The Work of Our Hands - and Minds

I approach Labor Day 2009 with a set of feelings I've not experienced before.

For the first time in my professional life, I am not working outside of the home, though I would like to be. Although my job search began in earnest only about six weeks ago, I am already familiar with the rejection, lack of confidence, disappointment and discouragement that seem to be par for the course for the unemployed. I find some consolation in knowing that I am not alone. In fact, there are currently some 15 million unemployed Americans, and that statistic only includes those who qualify for and are applying for unemployment benefits. Since my former employer was a non-profit that was not required to pay into the system, I do not qualify for benefits. While it's hard to track those numbers, it's no stretch to assume that the actual unemployment figure would be much higher if all of us, along with the many who have become so discouraged from months of looking, or have exhausted their unemployment benefits were included. If you are among the gainfully employed this Labor Day, consider yourself blessed.

A day to celebrate the labor movement and the dignity of work was initiated in the late 1800s, at the height of the organized labor movement. Perhaps because of that origin I've always considered the day to be a tribute more to manual laborers than 'knowledge workers.'

Matthew Crawford, an intellectual by any standards, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and a research fellow at the University of Virginia, has written a book lamenting our culture's devaluing and consequent neglect of training for manual labor. In Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Crawford argues that the elimination of shop classses in high schools has lead to a culture that encourages mindless mental tasks, while belittling the value of manual labor. Crawford speaks from his own experience as a motorcycle repairman, when he makes the case for working with ones hands. He values not only the satisfaction of producing something useful with his hands, but also the mental challenge and autonomy of identyfing a problem and then being able to solve it with his own hands. That sense of satisfaction, he maintains, is unsurpassed.

We will spend our Labor Day waiting for one of those persons who is (hopefully) adept both at identifying and repairing a problem. Inexplicably (at least to our untrained eyes and minds) the electrical system on the pool quit working last week. As our own holiday plans fall by the wayside in anticipation of a service call sometime between the hours of noon and 5pm, we are grateful for a service man who will make a call on a holiday; hopeful that he will be able to diagnose the problem quickly and repair it easily (read: not requiring a second mortage); and celebrate those who find significance in the work of their hands and minds.