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<p>When I was a kid, growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, my
mother arranged for a part time job for me where she worked at the
now defunct Hercules explosives plant. It was my first, and last,
salary job. <br>
</p>
<p>The plant was a historic facility that had been producing
nitrocellulose for artillery applications from very early in the
20th century and was notable for its occasional massive
explosions (often associated with union conflicts...), which could
shatter windows as far away as the neighboring state of
Pennsylvania. I was assigned a simple task of file sorting in a
very old, decrepit brick building the staff referred to as the
'bag house' because it was used to store records that had simply
been stuffed into large canvas bags and dumped there to be
forgotten for decades. My task was to go through some bags of old
medical records and sort out which would be saved and which would
be sent for incineration. There was no heat in the building and
only one working overhead light so I was left there alone with a
kerosene space heater to keep me more-or-less warm through the
evening. For a teenager it was a simple, easy, job, but I didn't
last long.</p>
<p>You see, the files I was sorting were medical records for
deceased workers going back as far as WWI. Each file listed a few
details, their cause of death, and a passport style photo. And as
I sifted through them, I found that nearly all these workers had
died in much the same way; black lung and its complications caused
by the constant exposure to graphite dust common on the plant. (so
common, all the squirrels that wandered the wooded area were
black) Night after night I was there alone reading these files,
looking into the faces of these men in their thousands, and seeing
their ultimate fate. Black lung, lung cancer, black lung,
esophageal cancer, black lung. On and on. I came to realize what a
horrific meat-grinder America was. How these thousands of men had
died trying to earn a meager living making stuff to kill other
people in other countries. It was a bit much for a teenager, and
the worsening kerosene fumes and encroaching autumn cold and
darkness didn't help. I gave up after a month, vowing to never
work for a corporation and choosing a life of entrepreneurship
instead. Of course, I didn't have much choice in the matter, later
succumbing to environmental illness and chronic bronchitis myself
from too many years subject to NJ's pollution and the common abuse
of antibiotics by doctors back then. <br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/5/17 4:00 AM,
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:p2p-foundation-request@lists.ourproject.org">p2p-foundation-request@lists.ourproject.org</a> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:mailman.20.1483614004.13973.p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org"
type="cite">
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<div class="headerdisplayname" style="display:inline;">Subject:
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[P2P-F] Fwd: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN
Discussion)</td>
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<td>
<div class="headerdisplayname" style="display:inline;">From:
</div>
Michel Bauwens <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:michelsub2004@gmail.com"><michelsub2004@gmail.com></a></td>
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<div class="headerdisplayname" style="display:inline;">Date:
</div>
1/4/17, 10:51 PM</td>
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cellspacing="0" width="100%">
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<div class="headerdisplayname" style="display:inline;">To:
</div>
p2p-foundation <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org"><p2p-foundation@lists.ourproject.org></a></td>
</tr>
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<br>
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<div dir="ltr"><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message
----------<br>
From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Great Transition Network</b>
<span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:gtnetwork@greattransition.org">gtnetwork@greattransition.org</a>></span><br>
Date: Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 5:34 AM<br>
Subject: The Struggle for Meaningful Work (GTN Discussion)<br>
To: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:michelsub2004@gmail.com">michelsub2004@gmail.com</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
>From Eva-Maria Swidler <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:eva.swidler@goddard.edu">eva.swidler@goddard.edu</a>><br>
<br>
------------------------------<wbr>-------------------------<br>
Hello everyone,<br>
<br>
The degradation of work is an issue largely ignored in
academia today, perhaps reflecting the fact that academics,
who are the ones who do most writing about work, like their
own (craft) work a lot. The actual lived day-to-day reality
of a strong majority on the planet is that work is a
demeaning experience of frustration. So thanks very much to
Kent Klitgaard for raising this issue!<br>
<br>
I have here a series of somewhat unrelated thoughts inspired
by this very important subject.<br>
<br>
1) The key feature of degradation that Klitgaard points out
takes the form of a lack of control over the immediate labor
process, leading to what I would call alienation. But that
problematic powerlessness of workers also extends into many
other facets of an undemocratic workplace. Workplace
decisions that exclude the actual workers include the choice
of the purpose or mission of work (to use corporate
parlance), the creation of strategies and priorities,
juggling trade-offs, and formulation of pay and profit
distribution structures. In many ways the labor process is
merely the endpoint of those undemocratic workplace
decisions, as the labor process is shaped by the economics
and efficiencies demanded by those larger institutional
decisions. I would like to see our idea of and hopes for
worker control, even as we pragmatically imagine it or fight
for it in the immediate future, expand from struggling for
control over the labor process itself into these wider
contextual realms of<br>
workplace decision-making, which after all ultimately drive
the labor process itself.<br>
<br>
2) Economists such as Steven Marglin and David Noble, but
also many others, have shown that technological “progress”
often does not produce greater efficiency. Efficiency itself
is always a relative term—maximizing A in terms of B—and not
absolute. For instance, an agricultural technique may
maximize calories grown per acre-foot of water used, but at
the expense of more labor. Is that an efficient technique?
Yes, it is water-efficient, but no, it is not
labor-efficient. Beyond the fact that the terms of
efficiency must always use defined inputs and outputs,
however, is a larger and oft-ignored fact that often new
production processes are less efficient in terms of all
inputs and outputs, but are adopted because they afford
greater control or predictability to the boss. Here we can
see how the economic and institutional context of a
workplace—that un-democraticness of priorities, strategies,
purposes, etc.—actually does directly impinge on the details
of the organization<br>
of the labor process. Often bosses mechanize at great
expense merely to be able to guarantee less possible
disruption by discontent workers. So we have to be wary of
assuming that technological developments that degrade work
actually equate to greater output. They often don’t. They
may just equate to an interchangeable worker who can be
replaced during a strike, or who can’t effect a slowdown or
some other work disruption now that skill or decisions have
been automated.<br>
<br>
In other words, what we have seen in the development of
increasingly degraded workplaces is not necessarily a simple
exchange of the higher quality of work for a greater
quantity of output or profits. Sometimes the quality of work
degrades and output does not rise, or may even fall. And
sometimes the increased work that is required is never even
tallied. How many of us have wasted hours on hold with a
phone company or health insurance? Those hours I would argue
are unpaid work and result in high inefficiency in any
complete economic calculation.<br>
<br>
If there is not a direct relationship between the
degradation of work and efficiency of output, the scenario
to be tackled to create meaningful, undegraded work is on
another order of complexity altogether than a simple
continuum of trading one for the other.<br>
<br>
3) I approach many of the issues raised in this piece with a
more central location of economic concepts such as
“capitalism” (not mentioned by name here in this essay) and
the “productivity dividend”. After all, as Klitgaard points
out, the technology for vastly shorter work weeks is there.
It is used or spent to produce greater profits rather than
fewer labor hours, by making people work just as many hours
even though they produce more, and thereby making workers
produce greater profits rather than being able to enjoy a
shorter work week. This way of distributing the productivity
dividend is a question of workplace struggles and political
economy, and I find economic concepts such as capitalism and
the productivity dividend to be essential in understanding
the situation we are in.<br>
<br>
4) An important question is certainly how to make work
meaningful, but also whether we need work to have meaning.
It does seem to be a capitalist preoccupation to define
ourselves and our lives’ meaning in terms of work. In fact,
I’d say it is the fundamental spiritual/personal/<wbr>psychological
lie of capitalism—that without work, we are nothing. We tend
to create an opposition between work/meaning on the one hand
and leisure/individualistic hedonism on the other. What if
by leisure we include participation in community, social
life, and cultural creativity, not merely what you could
call entertainment? Could we not attain all the meaning we
want or need through that leisure? What about instituting a
campaign for meaningful leisure (by which we don’t mean
volunteer work, but something else altogether)? Benjamin
Hunnicutt describes the development of what we could call a
leisure ethic rather than a work ethic in his most recent
book, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. Paul<br>
LaFargue’s classic pamphlet “The Right to Be Lazy”, or Kathy
Weeks’ The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Anti-Work
Politics and Post-Work Imaginaries take an even stronger
anti-work view. I’d venture that a working-class leisure
ethic is what has served historically as the cultural
foundation of a rejection of constant and increasing
consumption, expressed through various forms of work
resistance. My piece “Radical Leisure” in Monthly Review
this past summer has more thoughts on this <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/radical-leisure/"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">monthlyreview.org/2016/06/01/<wbr>radical-leisure/</a>
.<br>
<br>
In fact, I think that the meaningfulness of much of caring
work has more in common with the kinds of meaning a
well-developed leisure ethic can provide than with the
meaning that stems from a craft work ethic. A struggle for
meaningful leisure might shed light on caring work that the
current discourse on work has a hard time with. Certainly
there are craft issues of skill in caring work (as an RN and
midwife of 20+ years clinical practice, I staunchly support
this view), but many satisfactions of care work stem from
the rewards of companionship, accompaniment, support, and
love, which are experiences that might be more likely to
come from meaningful leisure rather than meaningful craft
work. The craft-work-oriented rewards of mastery or the
“transcendence of setbacks” Klitgaard describes are rewards
that result from what is to me a somewhat gender-limited
experience of work. Renewed intellectual attention to
leisure, which seemed as though it would be an academic
field of note a<br>
few decades ago, might allow a different kind of
understanding of care work.<br>
<br>
Thanks again for this essay raising a topic of crucial
importance. I’m looking forward to the conversation to come.<br>
<br>
Eva Swidler<br>
Goddard College<br>
<br>
******************************<wbr>*******<br>
<br>
On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Great Transition Network
wrote:<br>
>From Paul Raskin<br>
<br>
-----<br>
Dear Great Transition Network,<br>
<br>
As we bid adieu to 2016, a banner year for the Fortress
World scenario, what can we do but turn with renewed resolve
to the work of transition? There is no alternative (to
hijack TINA, Margaret Thatcher’s infamous justification for
neoliberalism). Anyway, the work itself is a privilege and a
gratification.<br>
<br>
This brings me to the topic of our JANUARY discussion: “The
Struggle for Meaningful Work.” Kent Klitgaard’s Viewpoint,
so titled, argues that the degradation of work, like the
degradation of community and the environment, is inherent in
the logic of capital accumulation, but receives insufficient
attention. The struggle for meaningful jobs, he contends,
ought to stand alongside parallel struggles for justice,
equity, and sustainability as core components of a
transformative praxis.<br>
<br>
Kent’s thoughtful piece is inspired by his own search for
meaningful work in a career that has spanned cabinet-making
to ecological economics. It highlights a critical dimension
of a Great Transition that warrants heightened emphasis, or
so it seems to me. Do you agree? Would you revise its
formulations? Please read it at <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.greattransition.org/publication/meaningful-work"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">www.greattransition.org/<wbr>publication/meaningful-work</a>,
and share your thoughts.<br>
<br>
This Viewpoint will be published in February, along with
selected comments drawn from the forthcoming discussion and
an interview with Nancy Folbre on “The Caring Economy.”<br>
<br>
Comments are welcome through JANUARY 31.<br>
<br>
Warm wishes to you and yours for a healthy and meaningful
2017.<br>
<br>
Looking forward,<br>
Paul Raskin<br>
GTI Director<br>
<br>
-----<br>
Hit reply to post a message<br>
Or see thread and reply online at<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://greattransition.org/forum/gti-discussions/187-the-struggle-for-meaningful-work/2194"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">greattransition.org/forum/gti-<wbr>discussions/187-the-struggle-<wbr>for-meaningful-work/2194</a><br>
<br>
Need help? Email <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:jcohn@tellus.org">jcohn@tellus.org</a><br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Eric Hunting
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com">erichunting@gmail.com</a></pre>
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