Wishful Thinking for Labour Day
Original Kitchener, September 2, 2024, based on a CultKW column for Labour Day 2020.
What follows is based on a column I wrote on Labour Day, 2020 and submitted as my mid-September contribution to CultKW, an online publication produced by THEMUSEUM in downtown Kitchener.
It began as further thought on a question that had emerged in the wake of the Solidarity March for Black Lives Matter: “but what can a poor boy do”? And the answer that kept coming to mind was, and remains: “Get to work.”
I sent out a revised version the following year. Here’s another take, which I’m posting here as a best wishes greeting for Labour Day 2024.
Call to Work
Marching is not getting down to work. Ideally, it’s an expression of commitment and resolve, which are prerequisites for both effective work and purposeful association.
If the march is to protest, it is talk, not work; reaction, not action.
If the intent is to speak truth to power and move political, managerial, professional and economic leaders to take action, it is not true activism, but a kind of persuasion.
If the aim is to build solidarity, this can strip away difference and personal resolve. The result can be association with militaristic elements, in preparation for mobilization. For those who are not in command, this is not getting to work but getting ready to be put to work.
Although command is normally at the behest of the powers that be, and perceived as oppression, it doesn’t have to be. Order can be service to shared purpose as well as for private gain; a division of labour like any other. Work doesn’t always have to be in service to and for the benefit of those who have acquired the capacity to organize.
Despite all the improvements modernity has brought, it is becoming increasingly clear that standard ways of organizing work are extremely wasteful, not just of land, air and water, but of our very lives, minutes, hours, days and years at a time.
We can do a lot better. There fact is, there is virtually no limit to the work we could do for one another. And there is no shortage of people to do the work: 7.87 billion of us, and counting.
So let’s get at it.
A Labour Day Wish
My wishful thinking for Labour Day is that we start moving away from the association of work with drudgery and toil.
I know there’s a biblical injunction that supports this view of work: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
In this telling, work becomes a curse, a punishment. But it can also be a gift, a blessing.
In many respects, work is life, and life is work: It’s what defines us and our place in the world. Work can and should be what gives our lives meaning and purpose.
The idea of setting just the right “work-life” balance, usually through various lifestyle and leisure offerings from purveyors of health and happiness, seems perverse: The implication is that we’re truly alive only when we’re not sacrificing hour after hour to making a living.
Chamber of Commerce style promotion of a city or a region as a “great place to live, work and play” strikes me the same way.
Work, play, recreation, leisure and rest are all living.
The distinctions between “work”, “recreation”, “leisure” and “play” have always been vague. That’s especially true in the arts:
“The play’s the thing,” but it is the work of a playwright, i.e. a maker or a builder.
Performers are “players,” but they commonly work in companies, train within disciplines, and create productions.
Whether it’s painting, drawing, sculpting, composing, writing and even dancing, the objective is to produce works.
The play aspect of art making may be a major part of why it is so difficult to get policy makers and the public art large to pay serious and sustained attention to working in the arts as an integral part of a healthy economy.
Art Work as Part of the Solution
For a long time, arts advocacy was my business, and I’m not sure if anything I said or did in this line of work ever made the slightest difference. Nevertheless, I’m more convinced than ever that arts-related work is the key to a smarter, stronger, more advanced social and economic future.
Any way you look at it, in 2024 going on 2025 smarter and more advanced means more sustainable. We've reached the point where the ecological balance sheet is of far greater consequence than anything that can be measured in terms of dollars and cents.
My sense is, if culture-related work, culture-related exchange, the infinite bounty of arts-related production, and the ever-increasing riches of our collective cultural inheritance are not at the very centre of our conception of what true prosperity means, the future starts to look very bleak.
The arts are, after all, the original work. From before the beginning of historical time, what people do, as soon as there’s enough food and no enemy at the gates, is tell stories, sing, dance, depict, decorate, embellish, make special.
Full Employment
There will always be work to do providing the necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter, security, healing. But this needn’t take anywhere near the amount of thought and effort we put into covering these essentials today.
If we distributed the workload more equitably, we wouldn’t have to work so hard. But we may still want to work long and hard. All work could and should be more like arts-related work: varied, open-ended, creative, done for its own sake, with pleasure and a sense of accomplishment.
What I’m getting at here is that it might be time to extend some of the confusion between work, play, leisure, learning, creation, recreation and entertainment that we associate with artistic practice to work of every kind.
If there are aspects of our working lives that make us miserable to the point where we feel a need to seek relief or escape, it may be because of the way we organize the work that needs to be done to make a living.
There can be pleasure even in drudgery, but not if you’re bound or relegated to it, and not when you’re looked down on for having to do it. There are better ways to organize these things, starting with working towards a free and open exchange in labour of every kind.
The system of having twenty workers seeking employment for every ten decent jobs available is cruel and wasteful. In a healthy, mature economy, these proportions are reversed. We can all be rich in possibilities. Everyone seeking gainful, meaningful employment will be able to pursue whatever they feel a call to do.
To “pursue” an objective will involve either proposing a project with a view towards finding people able and willing to work with you to make it happen, or signing on to a project already in the works.
The key to getting a project off the ground will be the credentials of the people committed to working on it, not the wealth or borrowing capacity of the person or organization behind it.
Working for Fun
Part of the inspiration here is a comment from Jimmy Wales, the prime mover behind Wikipedia, the for-purpose, non-shareholding enterprise that has produced miraculous results relying largely on unpaid, voluntary work.
According to Wales, “It's a misconception people work for free. They have fun for free.” Researching, writing and editing the site is painstaking work, yet capable people do it willingly in part because they trust the organization and believe in its purpose, but also, as a survey of Wikipedia volunteers revealed, simply because “it’s fun.”
Judging by the kinds of things people do as a hobby, a pastime or for recreation, almost every kind of work can be pleasurable, even fun. And my hunch is that as we move toward conflating work, play, leisure, learning, creation and recreation, we’ll not only be happier and healthier, but also more steadfast, more conscientious, and consequently a lot more productive.
Organized Labour
Just because it’s fun doesn’t mean people needn’t and shouldn’t be paid for doing it. If there’s no money involved, it may still be work that is beneficial, but it would not be part of the measured exchanges that are an economy.
There may come a time when we can do it all on trust. For the time being, however, I’m suggesting that we keep track, and aim towards making everything reciprocal.
We can start by getting to work wherever we happen to be, each in our particular corner, according to our own lights, with whatever capabilities we may have been gifted with or developed.
I firmly believe that each and every village, town and city in the land of the Canadas is, or can be, a great place to live, play, work, learn and associate.
Association is the critical component. The fact is, there is almost nothing one can accomplish alone. Even a rock’n’roll band is an organization of sorts: a company.
“Company” was the title of my next CultKW column.
I’ve been known to say that it’s only work if you’d rather be doing something else.