"Breaking the Job Lock" by Andrew Kimbrell

"Breaking the Job Lock," brought to mind a friend and her job with the post office encoding center. The opening of this center (about 4 years ago) was heralded as a major development on Duluth's economic scene; hoping to land a job, hundreds of people paid for classes that were intended to dust off their reading, math, memory, and typing skills. My friend was one of the successful ones; she's been working at the encoding center for several years. Her shift varies, but often it starts about midnight, and ends at 3 or 4 AM - - whenever she's done (no full-time hours for her). She must type many thousand words per hour, with less than 2% error; she's developing Carpal Tunnel syndrome. And, best of all, new technology is many times faster and more accurate than she is -- so, she tells me, her job (and everyone else's at the center) will end, probably in the fall -- after 2 or 3 days' notice. Her job epitomizes what Kimbrell calls the "prized values of the industrialized job system: speed, productivity, efficiency;" and the view that people are "replaceable spare parts for the great machines of production." It seems true that the globalization of companies and the headlong rush for an ever fatter "bottom line" have resulted in more people finding themselves in jobs that are without meaning, without power, without dignity, and without benefits. Kimbrell says that "we all deserve to be involved in work to which we have been called by our passions and beliefs." Certainly his statement must apply not only to Americans, but also to the teeming populace of Calcutta or Mexico City. He advocates national health insurance as a way to free us to pursue meaningful work -- wow, quite an Rx! I agree that we should all share the cost of medical insurance -- but it is evidently a gargantuan task to bring this about without bankrupting the country. So many powerful factors are working against his ideas: burgeoning world population, greed, environmental degradation, human nature. Yet, he's right (I think) -- utopian, but right. When one blends his vision with the last Utne about "The Stuff of Life," perhaps our hope for meaningful work, for more investment in family and community can be at least somewhat fulfilled if everyone could realize that "less is more" and that the simple life can be a good one.

-- Anonymous, May 04, 1999