So this is very much a generalized comment - but I will never forget listening to a podcast (I *think* it was Pantsuit Politics, but don't quote me), and the host was interviewing someone who had a mobility disability, and they said something to the effect of, "when communities plan + build around disabled people, everyone benefits in unforseen ways", and then gave a number of examples.
One of the prominent ones being a ramp and then a door-opening button for someone in a wheelchair. So many other people will benefit - elderly who are unstable on stairs, people with young children in strollers, even people with their hands full that opening a door would be cumbersome - just pat the button with part of your arm.
The person went on and on with other examples and I was amazed. Of course, I'd never *needed* to think about that, and likely most community planners/builders didn’t either, but what an incredible testament to what you said above - changing things so they worked and then everybody reaped the benefits.
This is very small, but when I worked in-office, I asked that several lidded coffee mugs be made available in the break room because my uneven gait makes it easy for me to spill liquids when carrying them. HR accommodated my request and then ordered even more when other coworkers said they preferred them for various reasons. This reduced my break room anxiety immensely. It’s embarrassing to have to wipe up a spill on the way to your desk every day.
My kids and I regularly volunteer at a local charity that assembles emergency food packs for undernourished children abroad. They've broken down the packing process similarly to what you describe in the airplane assembly lines: a wide range of tasks (some involve heavy lifting, some are easy enough for a 5 year old because that's the youngest age permitted to volunteer, some can be completed while seated, etc), a tolerance range of ~30 grams for the weight of each pack to accommodate the fact that one person's "scoop" of rice may be slightly different than another's, shifts are short and people are allowed to change jobs during a shift, and they try to make it fun by playing upbeat pop tunes while you pack and asking you to cheer loudly when you've completed a case. It's clear that they've put a lot of effort into making it accessible to a wide range of volunteer ages and abilities.
That's wonderful. And I also am really glad you're attentive to how much work and planning goes into being able to make use of such a broad range of volunteers. It's frustrating when people say "why not allow volunteers / hire an intern" without realizing how much slower things get at first, without a guarantee you cross the line where adding new, less skilled people actually saves time. It matters a _lot_ what kind of work you have on offer.
Absolutely! Volunteer labor is rarely truly "free" and can come with other headaches (ask me about the time I was volunteering at an MLB concession stand on behalf of a charity and had to learn very quickly how to properly pour tap beer because people don't take kindly to being handed an $8 cup half full of foam!) BUT I think this is possible for this charity because packing and delivering these meals is *all they do*. It's their only product and it is used in emergency food aid situations, so it has simple components and simple assembly process. They do follow and enforce rules for food prep (all volunteers must wear hair nets, no jewelry, etc) and they remind people to follow the "recipe" because that makes the food pack nutritionally complete and able to come together quickly when people need to eat it. When my kids are older and can provide slightly more "skilled" labor (for lack of a better term) I think we'll start volunteering at the local food pantry where they can stock shelves, remove expired goods, etc., but for now when they are all under age 10 this is how they are learning that there are hungry people in the world and that they can do something about that.
The basic gist is that the particulars of garbage sorting are well suited to poor women in Rio because of the flexibility of the job. Women leave the work because its hazardous and taxing, take jobs in domestic labor, and then come back because the work allows them to care for children and other dependents, have free time, work on days they choose. It's been on my mind a lot as I consider what kind of work the homeless single moms I know could do. Perhaps our equivalent is door dash, and we see a lot of people doing it, but the cost of the car is a major barrier. Piece labor has a history as being women's work, and I wish there was more of it I could offer to those I know who have flexibility as their highest need.
Ach, this is fascinating and sad. It's not that piece work isn't itself laborious/often low-paid bur it seems like a qualitatively different kind of work than dangerous garbage sorting.
On the one hand, I'm all for tool use. I've worked in the landscape industry before, and despite all our modern technology, there remain some tasks that are miserably taxing for even a strong young man to do, especially day after day in the heat. I wish I could give them the equivalent of counterbalanced rivet guns to make their jobs less painful.
On the other hand, this caught my eye: “Processes were broken down into simple steps that unskilled workers could do.” It reminded me of the Industrial Revolution, during which not only physical tools but also work processes were transformed.
Foolproofing a work process via assembly lines is the way to go, if you want to make interchangeable parts of reliable quality. There are only so many master craftsmen you can hire, and they would cost more than unskilled workers due to having more training.
But it does give me pause to remember that the Industrial Revolution changed how men, and women, and children worked; and that it was especially oriented toward children, and how their “weakness” could be accommodated by, and could accommodate, industrial processes.
Marc Barnes claims that “Children were the secret engine of industrial productivity as it came into its full flower in Once Jolly England”:
“In the traditional order, tasks tend to be arranged in such a way that they are capable of being approached with greater and greater skill. One may begin as an apprentice and end as a master. One may begin by performing children’s work, and then eventually be brought up into the work of the men.”
“This is not the case in industrialism, in which labor becomes childish and unskilled children become better and more affordable laborers than men.”
“As the industrialist Andrew Ure confessed:
“‘It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers, for trained artisans. In most of the water-twist, or throstle cotton mills, the spinning is entirely managed by females of sixteen years and upwards. The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children.’”[5]
“Ure’s point is clear; machines make for unskilled work, and unskilled work can be performed by children—who can, at least ostensibly, be paid less. The introduction of children was especially effective in smothering what remained of the desire for skill and independence that characterized the subsistence economy. The industrial system relied on children protesting and asserting themselves less than adults:
“‘By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity,—faculties, when concentred to one process, speedily brought to perfection in the young.’[6]”
“Thus the main difficulty of industrialism did not, to Andrew Ure’s apprehension,
“‘lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism ... as in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one co-operative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.... Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organized, and its labor lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty ...into useful factory hands.’[7]”
What are the differences and similarities between changing workplaces for unskilled women laborers in WW2 and for unskilled child laborers during the Industrial Revolution? The former seems good but the latter seems bad. Why?
It's appropriate to recoil at the thought of child factory workers being selected not only because they were cheap and newly available (having been uprooted from subsistence farming) but also because they could be molded into uncreative robots. Women are not as different from men in this moldability as children are from either of them. It seems less permanently harmful for an adult of either gender to work a stultifying job for ten years than for a child to. Children are supposed to develop a broad range of skills.
The shadow side of de-skilling jobs - to some extent for adult men and women as well as children - is that the worker doesn't experience the joy of developing and using skills.
I don't know the perfect amount of job skill use for every person, much less how to balance that with productivity/affordability, on any scale. I just know there are tradeoffs.
This is a great point. And it’s one where my husband and I have some disagreements in practice. When I’m at a store, I usually head toward the self checkout and he goes to a person-staffed checkout.
When work gets deskilled to a certain point, I’m not so sure the job should continue to exist. He’s more sensitive to not walking past the person to go work with the robot! (I feel like it is tedious to ring me up, and I’d rather spare them since I can do it myself).
We’d both rather people have better work, but that depends on a tight labor supply such that you can leave a redundant job and find a better one. And, as you point out, that your prior work has formed you for more responsibility
It seems to me that the low wage service economy (retail sales, fast food, patient care, residential services) is full of examples. These industries have had to get very creative to fill positions since the pandemic. This, along with the gig economy, have opened up many opportunities for immigrants, seniors, youth, and other non-standard workers. The work from home trend is also an accommodation by employers for the needs of workers. Our labor economy looks very different than it did five years ago.
Though I think the flexibility only lasts as long as unemployment is low, and then I'd expect a lot of accommodations vanish and things like no-notice scheduling return once the employer expects it's hard for a vulnerable employee to walk away.
So this is very much a generalized comment - but I will never forget listening to a podcast (I *think* it was Pantsuit Politics, but don't quote me), and the host was interviewing someone who had a mobility disability, and they said something to the effect of, "when communities plan + build around disabled people, everyone benefits in unforseen ways", and then gave a number of examples.
One of the prominent ones being a ramp and then a door-opening button for someone in a wheelchair. So many other people will benefit - elderly who are unstable on stairs, people with young children in strollers, even people with their hands full that opening a door would be cumbersome - just pat the button with part of your arm.
The person went on and on with other examples and I was amazed. Of course, I'd never *needed* to think about that, and likely most community planners/builders didn’t either, but what an incredible testament to what you said above - changing things so they worked and then everybody reaped the benefits.
Agreed! I’ve heard this called the “curb cut effect” since the sidewalk curb cuts intended for wheelchair users help many many more people.
This is very small, but when I worked in-office, I asked that several lidded coffee mugs be made available in the break room because my uneven gait makes it easy for me to spill liquids when carrying them. HR accommodated my request and then ordered even more when other coworkers said they preferred them for various reasons. This reduced my break room anxiety immensely. It’s embarrassing to have to wipe up a spill on the way to your desk every day.
My kids and I regularly volunteer at a local charity that assembles emergency food packs for undernourished children abroad. They've broken down the packing process similarly to what you describe in the airplane assembly lines: a wide range of tasks (some involve heavy lifting, some are easy enough for a 5 year old because that's the youngest age permitted to volunteer, some can be completed while seated, etc), a tolerance range of ~30 grams for the weight of each pack to accommodate the fact that one person's "scoop" of rice may be slightly different than another's, shifts are short and people are allowed to change jobs during a shift, and they try to make it fun by playing upbeat pop tunes while you pack and asking you to cheer loudly when you've completed a case. It's clear that they've put a lot of effort into making it accessible to a wide range of volunteer ages and abilities.
That's wonderful. And I also am really glad you're attentive to how much work and planning goes into being able to make use of such a broad range of volunteers. It's frustrating when people say "why not allow volunteers / hire an intern" without realizing how much slower things get at first, without a guarantee you cross the line where adding new, less skilled people actually saves time. It matters a _lot_ what kind of work you have on offer.
Absolutely! Volunteer labor is rarely truly "free" and can come with other headaches (ask me about the time I was volunteering at an MLB concession stand on behalf of a charity and had to learn very quickly how to properly pour tap beer because people don't take kindly to being handed an $8 cup half full of foam!) BUT I think this is possible for this charity because packing and delivering these meals is *all they do*. It's their only product and it is used in emergency food aid situations, so it has simple components and simple assembly process. They do follow and enforce rules for food prep (all volunteers must wear hair nets, no jewelry, etc) and they remind people to follow the "recipe" because that makes the food pack nutritionally complete and able to come together quickly when people need to eat it. When my kids are older and can provide slightly more "skilled" labor (for lack of a better term) I think we'll start volunteering at the local food pantry where they can stock shelves, remove expired goods, etc., but for now when they are all under age 10 this is how they are learning that there are hungry people in the world and that they can do something about that.
I recently read an Ethnography by Kathleen Millar on Labor in a Rio garbage dump. https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2430/Reclaiming-the-Discarded-Life-and-Labor-on-Rio-s
The basic gist is that the particulars of garbage sorting are well suited to poor women in Rio because of the flexibility of the job. Women leave the work because its hazardous and taxing, take jobs in domestic labor, and then come back because the work allows them to care for children and other dependents, have free time, work on days they choose. It's been on my mind a lot as I consider what kind of work the homeless single moms I know could do. Perhaps our equivalent is door dash, and we see a lot of people doing it, but the cost of the car is a major barrier. Piece labor has a history as being women's work, and I wish there was more of it I could offer to those I know who have flexibility as their highest need.
Ach, this is fascinating and sad. It's not that piece work isn't itself laborious/often low-paid bur it seems like a qualitatively different kind of work than dangerous garbage sorting.
On the one hand, I'm all for tool use. I've worked in the landscape industry before, and despite all our modern technology, there remain some tasks that are miserably taxing for even a strong young man to do, especially day after day in the heat. I wish I could give them the equivalent of counterbalanced rivet guns to make their jobs less painful.
On the other hand, this caught my eye: “Processes were broken down into simple steps that unskilled workers could do.” It reminded me of the Industrial Revolution, during which not only physical tools but also work processes were transformed.
Foolproofing a work process via assembly lines is the way to go, if you want to make interchangeable parts of reliable quality. There are only so many master craftsmen you can hire, and they would cost more than unskilled workers due to having more training.
But it does give me pause to remember that the Industrial Revolution changed how men, and women, and children worked; and that it was especially oriented toward children, and how their “weakness” could be accommodated by, and could accommodate, industrial processes.
Marc Barnes claims that “Children were the secret engine of industrial productivity as it came into its full flower in Once Jolly England”:
“In the traditional order, tasks tend to be arranged in such a way that they are capable of being approached with greater and greater skill. One may begin as an apprentice and end as a master. One may begin by performing children’s work, and then eventually be brought up into the work of the men.”
“This is not the case in industrialism, in which labor becomes childish and unskilled children become better and more affordable laborers than men.”
“As the industrialist Andrew Ure confessed:
“‘It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery to supersede human labour altogether, or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary labourers, for trained artisans. In most of the water-twist, or throstle cotton mills, the spinning is entirely managed by females of sixteen years and upwards. The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children.’”[5]
“Ure’s point is clear; machines make for unskilled work, and unskilled work can be performed by children—who can, at least ostensibly, be paid less. The introduction of children was especially effective in smothering what remained of the desire for skill and independence that characterized the subsistence economy. The industrial system relied on children protesting and asserting themselves less than adults:
“‘By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skilful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole. The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity,—faculties, when concentred to one process, speedily brought to perfection in the young.’[6]”
“Thus the main difficulty of industrialism did not, to Andrew Ure’s apprehension,
“‘lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism ... as in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one co-operative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.... Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organized, and its labor lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty ...into useful factory hands.’[7]”
https://newpolity.com/blog/childish-labor
What are the differences and similarities between changing workplaces for unskilled women laborers in WW2 and for unskilled child laborers during the Industrial Revolution? The former seems good but the latter seems bad. Why?
It's appropriate to recoil at the thought of child factory workers being selected not only because they were cheap and newly available (having been uprooted from subsistence farming) but also because they could be molded into uncreative robots. Women are not as different from men in this moldability as children are from either of them. It seems less permanently harmful for an adult of either gender to work a stultifying job for ten years than for a child to. Children are supposed to develop a broad range of skills.
The shadow side of de-skilling jobs - to some extent for adult men and women as well as children - is that the worker doesn't experience the joy of developing and using skills.
I don't know the perfect amount of job skill use for every person, much less how to balance that with productivity/affordability, on any scale. I just know there are tradeoffs.
This is a great point. And it’s one where my husband and I have some disagreements in practice. When I’m at a store, I usually head toward the self checkout and he goes to a person-staffed checkout.
When work gets deskilled to a certain point, I’m not so sure the job should continue to exist. He’s more sensitive to not walking past the person to go work with the robot! (I feel like it is tedious to ring me up, and I’d rather spare them since I can do it myself).
We’d both rather people have better work, but that depends on a tight labor supply such that you can leave a redundant job and find a better one. And, as you point out, that your prior work has formed you for more responsibility
It seems to me that the low wage service economy (retail sales, fast food, patient care, residential services) is full of examples. These industries have had to get very creative to fill positions since the pandemic. This, along with the gig economy, have opened up many opportunities for immigrants, seniors, youth, and other non-standard workers. The work from home trend is also an accommodation by employers for the needs of workers. Our labor economy looks very different than it did five years ago.
Though I think the flexibility only lasts as long as unemployment is low, and then I'd expect a lot of accommodations vanish and things like no-notice scheduling return once the employer expects it's hard for a vulnerable employee to walk away.