The war on work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-udsIV4Hmc

I was sent a link to this a few days ago and I found it rather fascinating and not just for the in depth discussion of lamb castration. For those of you who don’t feel like watching the clip, which is rather long but definitely worth it, it is a speech from Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs discussing our view of work in this country and how we are at war with the very concept of work. It is such an interesting idea that I wanted to explore it further here.

It is interesting in this time where we talk a lot about “shovel ready projects” in order to speed up the economy and reduce unemployment that very few people are willing to pick up shovels. For most people the entire idea of being blue collar is almost appalling. I watched a show on house flipping over the weekend and of the two guys who bought the house to flip one said “I told you I wasn’t going to do any manual labor”, which makes you wonder exactly how he intended to fix the house in order to flip it.

The thing is there is nothing wrong with blue collar work. At its best it is a way to make a solid living and be pretty much assured of always having a job. The world will always need another plumber. They might not need someone selling them ringtones but they will need a plumber. Heck, my grandfather was a bricklayer and he made a decent living from it. From a cultural perspective though we completely downplay those professions and mock them. The only exception I can think of are sitcoms like The King of Queens where the blue collar worker has the inordinately hot wife but even in those he is portrayed as a buffoon. A lucky buffoon but a buffoon nonetheless. So I agree with Mike that the entire image of working hard for a good living needs to be enhanced.

There are two points he didn’t make that I wanted to touch on. The first is that I think one of the problems with our society in general is that we are so focused on excess that we ignore what could be a very good living. To take a job where you can make a decent living and have a relatively comfortable life is not sufficient when you compare your life to what you see in the mirror of pop culture. You feel ashamed if you do not have a fancy car or an amazing house and feel as though life is meaningless without those things. The danger with having such a consumer culture is that it makes people swing for the fences every time in trying to become rich even though in many cases that is really like trying to win the lottery. The goal is to get on base and make your way around as opposed to striking out in a very impressive fashion.

My other point is that there really seems to be a rebellion against work in this country that I have seen just in my work career. Now this is coming from someone who is lucky enough to make his living behind a computer screen where his daily activities involve looking at numbers and making sense of them. It is not physically taxing work but it is work all the same. But has anyone else noticed how people seem to work less now than they did before. How an office will empty before a holiday weekend or a crew of people mysteriously departing to Starbucks or just a sense of not wanting to do something because it is hard. Now I won’t say that I am perfect in this regard because I am most certainly not but things seem to have gotten much more lax from when I started working in the mid-90’s. If there is anything that makes me think that we are losing our edge in this country it is the fact that more and more people aren’t willing it to push themselves that little bit more. Sometimes to compete that is the only way to do it.

Let’s end this with some Men at Work. Seems fitting.