Let’s Get Physical: What's So Great About Working in a Cubicle?

[marmar]

Let’s Get Physical: What's So Great About Working in a Cubicle?

By Margaret Wheeler Johnson, AlterNet. Posted June 13, 2009.

Author Matthew Crawford publishes a jeremiad against white-collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it.




Children of the '60s and '70s may remember Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Over the course of a 17-day motorcycle trip across the northern United States, Pirsig's narrator uses the relationship between man and bike to reflect on technology and reason.

"The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower," reads a typical passage. Academics dismissed his ideas as New Age bunk. The public bought 4 million copies.

Thirty-five years later, Penguin Press is hoping to repeat Pirsig's success with a new philosopher-mechanic of its own. This month, the publisher will release Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, motorcycle repairman Matthew Crawford's jeremiad against white-collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it.

Crawford, who has a Ph.D. in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual labor. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, financially and intellectually satisfying than the white-collar information-processing jobs for which schools and colleges typically educate their students. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/140437/let%E2%80%99s_get_physical%3A_what%27s_so_great_about_working_in_a_cubicle/

[Demeter]

1. There Is Nothing Great About Working in a Cubicle

It's a prison: physical constraint with sensory deprivation AND torture by noise simultaneously.

[ixion]

2. Having done both in my life, I would say there are pros and cons

I enjoy doing physical work, and find it rewarding at the end of the day. Although I also find it rewarding when I've written a new software implementation. So I would say both are rewarding, or can be, in that regard.

However, anyone who does physical labor for a living will tell you there are days that it doesn't seem worth it. Sure, you're outside, getting fresh air (sometimes) and exercise (more than you want), but what happens when you smash a finger (or lose one) or break your leg (or lose one)? I'll tell you: You're out of work.

I think there needs to be a balance of the two, and that balance would be different for different people. Idealistic, I admit, but effective.

That all said, I don't like working in cubicles at all. That's the physical equivalent of working in a closet, IMO.

[here_is_to_hope]

3. Very good read, might buy the book.

"Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, financially and intellectually satisfying than the white-collar information-processing jobs for which schools and colleges typically educate their students."
I think this is true. I know a few paper pushers and by and large, they are not the happiest sort.
But those I know who build and create, much happier as a whole.
I could never punch a clock and twiddle paper, all the while indoors 40 hours a week, life's too short for that.

[imdjh]

4. I liked it at first- except for the fluorescent lighting, of course

The fluorescent lights drive me nuts with the flicker and the noise- I have always been sensitive to this.

But anyway, initially I enjoyed the cleanliness. I enjoyed not feeling physically beaten at the end of the day. I even enjoyed the hive environment and workplace policies at first. It was somewhat calm and steady.

But then I saw the monster.

[here_is_to_hope]

5. *wiping screen* Ha! n/t

[raccoon]

13. "But then I saw the monster. "

Elucidate, my dear Watson.

[TrogL]

14. Get maintenance to pull the bulbs over your cube

...and put in a full-spectrum lamp.

[Berry Cool]

6. I liked the author's recent article in the New York Times. It made me think.

There are good sides and bad sides to working indoors in an office. To me, as a woman with little in the way of physical or mechanical skills, the best reason was because the alternative would have most likely been working in retail: on my feet all day long, forced to paste a smile on my face and look alert and ready to help someone each and every minute of my day, even when I was dead tired on my feet and there hadn't been a customer for hours. I'd done that earlier in my career. Never again.

Oh, and then there would be working with kids. Yes, I did it when I was younger, but I didn't really want to make a complete career out of it.

Then again, I grew up in the era in which girls were forced to take home economics and boys were forced to take shop. Had that not been the case, I might have tried shop, discovered talents I didn't know I had, and gone in a different direction.

I doubt it, though. I was a smart kid, and in this culture smart kids are very much discouraged away from the world of manual labor of any kind. We are taught from the cradle that working with our minds and keeping our hands clean is the way to go. What this author made me think about was the enormous amount of thought that goes into manual labor for which no one seems to give much credit. Motorcycles can't be repaired by dummies. Clueless people can't design, cut the wood for and assemble beautiful handcrafted furniture, or do safe electrical wiring, etc. Yet somehow, the people who do this stuff are categorized as working with their hands and not their minds.

[TreasonousBastard]

7. I heard this guy on NPR last week and...

he mostly made sense, even though he did go a little off the wall toward the end.

He has clicked on a major problem that we just don't appreciate garage work like we used to. People ask me what career move to make and I always say auto mechanics-- we just haven't have the teenage gearheads and shop classes we had years ago so there's a shortage of good mechanics.

It's not just with cars-- we don't have radio kits or chemistry sets entertaining kids any more. We don't have kids apprenticing with cabinetmakers or metalworkers. (Try to find a blacksmith or wheelwright when you need one.)

But, don't anybody kid youselves, manual labor and making stuff is often grueling, boring, back and mindkilling work making cubicles more and more attractive. Assembly line work is better done by robots and will turn you into one with little appreciation of the finished product you may never see.

Me, I get off turning a piece of tree into something at least as useful and beautiful as the tree was. But, it's not so easy to make a living doing that.

[customerserviceguy]

8. It depends on the size, sometimes

My company switched to new offices a couple of months ago, before that, the part-timers like me were crammed into an area I called "the space shuttle", if you've seen the seating chart on that particular craft, you'll know what I mean. My own personal space was about as wide as a toilet stall (the non-handicapped version), and if the person behind me and I decided to get up to go to the printer at the same time, we'd have a mutual rear end collision.

Now, I have a really great cube, vast in size, and with plenty of room for my calendar pictures of Washington State. People stop by on occasion for a mental mini-vacation. It's well lit, there is plenty of good fresh air, and the whole office is so well noise insulated that I cannot hear the passenger train that rumbles about twenty feet from the building, I usually just feel the vibrations through the floor.

What is important is for white collar workers to respect the blue collar workers, and vice-versa, we would be useless without each other. Somebody has to push the pencil or computer keys to schedule the jobs that the folks with the wrenches and screwdrivers do, and make sure the firm gets paid for them.

[Rob H.]

9. I hate being a cube rat

but sometimes I get to do a little photography as part of my job and that can be a nice break from the monotony. I just wish there were more of it to do; pushing electrons all day gets mind-numbing pretty quickly.

[Gman2]

10. I am a plastic injection Moldmaker, In Europe, that is equivalent to a doctor

In this country, I am equivalent to a grease monkey> Only the grease monkey gets more respect, cuz they cant ship his job overseas. The Bush admin LIED to us all for years about BPA in plastics. Try being around it all day in molten form. I have Heart Failure from that, and no health ins now. And SS says no dice. And the ER will not treat a chronic condition. Yes, we have kicked the working man in the fucking teeth, ever since Reagan said that we would have robots to do all that nasty physical work, or poor peasants, that will be glad to get the work. FUck this countries priorities. WE explode the Shuttle, cuz we cannot but crow about how OUR system pays more rich peoples lazy asses than yours.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

11. Back in the 1980s during the Reagan recession, I temped on and off for three years

Some of the manual labor jobs were more interesting and satisfying than most of the data entry jobs, but I noticed a distinct difference in working conditions:

Manual labor: Hours are 7AM to 3:30PM, half an hour for lunch at most (I worked in one place that had 20 minutes for lunch and ONE 10-minute break), possible compulsory overtime, plus possible requirement to clock out not only for lunch but also for breaks, supervisor who yells at you publicly if you don't seem to be working at capacity, pointless discomforts (having to stand on a concrete floor all day when the job could as easily be done sitting down)

Clerical work: Hours are 9:00AM to 5:00PM, an hour for lunch, two 15-minute breaks, no requirement to clock in or out as long as you're not noticeably off-schedule, reprimands done in private.

What is that but a caste system and a sign of disrespect for manual labor?

[tomreedtoon]

12. Why should everyone be an executive?

That was the goal of our parents, who mostly survived with mechanical skills - in the case of my parents, a secretary and a Navy aviation chief. They hated that hard, messy work and wanted their kids to be executives. So they sent us to college so that we could wear suits and ties at work.

Those jobs were easily outsourced, while blue-collar jobs went wanting. They were messy and they were despised, but they built real value - unlike the symbol manipulators and the Masters of the Universe.

My own job (the one I just lost) was light blue collar; technical operations in a TV station. I found (and hopefully will again in a new job) the real satisfaction out of struggling with equipment, time constraints and disasters of all kinds. The real white collar jobs there - sales, management - are growing more and more frustrating and pointless. They know they can be replaced, perhaps if things get difficult, to some teenager in Bangladesh.

You'll notice that President Obama has pointed out that Indian and Asian kids are learning those white-collar skills en masse. He's blamed video games and TV for the reason that American kids won't be getting white collars and expense accounts, the same ideal mentioned in this guy's book.

Maybe if Obama would concentrate on getting kids manual training - putting them to work in a modern Works Projects Administration or something similar - he would be serving America's future better and building a more secure future than turning out scrabblers after CEO posts.