I am grateful for my job. For the most part, I get paid to think. I have had jobs where I was paid labor. While I was even fortunate in that work to have acquired skills and even a craft, my now 40 year old knees definitely would not allow me to collect a paycheck for that work.
With no slight meant in any way to “equal pay for equal work” I realize that in the trade of work for pay fair is seldom equal.
Brett Favre is willing to trade his aching 40 year old body parts for at least one more punishing season. I may have been convinced to do the same if I had lightning in my arm instead of improved aesthetics.
Fair yes.
Equal no.
For many workers the choice is not so easy.
Take the immigrant labor factor in our society for instance. This is an age old issue. Be it Chef Anthony Bourdain making the case for Mexican kitchen laborers or the loud border battle legislation in Arizona the argument ominously takes on an “us” against “them” school yard fight.
In her book “The Warmth of Other Suns” Isabel Wilkerson tells the immigrant labor tale with a slightly different take. Wilkerson’s protagonist Ida Mae has taken a “Freedom Train” north to make a better life for her family. Ida Mae’s dilemma to join a strike against her hospital or cross an angry picket line in order to pay monthly bills could be stripped from today’s headlines. Wilkerson could be writing about the current nurses’ strikes as she rationalizes Ida Mae’s decision. “The concept of not working a job one had agreed to do was alien to Ida Mae.”
In celebration of this 116th Labor Day I am again grateful for my employment and also the gainful employment of my husband. My concern for the estimated 200,000 people in the state of Minnesota who are unemployed is deepened by the knowledge that there are even greater numbers of jobless Minnesotans not included in this number. Many others, who have run out of unemployment benefits or who have simply stopped looking for work are not as fortunate this Labor Day.
Thanks for a great post. I’m reminded of my dad’s observation that, as a lawyer, he “sold words for a living.” In many ways, that seems easier than selling bricklaying, or auto repair, or any number of things.
On the other hand, in “Shopcraft as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work,” Matthew Crawford makes great points about the power and value of craft work, work done with our hands. He points out that society in general tends to over-value “knowledge work” (note even the use of that term!) versus crafts and trades. In fact, it can take a great deal of knowledge to build or repair real-world objects! He also observes that the failures of an executive can often be explained away in ways that are not available to an auto mechanic: either the car starts, or it doesn’t. Many leaders today, he asserts, have not benefitted from that kind of experience. Crawford knows of what he speaks: he holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, and left a job as executive director of a Washington think tank to start a Richmond motorcycle repair shop.