At a time when so many Gen Y are hiding from unemployment beneath their law school desks, it raises the question: What’s wrong with working for a living? From the Pittsburgh Review-Tribune :
One 29-year-old fellow in Washington, D.C. — he has a degree from Notre Dame — considered going to law school, like many others in the lawyer-saturated town.
After watching his friends work long hours as paralegals — and watching his lawyer pals sign their lives over to their firms — he did something sensible.
He became an electrician’s apprentice.
What’s wrong with that? It will break your mother’s heart? She’s not going to live your life.
There’s a tacit classism that permeates the American dream, that we start out working with our hands and end up working with our minds. We climb the ladder of success by becoming educated, putting on a suit and tie and, eventually, spending our days uttering words while others listen with rapt attention. At the end of this day, however, no house is built, no food is grown, not even a light turns on.
This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with education or learned professions, but that there isn’t anything from plumbing or carpentry either. Why one became a career of a higher order than another isn’t exactly clear, but it’s become so ingrained in our society that few thinks twice about it. We even distinguish criminal defense lawyers by collar color.
The shift happened over many years, of course. Industrialization moved Americans to the cities and, gradually, to paper-pushing jobs in the service industry.
Now we’re a country of white-collar snobs with an underdeveloped understanding of how things work.
The snobbery starts in high school. Parents and guidance counselors both point kids toward college and white-collar careers — they save the blue-collar careers for the kids whose grades aren’t so hot.
It makes no sense.
What doesn’t make sense is that people who would find success, and satisfaction, working with their hands as well as their minds are indoctrinated into believing that they are failures if they don’t get the degree and put it to its “highest and best use.” Creating something of beauty, something that works, something that helps people to satisfy their needs, apparently, is viewed as a waste. This is a shame.
A skilled laborer earns more than many lawyers do — and likely enjoys his work more. Show me a dozen lawyers and I’ll show you 11 people who have considered driving a cab for a living.
Skilled laborers are good for our country — white-collar folks are not always so good.
We have lawyers. Lots and lots of lawyers. And middle managers. And management trainees. And kids sitting on the couch in their parents’ basement with very expensive degrees and a bag of Cheetos. We don’t need more. We need people who can create things with actual skills.
It may not be for you. Or it may be exactly what brings you fulfillment, not to mention a good living and that balanced lifestyle you’ve been craving. It’s not too late. Your mother will get over it, but if you allow yourself to be pushed into a career that neither suits you nor has room for you, just because it’s what society deems a “success”, you may not.
There’s nothing wrong with good, honest work. Nothing.
H/T Kathleen Casey
Along these lines, you should check out (if you haven’t already) Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Crawford earned a PhD in political theory from Chicago, and then ditched a think tank to run a motorcycle repair shop.
Again, I hope you’ll allow this link to a TED talk by Mike Rowe (from Dirty Jobs) on the American bias against hard work. His points about how we focus on the wrong things and how classism looks down on manual labor come at the end of the 20 minute talk.
It’s a great perspective on the value of hard work.
[Ed. Note: Nope. What part of no links is confusing?]
It wasn’t too long ago in Britain that plumbers were being recorded earning up to £250,000. It was suggested that it was a market effect caused by everyone going to university instead of training as a plumber – the ones left could name their price. There’s a lot of money in knowing a trade so it’s slightly weird how much people are pointed away from it at school. It never even came up in my careers service.
I have to say that I’ve thought about this issue often. I’m not a lawyer or anything, but I was certainly brought up in the ethos that white collar is what one should aspire to. This is based on on the belief that white collar is the path to fulfilling one’s potential, to intellectual stimulation, etc.
Now with a little more perspective, I still believe this but with a lot more nuances.
First, within the world of office life, there is a wide variety of activities, from the paper-pushing cliches to the true adding value. In truth, the bottom rung of office work is very low value-add, it’s not fulfilling, it’s an environment of doing your time and getting out. No virtue here.
It’s almost like we need to acknowledge that white collar/office work has its classes of manual labor and, whatever else you want to call the value-adding side.
Looking at what’s traditionally blue collar work, I think a typical role has many components. A smart person in any role will find a way to do the job better, faster, smarter, be more creative, add more value to clients. Some professions that involve working with materials could lend themselves to incredibly artistic talent.
Supply and Demand still rules. I look in the phone book and see the prices commanded by a well-recommended electrician, and I’m pretty impressed. Good for them. Again, somebody who knows their craft well and provides good customer service, deserves to be able to make a decent living. My sentiments reflect this blog, which is that as we become softer and more service-oriented, there are actually fewer and fewer people that know how to keep things running, and they will command a higher premium.
One thing I consider is the potential for income growth and personal growth. Keeping in mind an electrician, how much more money can you make as a 40-year old than as a 20-year old? Also, how much more do you know about being an electrician, how much more can you learn after 20 years? My impression is that the range isn’t nearly as great as with professions such as the law. So, if somebody has options, that should factor into their thinking.
Along the same lines, in jobs that have strong union traditions, people can make a lot of money. If a longshoreman in Oakland can make $75k a year, I’m impressed. But really, that is a market distortion. And whether you’re a dock worker or a NJ turnpike toll booth collector, and your main goal at 20 is to serve your time and get your pension, I wonder if that just isn’t shooting too low.
One last thing to consider is barrier to entry. There are some jobs that are on the manual side but that require plenty of training, education, experience, etc, to do the job right, and there are some paper-pushing jobs where this doesn’t necessarily apply. Maybe in the old days, when education was more for the elite, and profession matched education, this job classism made more sense, but I don’t think it does so much anymore.
The movement from respecting the physical to honoring the things of the mind (no joke here about lawyers) is hardly a new phenomenon. Heck, it was old when John Adams explained it to Abigail.
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
Of course, in this age of anti-intellectualism and contempt for actual knowledge, we may be moving back to a time of respect for working with one’s hands. (Think Joe the Plumber before we knew that his name wasn’t Joe and he wasn’t actually a plumber.)
Still,
There’s an old joke. Plumber finishes work on the lawyer’s drain, and hands lawyer the bill. Lawyer is outraged. “Even I don’t charge that much an hour,” the lawyer complains. “Neither did I when I was a lawyer,” the plumber replies.
Of course, in this age of anti-intellectualism and contempt for actual knowledge, we may be moving back to a time of respect for working with one’s hands.
So what’s wrong with working wiht one’s hands, and why is respect for it a product of “anti-intellectualism and contempt for actual knowledge?” Are you suggesting that only those who are the enemies of thought would respect a skilled tradesman?
No, what I was actually suggesting is that it’s only the skilled tradesman who’s likely to get respect these days. The so-called “learned professions” suffer in the public view from being learned.
Got it. Given the way the learned professions are behaving these days, we unfortunately haven’t done much to aid our cause and have provided ample ammunition to be used against us. Carpenters and plumbers “market” themselves with more dignity than most lawyers. And have the added benefit of having something to show for their efforts at the end of the day.
I think that’s unlikely. Anti-intellectuals respect the idea of plumbers and other laborers greatly, and detest those in careers that require higher education, but they still want their kids to go to college. The reason Joe the Plumber worked was that he was such a remarkable embodiment of that idea (that they had to invent him!) – everyone likes the idea that there’s an inherent nobility to working with your hands and doing something tangible, but they don’t actually want to do it themselves. And when they meet someone who does, they don’t assume that he or she is their equal.
A quick anecdote – I ran a small moving company from 2005-2008. It was real basic, just a Craigslist ad, a dolly, and the client’s U-Haul, plus however many sets of hands I needed to do the job. Craigslist is fairly egalitarian these days, but in 2005-2006, it was largely the province of tech-savvy, white-collar types. And most of the time, when I showed up to do the job, two things would happen:
One, if it was a man, when they realized that I was just a guy with a dolly and a Craigslist ad, they would fantasize about how nice it’d be if they did what I did for a living, and got out there to work with their hands, and;
Two, they’d inevitably treat me like I was an idiot. I would hear some variation of the phrase, “with my brains and your brawn…” from a customer regularly enough that it’s one of the defining things I remember from the job. Knowing nothing about me except that I loaded trucks for a living, they assumed that I had to be dumber than they were.
Blue collar work is always respected from afar, but the people who do it are still considered the inferiors of those who don’t. Martin Sheen’s character in Wall Street is a salt-of-the-earth good guy and everything, but everyone remembers Gordon Gecko. I don’t expect that anti-intellectualism is going to change that – more likely, it’ll just mean even more cognitive dissonance on the subject.
–d
I find this topic fascinating. I wrote about it a while back. We have devalued the college degree, and advanced degrees by encouraging everyone to go to college. Why? I remember hearing when I was growing up that “college isn’t for everyone.” Now, you can find a college degree on every corner, or every corner of the internet.
One of the most successful people I know, is a dry cleaner. But we have come to a point in time where we don’t encourage people to learn trades. Won’t we always need plumbers, electricians, landscapers, appliance repairmen? Do we really need a few thousand more lawyers?
It used to be that a high school education and a trade got you a living. Now, a high school degree is less than meaningless. A college degree is expected, and that causes the dispassionate and money hungry wanderers to seek MBA’s and law degrees.
We need a campaign, somewhere, to encourage people to do something else but flood the market with more unemployed white collar wannabees who would be much happier making money doing something involving a truck, tool, or hat.
I had a long, frustrating conversation with an academic type once about how lucky she was that our society could”afford”to support such people as herself. Producing nothing.dreaming up theories, writing for other academics,. Never made her grasp what I meant, I fear.or maybe just insulted her! At least as a defense lawyer, my education can be useful to someone now & then.
I read Mind and Hand by Charles Ham (available online) written in 1886 that in promoting manual education discussed the contempt of artisans. The author reviews the view of manual labor (historically the provence of slaves) from Egypt through the 19th century Western world. Even though the manual education promoted was once adopted by MIT, we’ve evolved away from shop class in high schools preferring to promote university education except for those diverted as high school freshmen to vocational programs off campus.
Acknowledging that most would rate Bessemer’s contribution of a cheap steel making process was greater than both Gladstone and Disraeli’s political accomplishments, the author concludes most would still steer their sons toward Gladstone’s career given the accolades afforded the political class.
One recent impact was the difficulty of getting into the trades in the eighties and early nineties due to the surplus of labor that moved into the trades after the factories shut down. That is no longer the case as many of those tradesmen retire. A young member of my extended family just completed a program, paid for by a department store, to train employees in building system maintenance.
But you didn’t address how we could continue to support a higher education system that relies on a limitless pool of applicants with limitless access to loan money…
I’m lucky to have been surrounded by people who work with their hands all my life, starting with my dad. Some went to college. Some didn’t. Some are the smartest people I’ve ever known.
I have never understood blind scorn toward those who work with their hands any more than I have understood blind reverence accorded one who graduates, say, law school.
It’s important to keep in mind that the high schools and the majority of colleges today are not what they were 30 years ago. Many middle-tier universities would have been called colleges. Majors now at a majority of schools include fields that are essentially trades. They may not be that “manual,” but sometimes are. They are far from learned professions.
I frequently hear, everyone who “wants to” should be able to go to “college.” That’s pretty much what we have now. Those that don’t do well in these schools usually wind up in a manual or low level clerical occupation.
I have an acquaintance whose organization gives scholarships to any high school graduate in his small town who goes either to a trade school or college. It would be nice to see that philosophy become a trend. Colleges should not be turned into trade schools. Instead trades schools should be encouraged as creating valuable, socially beneficial careers.
I would like all cops to be required to graduate from rigorous academic programs, though. Might not help, but couldn’t hurt.
When I was younger and fitter, I used to crew on catamarans at regattas. One of our group was a young guy in his early thirties, at the time, who is a master electrician.
He is a brilliant guy who was making a good living. He was also brilliant on the water, which is where I witnessed the full display of his intelligence. He was physically small, but could handle his Tornado masterfully even in rough water and high winds. It takes a lot of engineering-type skill and intelligence to read the wind and water and to understand the angles. I crewed for him a few times and he could more than make up for my many deficiencies.
He made the Olympic qualifiers more than once. (I’m probably using the wrong term of art for that)
I never thought that he was less than any lawyer or other professional. In fact, many a time I wished that he were older and single.
There’s yet another element to this discussion, which is the amazing way how these educated folks won’t even pick up an effing hammer at home. It’s amazing how little people are willing to cross that magical line from one label to the next.
To brag a bit, since beginning my practice of law, I’ve installed my own hardwood floors, done a bunch of my own electrical work, painted room, fixed plumbing etc. Part of it comes from my enjoyment of working with my hands and to be able to see my accomplishments before me, and part of it comes from my Yankee upbringing (read: cheapskate) that can’t stand to pay someone to do something I’m perfectly capable of doing on my own. I’ve never believed that graduating from law school, being a federal judicial clerk, working in a large firm or running my own practice meant that I suddenly shouldn’t do the manual labor that was right in front of me. (My wife would be there to disavow me of that notion right quick.)
The point is that there are tons of lawyers that see even the slightest bit of work in that area beneath them. (Maybe because they see the people who perform that work for a living beneath them.) But, I think it stems as much from a lack of desire to work (see: Slackoise) as it does from classism.
By the way, don’t discount the influence that the mamby-pamby soccer mom “everyone gets a trophy” has to do with this. If you screw up installing a gas connection, your house could go BOOM – there’s a clear winner and loser there. If you go to law school, the world will always think you’re a winner because you’re a lawyer – just as long as you get the right big firm job, with the high 6-figure salary.
Come pick up your trophy.
Victor