Work

Back in the 1980s, when I was at uni, I found holiday work in an aluminum parts factory. The job began around 3:00 pm and finished at 12:00 midnight. What I was required to do was to stand beneath a conveyor belt, attaching pieces of aluminum to hooks on the belt which transported the metal to a spray paint machine.

Two of us worked at this space, the other guy, a seasoned worker, whose job was to show me the ropes and make sure I could do the job, would give me an earfull if an empty hook went into the spray area. Another problem was that the metal would sometimes cut my hands and there would be blood on it, apparently this affected the quality of the spray painting.

But, do you know what really bugged me? I didn’t have any idea what these pieces of metal were for?

It wasn’t the place for a worker to ask questions, besides; the factory just made aluminum parts, not the complete thing. So there was always this division of labour and it used to upset me as it robbed me of any ownership that I had achieved anything.

I am currently reading The wonderbox: Curious histories of how to live by Roman Krznaric. It is a self-help book, covers a lot of territory already mapped out by those books. However, it can also be read as cultural history, so I do find it interesting. In the book Krznaric looks at various issues – love, work, money, belief to name a few and shows how much our relationship to these has changed over history. The message is that we should look at a lot of our current practices and beliefs and question them.

If you are lucky enough to love your job, that’s fine. However, for the rest of us, so many of our problems with work start from the time of the industrial revolution. This was a time when a lot of the practices that currently exist in the workplace were first raised and practiced. Take Thomas Wedgewood for example,he put into practice, the then nascent metaphor "time is money" by introducing the time clock to the work place. The workers in his factories were the first to punch the clock when beginning and finishing work, pay was docked for lateness. Henry Ford, may have been the first to introduce the assembly line, but he did not invent it. The idea was around in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and his ideas for the pin factory. Workplace practices have come and gone, but the thinking behind these practices remains. Krznaric's book points to how to change the impact of these ideas.

We need to read books like this in order to believe that there is a different way of approaching work; there are different ways that we can get through it. One of the simplest ways, that Krznaric suggests is to listen to the way that we talk about work compared with out leisure time. If we listen to the metaphors we use and change them we can make ourselves happier. For example, we ask for “time off” when we talk about holidays or leisure time. But have we given our employers ownership of our time? Why do we think of something as important as leisure time as “time off”, why can’t we instead, think of it as “ time on”, something that adds value to our lives. Surely something that important is not off time.

I am going to put some of the ideas in Krznaric's book into practice.