The Dignity of Labor

I took my first job when I was 14, working as field labor, staking tobacco for harvest. I didn’t last long; punishing heat, oppressive humidity, sticky sap from the tobacco plants you had to be abundantly cautious not to get on your skin or risk nicotine poisoning. I left after half a day, I couldn’t hack it, I was ashamed but relieved.

My second job was working overnights, stocking shelves at a Wal-Mart. I drove myself back and forth to work, 30 miles, phased by the morning sun and hoping to get home before my Circadian rhythm reset itself and sleep became impossible.

I worked at a Toys ‘R Us, literally locked in a toy store, somewhat less fun than one might imagine, given this was the age before one had cellphones to whittle away at a 3AM lunch hour. We would put a speaker next to the phone to pipe in the radio to overrule the tedious intercom musak, played street hockey in the aisles, rode on the pallet jacks like a scooter. I pulled a shift on Black Friday and cracked a rib when a box of die-cast cars fell on me, and was unable to report it given the supervisors were mobbed. I spent a few unpaid days off after a headcold made the chest pain unbearable.

After that, I was a convenience store clerk, I had a highschool kid come in with a ski mask and a shopping cart and make a beeline to the beer cooler, unannounced. I asked him what he was doing, even though it was painfully obvious, and he lost his nerve, took off the mask and fled, leaving the shopping cart in the store.

I had an uncle who knew I knew a lot about computers, he was kind enough to take a chance on me and helped me get a job working as a entry level developer for a small consulting shop doing orders for grocery trade shows. I spent five years learning about databases, automation, data scraping, reporting -- all between generally answering the phones and being a gofer in a small office.

My first love had always been teaching. After an attempt at pursuing grad school that ended in me failing, utterly, I felt rudderless. I moved to Louisville to be closer to my best friend and because I had enjoyed my visits; I took a temp job working for a publisher. I had a neighbor who I was friends with who knew I knew some programming, and went out of his way to encourage me to seek a role working alongside him, even when I had my doubts. It worked out well for both of us and I spent seven years in a developer role for Bank of America, before that department was spun off and many waves of layoffs forced me to seek something else.

I got hired for a small firm in downtown Louisville, a finance company working with farmers and regional banks. I spent another seven years as a developer, working on web and database applications. I left after the company was sold to another company, you could say it was a ‘bad culture fit’ — one of their products was a payday loan product conveniently within the letter of the law, but I considered usury. The COVID Pandemic made finding another job difficult, I spent another two miserable years trying to find something else before the right fit came along.

More than anything I struggle to explain what I do (I’m currently employed as a Business Intelligence Developer if you’re wondering), the closest I have come is telling people I’m a ‘data plumber.’ Like a plumber there are pipelines which have to be traversed, and tools to convey, manipulate, and shift data along those pipelines. Like a plumber, there are many hours of lingering tedium, punctuated by harried moments of stark, frenetic, and psychically draining triage. Like a plumber, it is a guild of very specialized labor, and I am certain there are many people who think I am very overpaid and very conceited for what I do.

The truth is very different, the truth is the work you carry forward. In his work “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Albert Camus suggested that in spite of having a thankless task for all of eternity, we must imagine Sisyphus as smiling. The truth that we find when we apply ourselves to a purpose, to see the beauty in rigorous self-discipline, in forming bonds with others, in synthesizing and applying new ideas, is that even though we may find ourselves in a very different place in life, our core self remains burnished in the ashes of our transformation.

Looking back at that first hot sweaty miserable job, I spoke with a few of the other fieldhands. One was a black man maybe in his late thirties, with what seemed like a grade school vocabulary, at some point or another he brought up sea monkeys (though he referred to them as ‘sea spiders’), and was convinced he wanted to buy them because they had whole families and societies under the water. I had to explain they were just some kind of shrimp but he insisted he had seen something in a magazine and it seemed real, to which I paused and said no more. It always struck me as a very humbling moment, someone doing backbreaking physical labor and the most they had to look forward to was a false utopia proclaimed in a comic book.

The truth is that some creative, talented, driven people never stop reminding themselves of these moments, not because they abhor them, but because it builds in them the desire to seek better. To me the deepest reward of any job is the connectedness of our own relationships. Working that first office job, I segued between phone calls with grocers with thick Brooklynese accents and matter-of-factual plains brokers from Rapids City. Throughout my career in IT, I always believed in the capacity to learn from the experiences of others, and have strived to do my best to share knowledge and train people when they ask. It is a stewardship that I acknowledge with both the understanding that I am doing something not many either have the capacity or care to do but also the gravity that careless mistakes could result in numerous people, many of whom I have never met, having A Bad Day.

I had a coworker, well and truly one of the biggest assholes I have ever met, who once told employees how he could replace their job function with a routine. I turned to him afterwards annoyed, and asked, “Hey man, even if that’s true, why would you fucking say that?!” The world is seemingly moving more and more towards his mantra, why even have people around? I see it a little more each day as human resources become Kafka-esque mazes of AI chatbots and dead links, or email responses go unanswered over the course of weeks. As more and more of a deeply undermanned, overworked fifth column of office workers drag themselves through inexplicably broken, poorly supported development software from Microsoft and other multi-billion dollar multinationals that threaten the stability of entire sectors of the economy.

The human connection of jobs is what makes work meaningful. I worry we are losing sight of that, and the metric it’s being replaced with has no value for that. It is a deeply cynical path that threatens the roots of our highly interconnected, highly complex world which many, many people take for granted. The animosity with which average people see technology, in large part due to large corporations stripping bare operations for profit-seeking, is starting to spill over.

I don’t know if I will see this play out in front of me, or if I’ll be caught up in it. But I find it a worrying thought because it is an ugly lie that papers over a much deeper, reconcilable truth -- that the experiences of the haves and have-nots that technology has exacerbated are not so different. The bottom has fallen out and is continuing to fall out. Blue collar workers seeing a hopeless and crushing bleak debt-filled existence envy and despise an office caste chained to an increasingly gutted and barely functional corporate bureaucracy further breaking itself to extract wealth.

We don’t have to accept this though. We should provide people with a basic income so they have the choice to pursue personal hobbies, help out in a charitable role, take care of a loved one with serious medical needs, leave an unfulfilling job to find their passion, or work the unfulfilling job for extra money -- but do it of their own choice. The dignity of labor should be measured in the role in which it helps people in fulfilling their own potential, our own pursuit of happiness we Americans so cherish.

I have worked many jobs, but I have never looked down on anyone. I’ve been wrong before, but I find people will surprise you, often in ways you can’t put on a ledger.