BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS: The Evolution of Work
BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS: The Evolution of Work.
By Richard Donkin. Texere. 374 pp. $27.95
The state of nature may have been nasty, brutish, and short, but was it also leisurely? The bushmen of the Kalahari devote no more than three days a week to gathering food. The Hadza, also of Africa, limit hunting to two hours a day, Donkin reports, "preferring to spend more time in diversionary pursuits such as gambling." In the developed world, meanwhile, "work has come to dominate the lives of the salaried masses, so much so that they are losing the ability to play." Is this progress?
"All true work is religion," wrote Thomas Carlyle. Donkin, a columnist for the Financial Times, aims to expose the shaky foundations of our most essential faith. The narrative is lively and larded with savory facts. We hear of Ned Ludd, the apprentice in a hosiery factory in late-18th-century England who, when threatened with a whipping for working too slowly, took a hammer to the machinery. His 19th-century followers, the Luddites, tried to destroy the technology that would throw them out of jobs. The movement failed, but its name has endured.
Schemes to put workers in a hammerlock have been as constant as their attempts to wriggle free. George Pullman created a town of 12,000 just south of Chicago for the people who built his luxury railroad cars. While the initial expenses were his own, he instituted a system designed for profit at every turn. He marked up the water and gas. He even made money from the vegetables fertilized with worker sewage. One worker said, "We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die, we shall go to Pullman Hell." When the depression of 1893 hit, Pullman cut wages but not rent. His proles began to go hungry. There was a strike, and they fled paradise in droves. The bitterness ran so deep that when Pullman died in 1897, his coffin was "encased in a thick slab of concrete, lest anyone should try to desecrate his grave."
Harsh feelings between CEOs and their charges were more recently excited by the corporate blood-lettings of the 1990s. "Neutron" Jack Welch cut 100,000 jobs during his first five years at General Electric. Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap laid off a third of the work force at Scott Paper within a year.
Why do we let work become such a dominant element of our lives? Just for the pay? As Donkin notes, the quest for money can’t explain Stonehenge, the pyramids, or the paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet. At its best, he believes, work enables us to "leave something better for those we leave behind, some signpost of our existence, our potential." To that end, he recommends a new work ethic, "an ethic that questions the content of work, that does not value prolonged hard work above everything." And he poses a revolutionary question: "If work is neither well done nor worthwhile, why work at all?" This book is both well done and worthwhile.
—Benjamin Cheever
This article originally appeared in print