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September 07, 2009
Higher Labours, anyone?
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Not the best Labor Day ever--as the world, the U.S., banks, companies, labor markets and even the Work Ethic itself tries to get its Mojo back.
All I can think of today is this:
One summer in the 1970s when I was a union employee at a Keebler's cookie factory in Cincinnati, a union official told me (after my third week there) that I was completing too many heavy skids of cookie boxes each shift, that it was "making the other guys look bad", and that I should do about 7 or 8 fewer skids a day.
Even as an idealistic 19-year-old at Duke, I was shocked. Unions had contributed great and needed things to America a half-century earlier. So what was happening now? No way the union guy could tell me that it was "less valuable" to the company if I did 50 rather than 43 skids a day.
Another summer job at a different kind of factory near Hamilton, Ohio a year later: same experience. It was like there was an effort to dumb all work--and all people working--down to "a sameness". And this theme: "they" (management) versus "us" (employees).
That kind of mentality is not my idea of excellence. It seems to have permeated the non-union and white-collar work force in recent years. My firm doesn't have any solutions--except to keep those employees (which we are beginning to see as educated looters) out of our "shop".
Personally, I still generally vote Democrat. But but sometimes I wonder why. Do Dems still love value? Did they ever?
Shakespeare worked hard--and well, too. Poems. Plays. He even ran theaters.
I am sure that no one sane told him to write less--or write less well:
"Hey Bill, dude, tone it down. Crank them out more slowly. Don't make Christopher Marlowe and rare Ben Jonson look bad. You want them to like you right?"
His play "Loues Labours Loſt" was likely written for early performances before culturally-literate law students and barristers-in-training at the Inns of Court in Legal London. The idea was that the students would appreciate its sophistication and wit--and its value and hard work as part of a new English Renaissance of works in plain old down-and-dirty English, which for centuries had labored in the shadow of French.
Interestingly, the play begins with a vow by several men to forswear pleasures of the flesh and the company of fast women during a three-year period of study and reflection. And to "train our intellects to vain delight". Work of value.
Posted by JD Hull at September 7, 2009 03:55 PM