Why do you think the lottery is so popular? Do you think anybody would play if the super payoff was a job on the night shift in a meat-packing plant? People play it so if they win they can be rich and idle. Like I told you years ago – if work is so good, how come they have to pay us to do it?
Mike Royko
To Mr Royko’s question:
Whether work is enjoyable or not is up to the person performing it.
One is paid to do work because the function one performs is either necessary or useful. (Unless one is a politician or a relative of one.) How much a given job pays is a reflection of the value society places on meeting the need or function and the availability of people willing to perform it.
One need only take a serious look at today’s US employment scene to appreciate that, at a time a third of the workforce has given up looking for jobs, there are literally millions of openings for high-paying (and necessary!) jobs that are unfilled because society doesn’t value them enough to train its workforce to fill them. Which is why they are high-paying and why they are increasingly filled by legally “imported” labor.
It’s all about attitude.
Too many people see a paycheck as an entitlement (and something to be mandated by politicians) rather than a reward for doing a useful or necessary function. In the process they lose the pride of accomplishment and devalue the job and themselves.
I’ve never internalized the connection between work and wages.
I just stumble around trying to find a job. I once ladled raw sewage from a septic tank in a soaking rain for a day and got paid ten dollars. I didn’t like the job or the pay, but beggars can’t be choosers and I was a beggar. Or I was stupid, because I got worms that took a year to shake.
Forty years later, I worked in an office that smelled better and made 50 times that. Then I threw that over and make less writing than I did shoveling sewage, but I don’t worry about worms.
When I think about it, if my health were better I might go back to shoveling sewage, but I see that now that they pump it with trucks, and I don’t think I could handle becoming a mobile pump operator.
The value of work depends on both the job and the person.
During the Great Recession, I’ll bet a lot of people would have bought a ticket for the meat packing night shift. That’s basically what the job market became: a lottery. A Utah landscaper told me it wasn’t unusual to get 400 applications within 24 hours of posting a job on Craigslist or KSL back in ’08 and ’09.
The funny thing is that humans are capable of believing that work can be made obsolete. We look forward with glee to the day (still distant, poppets; our department has much to do, and meanwhile, let us not be deceived by our own propaganda) when everything is done for the humans by machines, including the programming of the machines themselves: so that when they do it wrong, there shall be nothing and nobody to correct them, and the humans will suffer and die for ever – but at least they will not have to work.
There used to be a saying among the humans, ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’ By taking it seriously, many humans saved themselves from a life of worthless idleness, parasitism, and endless complaining about petty sufferings that were always somebody else’s fault. We are glad to see that this saying has been largely forgotten. It is an important step towards robbing the humans of any form of agency.
(Signed)
H. Smiggy McStudge
I mean, if you want to do things you don’t want to do instead of doing things you like because you think it builds character, by all means, knock yourself out. But don’t take it out on me.
Uh, you do get the H.S.M. is all about sarcasm, right?
Back in the day, I had a high school teacher (ostensibly he taught shop but in real terms he taught adulthood) who drove into us the idea that in the Real World™ one either finds a way to earn a living doing something one likes or one learns to like what earns one a living. Going through life grumbling about work is not productive for one or the employer. Or fair to either.
The funny part is that, now we’re on the verge of making work obsolete, the usual suspects in politics who used to complain about work are complaining about it going away.