Signs of Scarcity in Meaningful Work

by Lucy S
originally published August 2011

“Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages.  But many are no more worthily employed now.” Henry David Thoreau “Life Without Principle”

A century and a half after Thoreau’s essay was published, I’m struck by what seems an epitome of the kind of work he called “meaningless labor”: the human being whose paid job is to become a walking advertising sign.  One company trafficking in human signs has a website boasting to potential renters of human placards that they have high attendance rates and (ominously?) “many quality control systems in place to insure that you are getting the highest level of service available from anyone.”  They list some of the major corporations they are “proudly serving.” Flashing back to a teen me and the French fries I once scooped and stuffed into bags to serve to customers, I imagine the company smilingly serving up people-signs on a platter to companies that order them.

Recently, I saw an African-American woman forced to wear a Statue of Liberty costume as a personified ad for a company with “Liberty” in its name. She wasn’t forced in the way so many black Americans were made through overt violence to live in slavery to some white Americans; it’s important to distinguish the difference. But she was undoubtedly economically strong-armed into doing work she would otherwise never do, work with no inherent meaning.  And in that sense - despite cheery proclamations or condemnatory accusations from ever faithful believers in the sacred myth that we all can choose our paid work in this country – she was forced to put on the cartoonish, mock freedom symbol and parade before the public. I can’t help juxtaposing this image with another invocation of freedom, one as embedded in the American psyche by now as that famous New York harbor statue: the last words of Martin Luther King’s most famous speech, in which he envisioned what could become the real condition of all people, expressed in their exclamation: “Free at last! free at last! thank God almighty, we are free at last!”

America’s many manifestations of entrenched racism have always been bound to economic matters. For this very reason, King had begun the Poor People’s Campaign when he was murdered five years after his “Dream” speech.  A crucial goal was an Economic Bill of Rights which included a guaranteed income for all people and full employment. And not just any employment: in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, he called for “new forms of work that enhance the social good.”  (172) Similarly, Thoreau had suggested a town” pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends.”  Yet deeply meaningful work for all remains only a dream.

Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 The End of Work chronicled how, in the early decades of the 1900s, Americans were pushed, pulled, and squeezed by shallow, contradictory philosophies and promises.  The good life with abundant leisure would be theirs if efficiency zealot Frederick Taylor’s ideas infiltrated every aspect of society, particularly business. Corporations and economists realized the efficiently produced glut of commodities lacked sufficient buyers. They began a concerted campaign to get people to buy far more than they ever had.  Marketers appealed to anything from patriotism (“Your purchases keep America employed”) to convenience (boxed cereals and other new packaged foods) to new conceptions of sex appeal and status conferred through the modern and chic to enticing new suburbanites to “fill their castles” (18-23). Rifkin cogently argued that a crisis in employment was currently snowballing, but his solutions relied on benevolent politicians, corporate leaders, and other experts to unselfishly lead the way to needed transformations. There was little basis for believing they would; sixteen years later, they have not.  King maintained that we must “organize our strength into compelling power until governments cannot elude our demand …. It would be the height of naïveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of goodwill that it implored us for our programs” (145).

The labor hours required to produce the necessities and niceties of life have been exponentially reduced.  Had we all shared equally in the remaining work needed and the goods produced with far less labor, we would not find ourselves economically blackmailed into making and hawking an excess to one another. But the majority has not reaped the imagined benefit of more time and freedom. Now financial and political elites demand an austerity which cuts back on the very things an environmentally stressed planet’s economy should emphasize: education, health care, and other non-tangible experiential goods.  Meanwhile, those who desperately need material basics remain neglected. As in the past, the largest part of the benefit produced by improved technology has been syphoned off by a super-wealthy layer, while most people’s lives are disregarded as meaningless.

I tell myself I am fortunate in this regard: so far, I have escaped work as a “human directional” or any variation of this appropriation of our bodies by business. Passing them, I wonder how it feels, standing for hours on busy street corners or strip mall entrances, twirling signs up, down, and sideways, placed there to grab the fleeting attention of drivers or pedestrians and lure them in for special cheap deals to be had on fast food, oil changes, car washes, cell phones, model homes, loans, and so much more.  

But my sense of luck about this is misplaced. I had my body and mind occupied by not entirely different forces.  For over seven years, I phoned people at home or work, reciting scripts and overcoming objections. Bosses insisted that smiling faces emitted friendlier sounding scripted pitches.  The need to keep smiles plastered on our faces and peppy tones in our voices contributed, no doubt, to the common use of amphetamines in some of the phone rooms I worked in. Perhaps others extrapolated from that phone room savvy about how to use drugs to get the job done; now the pharmaceuticals push amphetamines to a host of experts who harness their artificial up and ‘focus’ for use in the greater wide world, doling out speed to mass numbers of people to keep all who ‘need’ it ‘on track.’  This, too, is part of the occupation of our minds and bodies.

Telemarketing felt meaningless and degrading, but it paid more than the lowest wage jobs I couldn’t survive on, jobs I knew from experience could be equally meaningless and degrading.  In my second fast-food job, our morning supervisor believed the best way to quicken our pace was to repeatedly shout, “Go! Go! Go!” while clapping to his own words. I lasted a whopping week in a plastics factory – the minimum wage job I hated most – racing the machine to remove throwaway plant-moving trays, cutting the edges and inevitably my fingers as I trimmed with a knife – stacking, moving stacks onto carts, moving carts – losing the race against the machine twice the first day, so that it closed on and melted trays before I could remove them – being threatened that if it happened again, I’d be fired.  I am in awe of those who worked at that company for years – primarily immigrants without documents.  Like that molten plastic, they were melted into pliancy by a relentless machine, and then hardened to last until they cracked.  So much of what we worked to churn out was trivial junk, stuff our society could mostly do without, but which, when produced and thus priced cheaply enough customers could find no reason not to buy.  Superfluous goods made by superfluous people.

But during many years, like others I worked with, I had work that mattered intensely, work I was often unable to do as well as I wanted.  Unpaid or paid, we’ve cared for the young, the old, the sick, and anybody who needs help, I took care of my kids, the kids of others, and sometimes adults.  In the mid-1990s, I watched a toddler for a woman in her mid-20s, paid $6 an hour as an “assistant manager” for one of the major pizza chains and working a second job at a movie theater ticket window.  There were poorly paid workers in need of child care at all hours. I cared for the baby girl of an early-20s single mom working for a collections agency.  When she picked up her baby, Stephanie delayed going home to her empty apartment.  After talking all day to cajole folks into forking over some of their scarce money for overdue bills, she offered us that gift of a voice, entertaining us with alternatingly suspenseful and hilarious tales of her rural Virginia childhood replete with water moccasins and swimming holes.  To our California ears, it was magic. My husband drove a school bus for $6 an hour mornings and afternoons, and I telemarketed for the newspaper from home in between watching kids. Two or three evenings a week, we piled our kids and sometimes another child in our vehicle to deliver weekly newspaper supplements.  My oldest spooned out baby food.  Stephanie soon picked up a route of her own to do two nights a week after work.  We and the people whose kids I watched did the best we knew how to care for our children in a society which treats that work in about the same vein as if we were caring for our private pets – not something for which there is a sense of collective responsibility or much respect.

We often bought one of those large cheap pizzas from the chain the other mom worked for so that we could all eat as we drove around, me rolling and bagging, my spouse hanging bagged papers on mailbox posts. When our economic situation deteriorated despite our efforts to bring together enough work and money to add up to what we needed, we got phone calls from other collection agency representatives like Stephanie. This is the loop – the ways in which we’re forced to buy from and sell to one another our labor and the goods we’ve wrung out of the planet’s resources and other beings’ lives, irrespective of whether these purchases are good for the majority of people engaging in them.  Unseen others insert themselves between us, syphoning off a huge share of our labor, redirecting it to enriching themselves, becoming middlemen even in our relationships. Capitalism mitigates how we interact with one another, making us define our interactions as economic exchanges rather than intrinsically valuable relations between living beings

 

The baby and toddlers I took care of back then are almost college age now.  Their likelihood of attending and graduating is not high. If they do, they’ll be exceptions demonstrating that ‘anyone’ – but, of course, not everyone; the system isn’t geared for that – any one can ‘make it’ if they really try.  And if they don’t spend too many life hours making fast food or plastic nothings, delivering papers, collecting from the financially desperate, acting as moving billboards or possessed ‘cheerful’ voices, or doing the myriad of other empty jobs our society assigns by default to so many.  But with the uppermost layer’s greed reaching new levels of gluttony, even if they graduate from college, they’re increasingly likely to do variations of the jobs their parents did – not because society so desperately needs their labor for our collective survival, but because their lives are treated as throwaway, akin to things consumed and tossed into landfills.

The work so many are forced to do wastes our never-to-return time, as Thoreau illustrated with his invoked image of back and forth stone throwing   Worse, it actively chews up that fresh green life that keeps trying to break ground in and around us.  What Thoreau lamented in 1863 is even truer now:

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.  As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

On one level, we  can ‘choose’ to buy and sell goods and services to one other, but only as pieces in a larger system in which we have too little authentic choice. We don’t know how not to cut our forests down.  As the system currently operates, we cannot all opt to use our labor, directly or in the money we trade it for and purchase with, for what we actually want: meaningful work; lifelong deep education; enough nourishing food for all; homes not huge but well-loved; health care, not only to ward off illnesses and injuries but to nurture a wholly physically and mentally healthy individual and society; and strong, vibrant ecosystems. The signs are everywhere: our hyper-abundances and scarcities both reflect and create crises in meaning, crises inherent in capitalism. And all of history teaches us that real change will only happen when we “organize our strength into compelling power,” as King urged forty-three years ago.  Can we wait another forty-three years?