Hard News: Is that it?
327 Responses
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Rich Lock, in reply to
Gio is a pussy-cat.
He can haz dignity of labour naow?
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Sacha, in reply to
Time to seize control of the means of discussion
hack the blog
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Most work involves some manner of organisation and people in addition to tasks.
Yes, but if at the end of getting there what you do is interchangeable, then it's not about toilet-cleaning - it's about the kinds of activities and relationships that can surround any job.
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(Put it another way: from cotton picking we got the blues. That is not to say that there was dignity in being abducted, transported across the ocean and made to pick cotton for no pay.)
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James Butler, in reply to
What I’m getting from this is that we have a problem in which certain work is perceived to be undervalued.
This is called "capitalism", no?
When we expect the value of labour to be determined entirely by the market, then that labour which brings one more information about the market (ie. closer to the money) becomes, by definition, more valuable. Certain economists would call this "efficient"; I have less charitable names for it, and mitigating this effect is (or should be) pretty much the entire point of centre-left politics.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
There are jobs that are mindless, jobs that are soul crushing, jobs that are backbreaking, jobs that are unaccountably dangerous or bad for your health, and jobs that are all of these things at the same time. I would go as far as to say that probably the majority of jobs are at least one of these things.
There are also jobs that are, in themselves, pointless but keep people "employed" and therefore not pointless. I often use the analogy of "Te Railways". Many people complained about wasteful overmanning and overburdening inefficiencies but at least those Railwaymen and women, had a reason for getting out of bed in the morning and having some form of social involvement. That, to me at least, seems a little more valuable than Michael Fay and David Richwhite becoming offshore millionaires.
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Heather Gaye, in reply to
This is called "capitalism", no?
Indeed. My thought was how the market value of labour reflects directly on people's perceptions of / assumptions about the character of the labourers. I'm really interested to know if there's a way to change that association.
For all the horrible jobs that people have described here, I think that improvements to pay, environment and staff treatment (read; modicum of respect) would probably go a long way to making a lot of those jobs a bit more rewarding (or at least not horrible), and that maybe this can be achieved by training society to measure labour's value in a different way. I guess that's in part what the triple bottom line was about.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I think the value is mostly dictated by supply and demand under capitalism. There is no end of supply of unskilled labour, so it's worth fuck all. Doesn't matter how hard, unpleasant or dangerous it is, nor how much that labour is on-sold for in the product/service. The position to be if you want money is either the capitalist, or selling labour in short supply with high demand. The capitalist is not really that sweet a position - most of them go broke. It's only sweet for that fraction who crack it open. The person selling short supply high demand labour is in a good position only for as long as that labour remains in short supply, which can be for a surprisingly short amount of time. Then they can end up on a different scrap heap altogether. Certainly it's mostly down to luck and hard work whether they can hold that position.
Alternative ways of organizing things have their own problems too. There's a whole lot of organizing to get things done that no one wants to do, in, say, a collective. Anarchy tends to go for the tragedy of the commons - when you give stuff away for free, hoping for it to magically come back to you, most of the time it just doesn't. Setting prices for work is an administrative nightmare, rather like the wage and price freeze - it's pretty easy to work around, just by changing every single job description over and over again. I'd like to hear any other serious alternatives - it seems to me that I'm just lacking imagination here.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I'd rather say that wisdom (define as you like) derives primarily from experience, and not necessarily as a function of brightness.
My point was more that you have to be bright enough to understand your experience and your experience be broad enough to lead to a greater understanding, ie Wisdom.
I think. -
John Armstrong, in reply to
I feel like there's no debate going on here. This is people agreeing with each other angrily.
I'm sorry if I've given that impression, I am genuinely not angry. Its just that the 'no value in mindless work' assertion doesn't fit my experience. Maybe my experience wasn't typical. I was certainly lucky to get out and wouldn't go back unless there was nothing else was available. But neither would I erase from my memory those eight years and all the various life lessons that came with the sore back and the constant, unwashoffable eely smell. I maintain that they were of value to me. At the same time, I accept Gio's suggestion that there is bugger all to recommend picking rice until your face stops working. Its all on a spectrum, and I guess that is why making blanket assertions either way probably has its problems. Some jobs are shit to the point of inhuman, while others are just a pain in the arse.
And, yes, shitty jobs can lead to some http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jG0Onc6goc / pretty fantastic art..
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There is dignity in a job well done, no matter how drudgelicious that job may be. It is not work that is demeaning or dehumanising, as work is simply a part of the human condition, and it seems fair to say that most work is drudge in some form or another. Nor is it necessarily the system that demeans or dehumanisises, although the capitalist system certainly helps. It is people's attitudes that demean and dehumanise.
So long as we continue to piss and shit, and if we wish to maintain our current standards of health and wellbeing, we are going to need toilets and we are going to need to clean them. That means paying people to clean public toilets. It certainly does not seem like an intellectually stimulating job, but there is no reason to sneer at those who do it for a living. Their jobs may not be great, they may not be particularly bright or ambitious (although it is always dangerous to make assumptions), but their jobs are necessary and we should respect that.
Basically, no jobs, even those that deal with various aspects of the sewage system, are shitty in and of themselves. It's shitty bosses that make shitty jobs shitty, and shite attitudes on the part of those "further up the social ladder" just compound the shittiness.
It would be interesting to see how the well-heeled would cope if all those in drudge jobs at the bottom of the social heap downed tools for even a week. Imagine fancy-pants currency traders (who, it should be pointed out, produce nothing at all as they accumulate their wealth) having to pick their own fruit, mill their own grain, or butcher their own chickens. Imagine John Key starting his work week cleaning the Beehive toilets.... now there's a pleasant thought...
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BenWilson, in reply to
I wasn't singling you out, John. Nor do I think it's a very angry debate. Just seems to me that when you get down to what people are saying, mostly there's agreement.
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Che Tibby, in reply to
It would be interesting to see how the well-heeled would cope if all those in drudge jobs at the bottom of the social heap downed tools for even a week.
you watched 'Kenny'? there's the scene where the fancy-pants madams deride him for being the bog man, then later he see said same madams cackling and pissing on their own self in the carpark.
you couldn't get closer to capitalist melbourne if you tried.
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James Butler, in reply to
I think the value is mostly dictated by supply and demand under capitalism. There is no end of supply of unskilled labour, so it’s worth fuck all.
You say "supply and demand", I say "the market", same diff right?
The question is why does the market place its value as "fuck all", while society places its value somewhat higher (as revealed by the minimum wage)? I think it's more instructive looking at occupations above the minimum wage floor. A lot of us might agree, for instance, that teachers and social workers are underpaid; this is hardly down to oversupply, or the work being "unskilled" - the work is simply so far along the value chain from "capital" that it's too difficult for the market to measure quantitatively what it's "worth". The quantifiability of value has become a proxy for value itself.
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JLM, in reply to
Alternative ways of organizing things have their own problems too. There’s a whole lot of organizing to get things done that no one wants to do, in, say, a collective. Anarchy tends to go for the tragedy of the commons – when you give stuff away for free, hoping for it to magically come back to you, most of the time it just doesn’t. Setting prices for work is an administrative nightmare, rather like the wage and price freeze – it’s pretty easy to work around, just by changing every single job description over and over again. I’d like to hear any other serious alternatives – it seems to me that I’m just lacking imagination here.
I think in Le Guin's 'anarchy' (The Dispossessed) everybody took a day or two out of their decad to rotate round the jobs that no-one wanted to do permanently. As Shevek said, it was inefficient, but better than condemning someone to doing the same horrible thing all the time.
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Danielle, in reply to
Basically, no jobs, even those that deal with various aspects of the sewage system, are shitty in and of themselves.
Are too!
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Islander, in reply to
LeGuin! She has said more accurate & perceptive things about humanity and our various societies than any dozen philosophers and any thousand thousand politicians.
I dont revere her, but I admire her writing very much. -
James Butler, in reply to
Alternative ways of organizing things have their own problems too.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest meaningful alternatives or anything crazy like that - just whining about the status quo :-) In reality I think progressive taxation is probably the best treatment we have for capitalism's chronic over-valuation of capital - but even that's pretty flawed, as it penalizes extra labour just as much as extra capital.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Great book. However, one of the most important points of that books was that Shevek was considerably undervalued in his own society, that getting the most amazing physicist in the known universe to till the fields, or to use his mathematical talents on the horrible job of deciding who gets to eat, was a shocking waste of his talent. Shevek, was, however, meant to be very strange guy, a total enigma. Right from the start, the odds were against his talents coming to the fore - to discuss physics at school got him kicked out for being an egoist. To send letters back to Urasti physicists made him a traitor to Anarres. He was held back by a jealous colleague stealing his work for years (which never occurred to him, theft being a foreign concept on Anarres). To travel to Uras involved the only attempt ever made by Anarrians to mob violence, desperate to stop him.
I found the idea at the end of him simply giving his theory away on the airwaves strangely prophetic of the Open Source mentality, and incredibly inspiring. But I also think Anarres would never happen.
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James Butler, in reply to
LeGuin! She has said more accurate & perceptive things about humanity and our various societies than any dozen philosophers and any thousand thousand politicians.
Yep, and in The Dispossessed she has an admirably fair go at showing the warts and cracks in both sides of her "ambiguous utopia".
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Sacha, in reply to
you have an eidetic memory, eh?
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James Butler, in reply to
Heh, and I thought I was doing well remembering the subtitle :-)
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James Butler, in reply to
that getting the most amazing physicist in the known universe to till the fields, or to use his mathematical talents on the horrible job of deciding who gets to eat, was a shocking waste of his talent.
Almost as bad as, say, coercing the top physicists and mathematicians of a generation to invent more and more effective and brutal ways of killing more and more people.
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Islander, in reply to
"The Left Hand of Darkness" is also a plus/minus look at bi/ambisexuality - my, how that book sustained me at times.
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Islander, in reply to
ut I also think Anarres would never happen.
Of course it already has happened (there), and since the space/time continuum
contains everything...fictional/factual/projected/rejected...whether we could ever get to that kind of state/stage.....urrrmmmm. Is another kind of question.
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