Irish ministerial announcements on "high value" or "high calibre" jobs in the "knowledge economy" give the impression that much of the workforce is involved in menial tasks, in particular in what is called manual work. Dwellers of cubicle-land know that it's a more complicated story and as far back as 1825, the English writer Charles Lamb, wrote in his essay The Superannuated Man: "I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul."
It is a false dichotomy to claim office work is knowledge-oriented while physical work is devoid of knowledge.
Much of so-called white-collar work is mind-numbingly boring and that can apply to "knowledge economy," work, as much as paper processing routines. Professions have developed jargon to give a gloss to what is often the mundane. Why has dentistry a perceived higher social status than plumbing when income levels can be similar.
In simpler times, the ambition was to get a job in the civil service in Dublin and the length of third-level education determined pay premiums. Secondary school teachers earned more than national/primary teachers as the latter's third level education was only for a two-year duration. The white collar job was invariably regarded as superior to the manual one.
León Ó Broin, biographer of Joseph Brennan (1887–1963), the first Secretary of the Department of Finance and first Governor of the Central Bank, told the story of Brennan complaining that road repair workmen he had been observing for two hours from his office, had been on the doss!
Joseph Brennan, the son of a successful Bandon merchant, was a Cambridge graduate and no slouch. He had worked with Finance Minister Michael Collins, in raising the first national loan of £10 million, on which the Irish banks were initially looking for a guarantee from the British Treasury. Now the boot is on the other foot!
In the US, motorcycle repairman Matthew Crawford, who has a PhD in political thought from the University of Chicago, has had a hit with his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.
“Shop class,” is the American term for what are termed vocational studies in Ireland. It is a challenge to the white-collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it. Crawford argues that trade work is more psychologically, intellectually and financially satisfying than the information-processing jobs for which students are typically prepared.
Matthew Crawford wrote in an excerpt in the New York Times Magazine: "High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.
If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”
Crawford continued: "A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.
The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people."
Crawford argues that contemporary “knowledge workers,” are often separated by layers of corporate bureaucracy from the products on which they work. Whereas the craftsman is solely responsible for his product, he argues, the corporate worker fits into a maze of specialist tasks and has little investment in the finished product.
He says much like the industrial assembly line of the early 20th century, the “cognitive elements” of corporate work“are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers - - clerks - - who replace the professionals.”
However, not all businesses have layers of corporate bureaucracy and entrepreneurs in whatever sector, have to do lots of multi-tasking including hard work to succeed but it's useful to highlight that an economy needs all areas of work to function, not only in the "knowledge economy."
