Hard News: Is that it?
327 Responses
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John Armstrong, in reply to
jobs that are mindless
I spent eight years gutting eels before I came to university. I wouldn't claim to have been anything like wise at the time, but I did have older colleagues who were masterful at managing staff relationships in an environment that had little job satifaction, no windows, and easy access to knives. I also firmly believe that the experience taught me a bit of wisdom, which has had real value in the University environment, where people have often got to without the intermediate step of a few years of 'mindless' work, I believe to their detriment. I genuinely admire your contributions around here Gio, but I think you miss the mark on this occasion. There is no such thing as mindless work, and to claim otherwise in an insult to the people who do it.
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Che Tibby, in reply to
I genuinely admire your contributions around here Gio, but I think you miss the mark on this occasion. There is no such thing as mindless work, and to claim otherwise in an insult to the people who do it.
+1
i found people of great beauty around me while up to my elbows in filth during a 15 hour shift in a kitchen, and endless ugliness on the top floor of a building working with people in the top tax bracket.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
There is no such thing as mindless work, and to claim otherwise in an insult to the people who do it.
Another side of that is not all people derive wisdom from their work.
I can think of jobs, currency trading for instance, which give little insight into the everyday workings of peoples lives. Working at a supermarket checkout, on the other hand, does. You could say that a bright person working in a dull job will gain more wisdom that a dullard in a complex and competitive position. -
Steve Barnes, in reply to
i found people of great beauty around me while up to my elbows in filth during a 15 hour shift in a kitchen, and endless ugliness on the top floor of a building working with people in the top tax bracket.
Snap
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John Armstrong, in reply to
You could say that a bright person working in a dull job will gain more wisdom that a dullard in a complex and competitive position.
I'm not sure. I am uneasy about the assumed correlation between 'brightness' and wisdom (also, ahem, based on university experience..). I'd rather say that wisdom (define as you like) derives primarily from experience, and not neccesarily as a function of brightness. I can think of at least one ex-currency trader who would probably benefit from a spell up to his elbows in eel guts. Or working in a creche. Or on a benefit. Or something.
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What I’m getting from this is that we have a problem in which certain work is perceived to be undervalued. National’s made a whole philosophy out of the idea that wealth = value; the corollary being that even people earning minimum wage (not just people on the dole) just aren’t ambitious or industrious enough, or have the wrong attitude. From a policy perspective it’s perfectly acceptable to treat them badly or strip away their rights because if they’re not entrepreneurial enough to climb up the wealth/career ladder, they’re slackers; not the kind of “hardworking, decent” people that are worth protecting. Us bleeding-heart liberals thus come from the perspective that the government’s bad attitude is causing decent human beings to be stuck on poor pay under poor work conditions with tyrannical corporate bosses, and it’s our job to help give them the options they need to find something “more worthwhile”.
So… I guess my point is, wouldn’t it be cool to improve the perception of “drudge” work to better reflect its true value, thus improving perceptions of the character of the people doing the work, and possibly in turn improving work conditions and pay to better reflect the value of the work?
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and possibly in turn improving work conditions and pay to better reflect the value of the work
oh, also this...I've long been extremely angry at the "I earn my money therefore I should keep it" axe, purely due to the fact that many rich people are completely oblivious to the fact that they benefit directly from the exploitation of others, thanks to the way our market society is shaped. It's ridiculous to complain about paying tax when you still only pay $4 for a flat white, and offensive to believe your underpaid barista isn't deserving of a student allowance.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
oh, also this…I’ve long been extremely angry at the “I earn my money therefore I should keep it” axe,
More so as it is usually prefaced by the term "Hard Earned"
Slaving over a hot spreadsheet does not compare to cleaning corporate toilets in the middle of the night but it pays better. -
BenWilson, in reply to
There is no such thing as mindless work, and to claim otherwise in an insult to the people who do it.
That's totally untrue. There is endless mindless work. I brought nothing to my childhood paper run other than an ability to ride a pushbike, and that was not essential, it just made my job easier. I did actually enjoy some aspects of the job - quite a lot of old people are up at that time, and relish the human contact of the paper boy. There was some pride in doing the work well, which pretty much involved working out how not to destroy the outer page on the fuxored letterboxes many people have, and making accurate estimations of how many papers I could carry, and what the optimal paths for delivery were (although it never once occurred to me at that age to take steps to make my job easier, like moving the pile of papers to the center of the delivery area, something one of my old morning "friends" would probably have been happy to accommodate, for the price of a few more minutes of my attention every morning).
But none of that mattered squat to the boss, whose only concern was that he got no complaints, and he could pay me the absolute pittance that you can get away with giving to a child. I could tell he liked me, every other delivery boy hated the job and slacked off a lot, which is probably why papers aren't delivered by children any more.
And mostly the job was dull as ditchwater, and the most enjoyable part about it was the ride home afterward, and obviously the bit where I got payed my $20 for 7 hours work (including 2 hours on the weekend - how I loathed those enormous fat papers). It was almost always freezing cold, and I couldn't wear gloves because it's too difficult to manage paper. It began at 6am, which meant I was perpetually exhausted throughout my early teens, doing school and a lot of sport at the same time. My school work improved enormously when I quit.
The main thing I learned from it was the appreciation of the fact that a lot of the time, if you want money, you have to do dull things.
It was, however, a nicer job than working at McDonalds, the only part of which I enjoyed was operating the garbage compactor. I lasted 6 months.
For my next fucking boring mindless job, I tended a petrol station on weekends as a student, because I was too rich to get a benefit like my friends. Being a person of reasonable intelligence, the boss worked out that he could get me to run the rental car company at the same time. I soon developed skills in dealing with angry and dissatisfied customers whilst simultaneously handling a steady stream of sales through a cash register, and huge wads of cash for the cars. I got minimum wage for this. It was interesting in so far as being massively overworked doing something really dull can be. The challenge was to flit around doing the most urgent tasks. The boss would leave a long list of things to do if I ever got a moment's rest, and would be quite angry if he found me sitting down reading some university notes during one of the intermittent breaks, when I could, for instance, have been vacuuming and washing one of the cars, or cleaning the forecourt, or cleaning the windows, or dusting the shelves, or rearranging them. It makes me laugh how little petrol stations attendants do these days. The only thing that made it better than McDonalds was that the boss was absent most of the time, so I was able to prioritize my way through the list of chores, get the fuckers done, and then sit down and do what weekends for students were supposed to be about, studying for their courses.
My first "real" job was at Unilever, entering data from stupid printouts they had, for which they had advertised seeking people who had programming skills. I wrote them a spreadsheet which extracted the data from the database source, in the precious minutes that I could get at the end of a 7 hour shift of looking for number groups and entering them into the spreadsheets. They were very grateful, and laid me off because I was no longer needed. During this year I passed 9 university papers, having found a sneaky loophole by which I could beat the 8 paper enrollment limit.
The next job involved initially entering a massive map database for a software house. It was almost interesting, measuring all the roads with a chartometer, and plugging them into a database, because the engineer who wrote the system using the data couldn't be arsed to do it. For this, I got paid nothing at all. I did it to get an in at the company, which was doing things that were interesting. I then wrote a bunch of software that used this data to provide useful information for the product, whose future was in doubt. Pretty soon, I rewrote the entire thing, and the company got rid of the other engineer, and I got to finally do interesting work, installing the system all over Victoria. By the end, they were paying me slightly above average wage.
So, I think there is boring mindless work because I have done plenty of it.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
I can think of at least one ex-currency trader who would probably benefit from a spell up to his elbows in eel guts. Or working in a creche. Or on a benefit. Or something.
That would require humility. I suspect said trader would complain that he could be doing "Better" things.
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Steve Barnes, in reply to
the boss worked out that he could get me to run the rental car company at the same time. I soon developed skills in dealing with angry and dissatisfied customers
So, not a great success then?.
;-) -
BenWilson, in reply to
So, not a great success then?.
Depends on your perspective. Rental car customers are seldom repeats, they're holiday makers, probably never going to come back. I made sure the people buying petrol got priority (which was only fair really, you don't expect to have to wait 20 minutes to pay for your petrol). So him being able to save $40 on staff costs might have been compelling. I think it was more that he thought there was some moral lesson in it for me - he was a pure capitalist, and also a friend of my parents, who he thought were hopeless idealist socialists, educated urban liberal twits. The guy had massive anger in him, it seethed from every pore. He died suddenly from a heart attack a few years later, well before his time. I felt terribly sad about it. Seriously. Despite being a slave-driver, he did love to have a good old argument about abstract things, and found it especially fun to pick on a philosophy student, because I'd fight back. So he got a free education to boot, but I welcomed the distraction - talking about ethics made vacuuming out a car a much less unpleasant chore.
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I will agree with John Armstrong (are you the one from the Herald?) that there is no such thing as objectively mindless and boring work. One guy I worked with in the gas station absolutely loved it. He was a nice enough guy, but really, really thick. If I considered it boring, it might have been a function of the kind of things my mind likes to do, which is not, on the whole, spending a lot of time on the details of stock placement in a shop, or the tricks of efficient vacuuming. He would come in on his days off to do it just for fun. Perhaps the old people in Subway are like that. But why weren't they doing it in the 80s, if there was always a portion of society so inclined?
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Matthew Poole, in reply to
I can think of at least one ex-currency trader who would probably benefit from a spell up to his elbows in eel guts. Or working in a creche. Or on a benefit. Or something.
Working up to his elbows in eel guts, in a creche, to top up his benefit so that he can afford to pay the interest on the rates on his Parnell mansion?
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
There is no such thing as mindless work, and to claim otherwise in an insult to the people who do it.
Fine: would you kindly point me to the mindful part of cleaning toilets?
I think the idea that we should all take pride in what we do regardless of what it is that we do, and that there is dignity in all kinds of work, is both false and designed to keep subaltern classes in their place. There are jobs that are mindless, jobs that are soul crushing, jobs that are backbreaking, jobs that are unaccountably dangerous or bad for your health, and jobs that are all of these things at the same time. I would go as far as to say that probably the majority of jobs are at least one of these things. The main benefits of higher education and/or being born white is that it increases your chances to escape the worst combinations, but that's about it.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
It could probably be argued that you learnt something or brought something to all of those jobs you listed.
So I take issue with those as examples. I spent six months picking capsicums in Queensland, and I can think of absolutely nothing about it that wasn't mindless. It didn't even have the bonus of learning how to manage short-tempered underpaid staff armed with sharp instruments.
All I learnt was how deeply I am able to hate Queensland farmers. The racist, money-grubbing quasi-fascist little shitbags that they are.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
It could probably be argued that you learnt something or brought something to all of those jobs you listed.
So what? Plus, that works only for the people who are lucky enough to have a character arc. A lot of people clean toilets all their lives. What is the job teaching them that they can take... where?
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Rich Lock, in reply to
So what?
I didn't think they were good examples. I agree with you: what exactly do you learn from cleaning other peoples shit off porcelain, except that some people really are utter filthpigs?
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
mine is that reaching 65 does not mean a person must leave the workforce
Oh, then fine. I took "should work" to mean, you know, "should work". If you mean they can keep working if it's their thing, why not. So long as it doesn't get stupid. I've had more than one post-retirement age teacher who should have known when to quit.
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BenWilson, in reply to
I spent six months picking capsicums in Queensland, and I can think of absolutely nothing about it that wasn't mindless. It didn't even have the bonus of learning how to manage short-tempered underpaid staff armed with sharp instruments.
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention my two season stints at thinning pears. When I brought a friend along for the second season, the owner decided to pay me 50c per hour more. The friend was righteously outraged whenever he came across a tree that I'd done in a half-arsed way. It was pretty silly - the skill took about 10 minutes to learn, but the owner was a Nat and believed in rewarding the laborer who had done their time.
It could probably be argued that you learnt something or brought something to all of those jobs you listed.
Of course. I brought an intimate knowledge of the works of Bertrand Russell to every customer buying gas. So far as I could tell, if that was ever noticed at all, it was a source of either anti intellectual anger, or pro intellectual lamentation, but it certainly made no difference to the petrol sales.
Plus, that works only for the people who are lucky enough to have a character arc.
I was hoping to convey that my character arc had absolutely nothing to do with my gainful employment until that last job. Until then, it was only a source of misery, and in one case, redundancy.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Oh, then fine. I took "should work" to mean, you know, "should work".
I actually read Che as I think he intended (and let's once again NOT have this argument). IOW, when he said "should work" I think he meant "should be allowed to work". It seemed clear from the context.
ETA: Which is why I didn't disagree with him. I'm not yet at the point of advocating enforced retirement nor enforced reduction in working week. Not that I think these ideas are in themselves wrong or evil, but I think there are other changes that have to come first, or they would hurt a lot of people really badly.
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Sacha, in reply to
I think the idea that we should all take pride in what we do regardless of what it is that we do, and that there is dignity in all kinds of work, is both false and designed to keep subaltern classes in their place.
That seems a somewhat sad belief to me. Yes, I've cleaned toilets, picked fruit, stocked warehouses, sorted filing and other such tasks. Likely contribute better in other occupations since, but I've noticed you don't have to be deeply spiritual to find mindfulness and pride in work.
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Sacha, in reply to
I spent six months picking capsicums in Queensland
bet you're really good at spotting the best ones in a vege shop now.
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Sacha, in reply to
But why weren't they doing it in the 80s, if there was always a portion of society so inclined?
Don't want philosphical distractions to take us away from that sort of question. Suits politicians all too well to ignore trends in youth employment, retirement, poverty, etc.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
Of course. I brought an intimate knowledge of the works of Bertrand Russell to every customer buying gas.
I was thinking more of your paper round, where you yourself say
making accurate estimations of how many papers I could carry, and what the optimal paths for delivery were
If I squint a little, I can almost turn that into a time and motion logistics study. If Ben can carry X number of papers and cycle at speed Y, or Z number of papers and cycle at speed A, with a total number of papers B, what is the shortest time he can complete his round in? Show working (ahaha).
I suspect the most valuable thing I learnt from my various stints of manual labour was how much I hated it, and how deeply shitty it is to be treated like a subhuman piece of filth, just because you're on the bottom rung. I had, even before I started, the expectation of a way out. Some people don't. Being able to empathise, at least to a degree is, I think, useful.
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