A Living, Not Just a Livelihood

‍ A Labor Day reflection on who directs our work, who shares its rewards, and how much of a life should be required to sustain one.

I have been in the labor force since I was fourteen, washing dishes for a mom-and-pop breakfast diner. I learned then how quickly other forces could demand every cent of my pay and leave me little to show for it.

Many times in my life, I have looked at the struggles of my labor and wondered how hard it would be to labor in the wild, for myself, rather than bring value to my employer so he may grant me the money to bring value to my landlord, just so I may serve them both again tomorrow.

I have been seeing discussion of the “millennial urge” to withdraw from the standard role in the economy and retreat to the woods, the mountains, the wild places. I am an elder millennial myself, and I recognize something in that desperation to temper our relationship with the demands of work and the strangled remuneration we receive for it.

Life in the woods would hardly be free of labor. Food, shelter, and warmth would require plenty. But that is what makes the fantasy revealing. The work remains. What disappears is the feeling that everyone else has the first claim on its proceeds.

The human species is an industrious one. One need only look around at the wonders we have wrought from soil, water, air, and fire. People have different skills, visions, and intellectual talents, and coordinating those abilities is a vital part of this thing we call society.

There is always more work to be done. What work gets done, how much, and towards what ends requires coordination. But coordination does not necessarily mean cooperation. Across human history, labor has been organized through both consent and coercion. The conditions of slavery and serfdom are distinct from modern employment, but the question of how freely people can refuse a demand on their labor remains relevant.

There is always someone willing to demand more, and someone who feels compelled to give more. When refusing means risking the food on our table or a roof over our heads, the ability to walk away is a narrow kind of freedom. Those who control the terms of work do not necessarily bear the cost of what they demand.

And I recognize that I have had it good. I have worked two jobs, with eighteen- and twenty-hour days for brief stints, but those times were short. I have found work when I needed it to make my way, and not all do. I have combined luck and effort for some social mobility.

I have also been fortunate enough to work in a world that generations of labor organizing helped restrain from being all-consuming of the worker. Gains such as the wage, overtime, and child-labor protections established in 1938 were neither automatic nor complete. People had to contest how much could be demanded of them and what they were owed in return.

Those questions remain. Productivity and workers’ real hourly compensation have not grown in step. Our increasing ability to produce does not automatically become greater security or more time to live. For all that workers have won, those with the resources to influence the rules and control the necessities of life and labor retain considerable power over how each hour’s value is divided.

On Labor Day, we should think hard about who coordinates the labor of humanity and towards what ends. A steward would want those ends to serve workers and citizens, current and future, to ease their burdens and let their industrious creativity push us to greater heights.

Personally, I want people involved in those decisions who know the tricks to remove grease and grime from under their fingernails. People who have replaced shoes worn thin moving around a single building. People who have learned to read a customer’s body language well enough to anticipate the abuse a typical retail inconvenience might provoke.

That experience does not guarantee good judgment. But the people who bear these costs deserve a meaningful say in the conditions of their work and the distribution of its rewards. Their wellbeing should not depend solely on the sympathy of whoever happens to be in charge.

We do need people of creative vision and broad perspective who can see how individual efforts connect into a greater whole. We also need them to respect the people whose lives make that whole possible, and to refuse to condone the consumption of a life for nothing more than the chance to afford to keep it.