Work that works

The Case for Working with Your Hands (or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good)

Aged 44, the author uses the experiences of his own life to inform his thesis. He worked on/off as an electrician before qualifying from university with a degree in physics but was unable to find work, and so began an odyssey through several white collar work environments: as a clerk in a law firm; a year on staff at the University of Chicago following a PhD in the history of political thought; time spent writing abstracts of academic journal articles; and finally five months as a director at a Washington ‘think-tank’. This last, well-paid job left him particularly dispirited.

Rekindling a lifelong interest in engines, he fled Washington to set up a motorbike repair shop with a friend, specialising in old, obscure bikes. In his book, he writes at length, for instance, about a gargantuan struggle he had one time trying to get a 1983 Honda Magna V45 back on the road. He convincingly shows how such struggles leave him invigorated, while office work invariably left him “sleepy”.

Crawford maintains that the skilled trades even at an amateur level — carpenters, for example, or what he jokingly refers to as “wood whisperers” — provide us with a way to think and relate to the world that other occupations do not, especially desk-bound ones.

“I think,” he clarifies, “what is more important and interesting is not whether you work with your hands or in an office but whether your job involves using your own judgement or not.

“Say you’re an electrician or a plumber or a mechanic, the circumstances of your job vary to such an extent that your work can never be reduced to simply following a set of procedures or rules. It always requires some amount of improvisation and adaptability.

“The problem with so much other kinds of work is that they get dumbed down. It’s the case with the assembly line and also with the electronic sweatshop environment that many offices have become where you’re not really thinking for yourself.”

Call centre jobs are an obvious example of these kinds of the rules-based jobs he alludes to, as are typists and office clerks. But into this net, in a discussion about the way in which jobs are increasingly prey to being “off-shored”, he bundles high-end occupations such as architects, scientists and mathematicians.

“Thirty years ago, we learned that anything that can be put on a container ship is going to be made wherever labour is cheapest, which turns out to be China. In the last 10 years, it seems like a similar logic has emerged for the products of intellectual labour which can be delivered over a wire. For example, radiologists who examine images now find themselves competing with radiologists in India. Something similar has happened with accountants and programmers. But you can’t fix a leaking toilet over the internet.”

Crawford stresses that he isn’t advocating that a “simpler” life is somehow more authentic or “valorous” for being “working class”; neither does he, having lived in a commune from the age of nine to 15, urge us all to become new agrarians — to grow vegetables or set about raising chickens on our rooftops, as some folk in New York have apparently taken to.

But he does lament the fact that we once made things; now we buy them. We used to fix things ourselves if they were broken; now we look to replace them or call up an expert to sort out the problem. We’ve lost our self-reliance.

“It’s harder to get a handle on your own stuff,” he says, “in part because of the design philosophy that makes its point to hide the works from us. For example, if you lift the hood of some cars there’s another hood under the hood, as if the sight of an alternator might offend us.

“Some high-end cars don’t even have dipsticks so you can’t check your oil level if you wanted to. Instead, you’re sent an email when your oil level gets low. There seem to be fewer occasions where you’re directly responsible for your own physical environment. With that I think comes less expectation of responsibility.”

“There is a kind of infantalisation where we’re basically becoming big babies. The passivity and feeling of dependence of not being able to do anything for yourself, having to call on others to do everything for you — becoming a big baby — is becoming the norm.”

This shift in our mindset can be seen in the way in which we teach our kids, he feels. Sure, it’s good to foster confidence, but sometimes we can go too far, sheltering them from the invaluable lessons that failure can teach.

“We regard them as so fragile, that their self-esteem has to always be promoted. Part of growing up is a matter of learning your own limits and struggling against them and accepting the fact that the world simply doesn’t bend to your will.

“There’s a kind of narcissism that is inherent in both consumer culture and educational culture where, if you’re never coming up against failure by, for example, learning foreign languages where you can be right or wrong, or physics where you can be right or wrong. If you avoid those topics and go into, say, finance where, as it now turns out, you can go for a good decade before finding out that you’re wrong,” he says, chuckling.

Picture: Robert Adamo