry is the golden retriever of trades. Electrician? While schooling is available, apprenticeships are few and far between–and often the business owner offers it to a member of the family. Nor is it possible to drum up business for your trade on a part-time basis.
Another path is that of a highly specialized wiz, like the piano tuner. Guilds, however, have lost the world-historical battle to mass production in just about every wealthy country of the world. Which countries allow for the gifted tailors, instrument makers, architects, jewelers, clock makers to thrive? Tobias Jones, writing about Italy, calls them ‘professional cartels’. Apart from protecting the cabbies, notaries, pharmacists, and private beachfront rentiers, yes Italy still has book-binders, luthiers and goldsmiths, “partly because it has been able to shelter artisans and their medieval guilds from the gale-forces of globalisation”. But the lack of competition keeps standards low and prices high. Inflexibility and corruption can dog the old-worldy economies.
Work, paid and unpaid, can be, according to the titan of the philosophy of ethics Alasdair MacIntyre, the context in which we develop virtues. It can be a practice that gives purpose, the way an acorn develops its potential by becoming a tree. “Practices” (MacIntyre is after all a former Marxist turned conservative) have their in-built point and purpose, and working for extraneous reasons such as money, power, Twitter likes or peer approval, or phoning it in, is to abandon that purpose. I’ve been thinking about MacIntyre and wondering if there are workplaces and kinds of jobs that enhance or undercut the possibility of certain virtues (say, courage). I’ve wondered why it was that the academe, the media and the NGO sector were such easy prey to what Wesley Yang called the successor ideology: the illiberal progressivism or wokeness. Is it some temporary structural constraints – or a long line of wrong choices and neglected practice of virtues that brings individuals to a situation where they have no choice but to conform or stay quiet.
Office jobs, those that tie you to a desk, a computer and a copier, largely don’t have the cohesion and purposefulness of a practice. Before Katie Herzog became Katie Herzog of Stranger and Blocked and Reported, I interviewed her about her piece on empty labour that went viral. She wrote about not having much to do in an office job, and how the empty hours got filled (mostly with internet content; one of the reasons for the initial successes of media like Buzzfeed, we now know, was the daytime traffic from people bored at work). But even a tedious office job is less grim than its better paid, more aspirational corner office cousin: the bullshit job. Popularized by the late David Graeber, the concept of a bullshit job (a very different thing from a shit job) covers a lot of the well-compensated, make-work and essentially pointless jobs that our era abounds with. You may remember Siobhan from the British comedy W1A? A prime example. What’s much less funny are the structural reasons behind bullshit jobs. The overproduction of the elites plays a role: all those middle class kids who go for university degrees and need white collar jobs on graduation, and where do we find them? Consultancies, PR, marketing, ‘strategic planning’, lately DEI.
And do we maintain any citizen rights in our places of employment? Elizabeth Anderson argues not: once we sign the employment contract, we enter a sphere of “a private government with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives, on duty and off”. (Noam Chomsky has said something similar in interviews.). It’s no accident that Anderson is American: the at-will employment is an American and Canadian phenomenon. The CBC radio did a reportage on the frog march a few years ago, that humiliating walking out of the just fired employee. A mass email informing you you’ve been laid off sounds almost kind in comparison.
We should all work less, then, if purposeful practice is rarely available. We are working for working sake, working no matter what, yet most of us would not feel fulfilled if suddenly a modest UBI indexed to the cost of living were available to us. Would you take it? The wisdom of the ancients had it that leisure rather than drudgery is where we thrive: it’s when philosophy, art, ethical thinking, athletic achievement can happen. Work is for the underclass. We have switched in the intervening centuries to the opposite side: there is salvation, there is purpose in work. For Western Christianity, quite literally. The long conversation among various strands of Christian thought on the faith vs works continues: is it enough to believe, or do we have to do good deeds in the world, volunteer in food banks, build orphanages, work in legal aid, sacrifice our freedom for the needs of our family? Or are we, by being smug about our good deeds, behaving like we know what God's plan is? Aren’t we hedging, metaphysically speaking?
We need work: fundamentally, deeply. Yet we are unhappy by what it brings to our lives, the way it shapes us, how it leaves us unfulfilled yet drained. Another American philosopher, Jerry Seinfeld, had it roughly right: find something you like to do. Try to get good at it. Keep trying. You have that (and love) and you have figured out life.
Sounds simple, until you begin.
Join me in this new series about work and tell me about your career, calling, temporary gigs, contracts, volunteering, homemaking. Who should I talk to about their work? Tell me what you make and whether you’re fairly compensated. What does work add to your life? Did you find that Seinfeld-thing that you’d like to get better at? Any BS jobs in your past or present? Who cleans your house? I’d love to hear from you. greeksandromans at gmail dot com.
Superb post. Hoping there's more coming along these lines!
Have you read Scott Cutler Shershow's The Work and the Gift (University of Chicago Press, 2005)? It might be of interest.
Have much respect for Crawford. Here he was on The Agenda https://www.tvo.org/video/matthew-crawford-in-defence-of-manual-work