Why I don't need you to sell fries to me.

The Quandary of Work, or : Why I don't need you to sell fries to me.

I have a dear friend to whom I speak on a regular basis. We've known each other forever, but haven't been on the same end of the continent for decades. Still, I value his opinion even when we disagree. The other evening we were having one of our typical conversations. “People need jobs” he said “and we need to penalize those companies that take them abroad so our people can have work.” Then he went on about worker productivity and salaries and the dignity of work and the like.

Sounds fine, I guess, but I have a problem with all of this “job” thing. Not that I don't work. I've worked 60 hour weeks for most of my life, generally in businesses that I created. I've spent a lot of early mornings and ridiculously late nights working to make things happen. I've worked myself to the point of falling over more than once. I mean that literally. Work, I can do.

But here's the thing. In my little galley (we're liveaboards, a life that I recommend) I have a stick blender. We do a lot of cooking. We use the thing for making sauces and gravies, for mulching a must for hard ciders when we brew, for whirring up frozen drinks in summers and hot soups in winters. Doing that stuff by hand would be an utter pain. I could do it of course, but why?

My point is: I use the blender so I don't have to do the work. At no time am I thinking about it being an enhancement to my productivity (I'm not cooking for 40, and if I did, they wouldn't fit on the boat). I have the device in order to avoid work, and avoiding bashing my knuckles pounding ice into a slurry is a good thing, I think we can all agree.

From blenders to electric drills to computer word processors to cars to aircraft, we build stuff in order to avoid effort, to keep us from having to do the work, take the risk, spend our limited lifetimes, and exhaust our energies. We do it so that we can turn our attentions to those things we find fulfilling, be it writing or family or hiking or building houses or staring at a turtle.

This isn't new. We've been building dedicated machines to do work for us since the dawn of the industrial revolution, probably since the dawn of humanity.

So the desirability of automation or lessening labor costs isn't the issue. The issue is: who benefits from it? The elimination of labor is a natural result of automation, as machines take over the tasks we once labored to do. I remember 1950's adverts heralding appliances as “ending the drudgery” of housework, and who wouldn't want that?

Now, to the investor class, those for whom “the market” is the only arbiter of labor and productivity (as well as of human worth), the current round of automation based layoffs and job exportation is not only just fine, it's the rightful way things are. There is, of course, historical precedent. The invention of the Jacquard loom in 1804, for example, laid off a lot of weavers (and created a host of anti-automation protests and actions, here see: Luddite). Despite the mass layoffs, the profits for the weaving industry in that era went nowhere but up. Now (having shipped a lot of American jobs to China where the labor is cheaper) companies in China like Foxxcon are laying off thousands of workers as they automate. The already massive industrial profits are headed for record highs (just look at the stock market). The investor class makes more and more as automation decreases costs and increases productivity, and the displaced workers...well...they can just go find another job. The trouble is, the only jobs available, manufacturing (and soon materials handling, programming, clerical work, truck driving, and delivery) being removed, are service jobs, and with a smaller and smaller class being able to afford the services, there is an unavoidable failure built into such a system. It becomes a feudal nightmare, ever feeding of itself, with collapse inevitable.

Which brings me back to my original point. Taking a broader view: turning our labor over to machines is a good thing. It frees us from tedium and drudgery and danger and allows us to seek fulfillment in our lives, be it to immerse ourselves in wildly productive fields which fascinate us or merely to spend our time in introspection, hedonism, or adventure. The “every man must toil” thing not only isn't needed, it isn't practical. I don't need 350 million people trying to sell me fries or clean my windshield. I need new approaches to physics, new music, new artwork, better ways to heal, more beauty. . . The job disruptions of the industrial age led to the creation of political movements including the growth of Socialism, seeking to redress some kind of balance in society.

Then as now, the answer is, of course, to let those who have toiled share in the productivity of the machines that freed them from that toil. It means decoupling income from the work of the individual and replacing its source with the productivity of the machine that replaced it. Those who are driven to find riches will always find a way to do so, but there's no reason the rest of us must suffer and struggle and starve because of it.

To be sure, if we institute a scheme like Universal Basic Income or the like, some small number of people will choose to sit on their asses for the rest of their lives, and I'm okay with that (those are unlikely to be very productive employees anyway). But humans are restless creatures, and most will find something to do, something for which people will praise them, something that will increase their social capital, because that's how we're wired.

What I'm Not okay with is a world full of windshield washers and fries sellers, scrabbling about in poverty and desperation so that a tiny number of us can live in unimaginable wealth. My friend across the country, moving as he does in corporate boardrooms, is still very much wedded to the “job” mantra, but having worked all my life, I've come to a different conclusion: Let the machines do the work. Let the rest of us get on with the business of being human.