The (In)Decencies of Work: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

Courtesy of Hope Hanafin

Without a constant livelihood, there will be no constant heart.  Ueda Akinari

There are things that keep us alive, there are things we stay alive for.  Abhijit Naskar

Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror. Harry Belafonte

All across this world, especially within the African diaspora, we feel like there is a constant devaluing of our culture and our livelihood. Jidenna

Inequality is a poison that is destroying livelihoods, stripping families of dignity, and splitting communities. Sharan Burrow

The curse of our time, perhaps soon a fatal one, is not idleness, but work not worth doing, done by people who hate it, who do it only because they fear that if they do not they will have no ‘job’, no livelihood, and worse than that, no sense of being useful or needed or worthy.  John Holt

Do your work and I shall know you; do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.   Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is Labor Day Weekend in the US, a time for some at least to honor and assess the conditions of those among us who keep us fed and clothed, who respond to us during health or other crises, who keep our infrastructure repaired and transportation safe allowing some of us at least to experience one final weekend delicacy of these summer months.

But even those of us who are reasonably well maintained in this world, who have enough to eat, dependable shelter, a viable social network and work that has at least some meaning attached to it know that things are not well with labor. In our time.  As social inequalities rise, the gap between those who “work for a living” and those who decide the too-often dehumanizing conditions under which that work happens continues to expand.  More and more people, especially agricultural workers and others in the so-called “service industry,” work at jobs over which they have little or no control and which ensure that workers and their families do no better than “scrape by” from one minimum-wage paycheck to the next, many wondering if their children will be able to break the cycle of what are essentially “fixed income” jobs with little input, limited satisfaction, and with few or no clear pathways to progress.

The UN speaks much of “decent work,” which rightly attempts to identify impediments to labor which is “dignified” in all aspects – dignified in the sense that the conditions under which that labor occurs are safety and participation-oriented, that exploitation of those seeking opportunities including as migrants (forced or voluntary) is duly highlighted and eliminated, that child labor on and off the streets is replaced by educational and health care access, that those who toil in mines and fields have access to the fruits of their own labor, and that dependents are able to reap at least some benefit from the absence (and often bone-weariness as well) of their working parents. 

“Decent” by UN standards is intended as a floor not a ceiling, as well it should.   

As the UN itself is well aware, impediments to decent work are not limited to gaps in our labor laws and immigration policies, as unforgiving as these often can be.  Across the world, more and more people have been forced to abandon homes and local livelihoods, victims of one or more of armed violence, persecution and other human rights abuses, and climate change impacts running the gamut of drought, severe flooding and biodiversity loss. This is “terror” of a sort that most of us who can read and digest posts such as this one can scarcely imagine, the terror of poverty compounded by the loss of livelihoods and community, the loss of much of what keeps people sustained in body and spirit, the loss of that which keeps us alive and that we “stay alive for.”

For all its good efforts towards “decent work” for all, what the UN cannot do, cannot ensure, is labor which is honored and respected by others. The UN (or any other institution of its ilk) cannot ensure that we who are “well off” are willing to recognize in ways concrete the degree to which our own affluence is a product of the labor of others, those often toiling under conditions that might well break most of the rest of us. The UN cannot ensure that we have the courage to look into the eyes of children flooding the streets and markets, children often left to wonder if the grueling uncertainty of lives as vendors or cleaners will ever end.  And in turn, wondering if the worry and fatigue in the eyes of the parents of these children will ever be allowed to transition into lives characterized by more security, more dignity, even more time away from labor to pursue other ends.

I can almost hear the voices chanting that “this is capitalism,” that people have a right to get what they can get for themselves, that people who “made it” are under no obligation to embrace even the most modest principles of fairness and equity.  I’ve heard this many times, often accompanied by expletives which I myself use but would never subject you to in this space.  But let’s also be clear: capitalism does not require disrespect of those who harvest our crops, deliver food or packages in the midst of a pandemic, or leave their warm beds at 3AM to fix problems with water, power or transportation which they did not cause.   It does not require our indifference to those who teach otherwise ignored children or care for the frail and elderly as they approach their own worldly ends.  It does not require us to centralize money as the sole measure of “success” to the exclusion of identity, community and self-worth.  It does not require our ignorance of the needs of people involuntarily on the move, often with children who cannot fathom why parents decided  to leave the “security” of home for the hardship which is now their constant companion.  It does not require the invalidation of the “constant heart” which beats in response to what once was and could still be our “constant livelihoods.”

And as the anxiety around artificial intelligence reaches a fever pitch in our time, including some urgent norm development through the UN, we would do well on this day to consider the degree to which we have dehumanized so much of our labor force aside from the wealthy decisionmakers who have, creatively or nefariously, pushed their way to the top. We are currently in the midst of an avalanche of technological advance, much of it unrequested at community level and most all of it to the benefit of a few. It is disconcerting to me, rightly or otherwise, that we are on the verge of magnifying the impact of non-human intelligence as our own capacity for sound and attentive judgment continues to wane, as more and more of us, as noted recently by Jared Holt, choose to “glue our eyelids shut.”  Equally disconcerting to me is that we threaten livelihoods with technology with only scant effort to accommodate the “terror” of livelihood loss, the consequences from which cannot be alleviated through money alone.

Of my many oft-quotations of Wendell Berry, the one I utilize most often is that we have become cultures full of people “who would rather own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.”  This fools errand lies at the heart of why we need to take this day more seriously, why the reconciliation of our peoples which is more and more up for grabs requires us to better validate both the labor and the laborer. This day and every day, we can and must do more to ensure that our still-serially disrespected workers have options for decency and dignity that they, like the rest of us, need in order to feel “useful and worthy,” including options of greater honor accorded to the work they do that the rest of us, at least in this time, simply cannot do without.

Tags: children, decent work, Labor