Trying to Understand the Value of Work: why do we pay so little for labor that we depend on so much?
It’s no secret that life as we know it would fall apart without the labor that we compensate most stingily. Why, then, do we continue to shower CEOs with riches?
Years ago, when I was waiting tables during the summers I was in college, I would get home in the wee hours after closing up at midnight or 2 a.m. and fall into bed, tired and still wired. Once I did sleep, I’d have dreams — the most literal, realistic dreams I’ve ever had. Unlike the majority of the dreams I’d experienced by then, which, like the ones I’ve heard other people describe, generally transformed the elements of daily life and recombined them in ways that made them anything from profoundly odd to unrecognizable, these table-waiting dreams were exact replicas of the job itself. Or, rather, they were like projections from the job: not reruns of what had happened that night, but something like what you’d get if a meteorologist designed models of future work-shifts based on data collected from previous ones. These dreams of work would be sometimes so intense and stressful that they’d wake me up, gasping. Even as I would realize that I was awake and had merely been dreaming, part of my brain would still…