I think I smell another variant of the real-work-unreal-work fallacy. You know the one I mean. It said, a few centuries ago, that making real, edible food was real work, but fiddling about with bits of metal was unreal. Then when fiddling about with metal starting to move to faraway places, fiddling about with metal (especially if it was heavy enough or hot enough to do you serious damage if you mishandled it) was real, but shovelling paper this way and that was unreal.
But now, hear this, a comment from Neal of Margate on a BBC report about the rise in Britain of working at home, made possible by the rise of broadband. I have already commented on this report at my Education Blog, because it will surely make home education easier, but that is another story. Here is Neal of Margate:
This infuriating subject is back, is it? Please do tell me, how should dustmen work from home? Street sweepers, can they work from home? Factory workers? District nurses? Casualty department staff?
The only people who can work from home are those who do an unnecessary job. Can surgeons work from home? Ambulance drivers? Firemen? If you can work from home full time, you have a pointless job.
Maybe not, yet. (Although, give it a century or two …) But an offshore banker can work for the whole world from a West Indian island, on the beach, let alone at his mere home. But according to Neal, pure information manipulation counts for nothing. It has to be combined with, you know, doing something.
This Neal character has just got to be rabidly anti-capitalist. You couldn’t believe in the benefits of markets and of the division of labour and believe stuff as daft as this.
So, it is good to know that something as seemingly benign as some people being able to get a day’s work done without spending a couple of hours of what is left of the day stuck in traffic jams or crammed into metal tubes makes this particular anti-capitalist’s brain hurt.
Did it not occur to him that he could have written that column from home?
This made me laugh. I sell small (benchtop) machine tools on the internet. I sell lathes, and then a small milling machine (for metal) that is available in either a manual version (turn the cranks by hand to mill the metal) or a CNC version (program a PC to move the cranks for you, like a little robot). The people who work in cubicles all day doing computer work overwhelmingly buy the manual machine as they want to do something “real” in their hobby time, even though the CNC version will allow them to do much more detailed and interestingly complex work. Not only has blacksmithing fallen into the “worthwhile” work category, but machining has as well – it has become an antique hobby, like woodworking with hand tools.
I have family who are doctors & whilst they need to work at a hospital the growth of the internet/broadband means they can carry out the information finding aspects of the job at home.
e.g. looking up medical articles etc. The growth of broadband is important as medical articles often have high quality pictures/illustrations showing what is being discussed & broadband makes the download time move from tolerable to good.
My father has been a farmer for 40 years and he lives in a farm house. Does that mean that by working from “home”, my old man has been doing nothing valuable for nearly half a century?
For that matter, until the Industrial Revolution, people such as textile weavers worked from home. I guess they were messing around as well.
The level of ignorance of even the most basic economics among parts of our populace never fails to astound me.
I often work from home on the weekends and evenings as I cannot finish urgent duties during the week. I wonder what my boss would say if I told him that I will no longer do this overtime, as nothing that I do at home would be real work.
I bet this guy thinks that the civil servants that waste all our money telling us how to live our lives are doing real work.
“Pointless”, to whom? Would it really be necessary to detail the whole long trail of division-of-labor value-exchange between my desk and showtime at the venue where the utimate consumers are waiting when house lights go down?
When I’m not on the road, I draw stage-set and lighting designs with AutoCAD. I do this right here at my desk, at any hour of the day or night that strikes my fancy, and guess what: the people who demand my service send me money at least as good as anyone’s that pays this “Neal” character. Whether he likes it or not, what I do is pretty damned important to the people I do it for.
He doesn’t count.
The sheer presumption of some peoples’ kids is an amazing and outrageous thing.
We have 3 kids under the age of 3 and there is no way I could work from home as despite all good intentions I would be dragged into fixing crisis after crisis every 10 minutes of the day.
Today the nearly-2 year old threw the contents of her sister’s potty (pee and poo) over the carpet – should I ignore that and blithely carry on with my emailing?
Ron
I dealt with this response, for I expected it, at my Education Blog. Gist: easier, not necessarily easy. And likely to work only with somewhat older children than yours.
I’ll accept that my working at home is not work if the agreement is that I then don’t have to pay taxes on my income for “not working”.
I think Neil of Margate’s (not ‘Neal of Margate’s’) comment is impressively stupid. While he shows an awareness of obviously useful workers like ‘nurses’ and ‘firemen’, he completely ignores childcare, for instance. But I don’t think, pace Paul Micklethwait, that his comments are necessarily anti-capitalistic. Even a command economy still needs its planners and childcarers, and some communalist thinkers envisaged minimizing the public/domestic divide.
Marxist thought posits that value comes from labor. Only in labor is wealth created.
I work from home quite a bit; many weeks I only show up in the office on one day. I like to think that my work is useful: I do editing and quality assurance on technical courseware — both classroom and electronic — for a major high tech company. With modern technology, people do not need to be in the same physical location to work together. I’m in Rhode Island, my manager is in Washington, DC — my department includes someone in Pittsburgh, the New York suburbs, Boston, Indianapolis, plus the U.K. and Germany.
Alan McCann,
You don’t happen to know a Marx passage that rules out ‘intellectual labour’ do you?
Oh, and I suppose should remind you that Marxism is not synonymous with anti-capitalism.
“A neglected influence reinforcing such prejudices has to do with physical effort, muscular activity, and the ‘sweat of one’s brows’ . . . This particular sentiment may today be waning. Indeed, the connection of productivity and human physical prowess, though still valued by our instincts, plays an ever smaller role in human endeavour, wherein power now less often means physical might as legal right.”
– F.A. Hayek, responding to the intellectual brethren of Neal of Margate twenty-five years ago. Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.
Considering that all of this commenting has happened online, and we’re all actually sitting in front of a computer, I’m surprised that no one has mentioned this blog itself. I think we accomplish quite a bit of intellectual work here (the brain is a muscle, too), though that may be questioned on other blogs. So has the entire phenomenon of blogging been made irrelevant? I think not. I also find it ironic that Neil of Margate would have to be sitting in front of his computer at home for quite some time to find the article, read it, and leave a comment. Why wasn’t he elsewhere doing ‘real’ work, if it is so important?
Leave it to those who don’t think to disregard intellectual work.
I have trouble with the term “value” as in, “value comes from labour.” As one of my old economics professors used to say, “There is price, there is utility, but there is no such thing as ‘value’.” Surely the test of whether work is “real” or not should be whether someone is willing to pay for it…unless, of course, one wants, as so many do, to ascribe “value” to opinion.
I am willing to bet the amount of taxes paid by this telecommuter would make his look rather pointless too.
If working from home isn’t real work, then Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity and his discovery of the calculus weren’t real work since he accomplished both while working at home. Archimedes’ discovery of the principle of buoyancy, Watt’s improvement of the steam engine, Beethoven’s symphonies and Shakespeare’s sonnets, none of these represent real work since they were all done at home.
The argument reduces to mental labor versus physical labor, whether it is done at home or at the office.
I work a white collar job for a manufacturer. We stratify into top management, middle management, and factory worker. Of course the factory worker does all the manual work, while the middle and upper management plan everything before hand, and evaluate everything after (i.e. mental work). I am sure in the minds of the factory worker they feel they do all the work while we lounge around idly helping ourselves to the profits. That’s about the size of it relative to the ‘class’ issues that have afflicted society for generations. Working from home just draws the portrait a little more starkly.
I do agree that ultimately every task, mental or physical, has its roots in handling tangible goods. Conceptions and ideas are useless unless they are applied to the material world. Simply because some are the direct laborers doesn’t make their work any more worthy, or those that don’t, any less so. In fact, we reward the effective ideas regarding materials more than the actual manipulation of them (much to the chagrin of labor leaders et al).
The problem with people like Neal is that they’re still buying into the mindset that only “manual” labor is somehow “worthy” of being called labor.
Total bullshit, of course, but then again, many people thought Mel Gibson’s Braveheart was historically accurate.
Value from labour:
If you had a manufacuring process that was completely devoid of human activity (i.e. all your “labour” was done by machines) right from the start of each process involved; if all the the materials you needed to make your product were produced in a similar way; if transporting it to the point of sale was also done in this way: what would your cost of production be?
EG
Value from labour:
If you had a manufacuring process that was completely devoid of human activity (i.e. all your “labour” was done by machines) right from the start of each process involved; if all the the materials you needed to make your product were produced in a similar way; if transporting it to the point of sale was also done in this way: what would your cost of production be?
Who built the machines? On whose design were the machines built? Who chose which machines to use versus other options? How were the machines financed? Who fixes the machines or decides it’s time to purchase new ones? Who decides when to upgrade? Who analyzes the breakeven points on when to do any of the above? That is the value of the such non-direct labor.
We live in an age of specialization versus an age or ‘artisanry’ (when one person could decide how, when, and why and with what). We have segregation of how, what, and why from merely when and by whom. Manual labor, without skill requirements merely fulfills that last two according to the first three.
I work from my home in Portland Oregon for a company in California. My boss lives in Buffalo NY and I have coworkers in 15 states as well as Ireland and India.
John,
Thanks for the tip! I’ve been searching for a way out of calculus for a few years now. What a thought — it never really “existed.” 🙂
If working at home accomplishes nothing, how do you explain online schools?
OK, maybe I didn’t explain myself fully. I intended to ask what the cost would be if there was no human input into your product at any stage, and if the machine inputs in turn had no human input in their production, etc.
Basically, the point I was trying to make was that things only have a material value because of labour (whether physical or intellectual is not relevant). So, thinking ahead, as humans are replaced by machines…
Machines already design other machines, sometimes in ways completely unexpected by the original machine’s programmers/designers. Machines frequently are used to build other machines. As this process becomes more sophisticated, the need for manual and indeed intellectual labour will presumably diminish. The end result of the process is that everything costs nothing and money ceases to exist because it no longer has a purpose.
Probably not in my lifetime, but you never know. Anyway, what becomes of anarcho-capitalism when capital no longer exists?
Sometimes I think the Communists were right, but for the wrong reasons – capitalism, by making things steadily cheaper in real terms, indeed contains within itself the seed of its own destruction. It will evolve itself out of existence.
EG
I am a quilter. Every stitch possible to sew on a machine, I sew on a machine. I would rather walk half a day to another woman’s house to use her sewing machine than stay at home and quilt by hand. My quilts are better–more orderly, sturdier, more precise, done sooner–when I use a machine. Many modern quilters think I am a heretic (many others agree with me).
The ladies who taught me how to quilt taught me both hand and machine quilting. As we were sitting there piecing squares by hand as an exercise, one of the ladies mentioned how nice it was to be doing things the old-fashioned way like they did in her grandmother’s day. Another lady raised her eyebrows into the stratosphere and spoke of how in HER grandmother’s day, women were very excited to be able to use a sewing machine to accomplish the task so neatly and quickly.