The interaction that people have with work has been an intriguing variable of personality since the beginning of time, as there have long been people who appear to be industrious out of sheer nature, while others seem like they would be fine with malingering to the point of starvation. In his establishment of the Jamestown colony, Captain John Smith had to institute a rule that anyone who was unwilling to work would not receive food. Given the extreme difficulty of making a settlement in an inhospitable, inconvenient land, and given that most people setting out to live in a new country would have taken that difficulty into account, it is hard to imagine why anyone would have a hard time getting up out of bed in the morning and heading out to workbuilding new homes, clearing land, tending livestock, or doing whatever else it would take to bring the new colony further away from subsistence and closer to stability.
Personally, I suppose that I view work as a means to an end. I have a lot of goals for myself, but most of them don’t have a lot to do with my profession. I do want to have a family someday, and I want to raise my children in an area where they can go to excellent schools. I also want to run a marathon on each of the seven continents, and I want to live a comfortable lifestyle as far as nice vacations. This means that I’ll have to do very well for myself professionally. However, while working hard is important, I don’t think that work done for its own sake is particularly worthwhile, unless you’re an artist. After all, lawyers, for example, make a ton of money, but how many of them end up changing the world because of the suits they file, or because of the briefs they prepare? The lawyers who have made their way into the history books are few and far between. What about plastic surgeons, or other people who have made their millions in elective fields of medicine? Again, they succeed to do well for themselves, not to make a difference – at least not through their professional work.
Marge Piercy appears to echo this in her poem “To Be of Use.” Rather than value any particular profession, instead she says that she is most inspired by those who “jump into work head first/without dallying in the shadows” (2-3). These people have a work ethic that makes them proactive, seeking out opportunities to excel. She has a similar admiration for those who “harness themselves, an os to a heavy cart,/who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,/who do what has to be done, again and again” (8, 10-11). Also, those who seek individual recognition for their success do not appear to appeal to Piercy; instead, she says that she wants “to be with people who submerge/in the task, who go into the fields to harvest” (12-13). Instead of serving as “parlor generals and field deserters,” (16), they must work as one with their colleagues, working “in a common rhythm/when the food must come in or the fire be put out” (17-18).
One might think that it would be difficult to find the sort of individual prosperity in a profession like the ones that Piercy describes. However, instead of specific vocations, I am referring to her particular attitude toward the anonymity of hard work that is done well. If I became a successful criminal defense attorney, while my name might become somewhat more famous than that of a sharecropper, but my belief that the work is more important as a collection of effort, rather than a set of individual deeds designed to glorify my reputation, matches Piercy’s notion that a successful career is like a “Hopi [vase] that held cornput in museums [even though] you know they were made to be used” (24-25).
In Dagoberto Gilb’s essay “Work Union,” the audience is people who think that their jobs are unrewarding and who believe that there are many jobs out there that are not worth their time. I am a big believer in the value of labor; for example, I’ve always found it ironic that the vast majority of people who don’t have to work on Labor Day are members of the white-collar professions. The hardest workers, particularly those in the service industries, all have to find their way to work on that day, and often have to work even harder than normal, because the descending hordes of members of the upper classes on restaurants and stores make for a longer workday. That said, one reason that I am in college in the first place is to avoid that sort of career for myself. Without plumbers, HVAC technicians, janitors, and street workers, the infrastructure of our lives would shut down completely. However, that doesn’t mean that I want to do that sort of work myself. I don’t view it as beneath me – in fact, I have such a clear knowledge of the hard work and physical stress involved in that sort of vocation that I know I would rather do something else. Gilb’s audience, at least in his own opinion, looks down on laborers, because it is comprised of people who do not appreciate how hard the life of a laborer is. One of my neighbors drove trucks over the road for almost thirty years, and the drudgery of driving, combined with the hard labor of getting out on the side of a hot (or cold) highway to fix a problem on his rig, took its toll on him, physically and emotionally. He did well financially, eventually buying five more rigs and owning his own business. However, I don’t want that hard of a life for myself. I don’t mind working long hours, but manual labor is not how I want to spend them.
Bell Hooks’ perspective in “Work Makes Life Sweet” is the closest to my own, when it comes to a point of view on work. If you can afford to buy (and keep) nicer possessions, and you can establish a solid credit profile, then your work is worthwhile. Whether the particular line of work is existentially satisfactory or not is not as important; instead, it is what you can do for yourself with the lucre you bring in from that work that brings significance.
All three of these authors had slightly different takes on the role of work in life, and the reason why we choose the jobs that we do. Despite the lyricism of Piercy’s paean praising those who can take a grinding work ethic, while I do see the beauty of a long career over time, as opposed to individual deeds, I don’t see the glory inherent in a long, shared career performing hard labor. The people who do it deserve all of our respect and commendation, but that does not mean that I want to investigate it as a vocational possibility. I also don’t feel that all (or at least most) members of the upper classes tend to look down on the hard laborer; after all, if people didn’t understand the plight of the laborer, so many of those people would not go to the time and effort to gain the educational background to avoid that sort of career for themselves. Bell Hooks, finally, does share a lot of my ideas about the proper role of work. Instead of trying to be the doctor that ends up curing cancer, making fairly good money as a pediatrician or as a family medicine general practitioner, or in the more lucrative elective practices, such as orthodontia, can provide similar levels of satisfaction – and even higher levels of material attainment.
While my beliefs may sound cynical, they are actually in line with the values of the American Dream, which has always been much more about pragmatism than idealism. Settling the Old West was more about gaining land and consolidating power than bringing religion to the lands west of the Mississippi River; the main stories of American history are about land grabs, not idealism. Similarly, work has as its end not the edification of the soul but instead the acquisition of the material.
Works Cited
Gilb, Dagoberto. “Work Union.”
Hooks, Bell. “Work Makes Life Sweet.”
Piercy, Marge. “To Be of Use.” Web. Retrieved 10 February 2012 from
http://www.panhala.net/Archive/To_be_of_Use.html
