Devalue My Work, Devalue My Life.
“Do What You Love”
Janitors, Maids, Housekeeping, Physical Plant, Orderlies, etc, etc. They are literally always there picking up after everyone else. They get paid, sometimes fairly, sometimes not fairly. But what is a fair wage for someone to make your space ready for you? This group of people in our world represents responsibility reduction. They are tasked with making the world cleaner for people who have “more responsibility.” Groups of people perceived to be critical.
Why is it then that people who prepare “your space to your specifications” are viewed as less critical, less valuable? Why does society believe that they should be paid so low?
Perusing the internet reveals that this kind of work is labeled “entry level”. What does that mean? Does it mean this group of people can expect to advance through the company? No, not really, but it does mean that it could be your first job. We’ll see if you can show up consistently, stay healthy, and do your work in a timely manner. The thing is that rarely if ever are people “entry level” when they do take on this kind of work.
Take me for instance. My first job, a summer job during high school, I cooked at an all you can eat restaurant. I cooked. Cooking is not entry level in restaurants, dishwashing and porter are entry level. I had the fortune of taking a step up from the very begininng. Which helped me over the years avoid “entry level” positions, but not always.
What if you are unlucky, and never seem to move past “entry level”? We know that poverty is the number one reason children struggle in school. It precipitates drop out rates, and it causes people to score lower all around. People who don’t graduate from High School, and who struggle to get a GED are the majority of people in “entry level” work even if it is their 10th job. In this example how can we call it “entry level”? What if that person stays in that position their whole life, and performs in a way that everyone notices? Doesn’t this set-up perpetuate poverty?
What if they love their job?
Now let’s play devil’s advocate.
People will say. What we really need to do is encourage people to excel. To be more, to grow. Entry level work is there for people who want to learn responsibility. Ok, if entry level work is for learning responsibility, then why is it undervalued, and underpaid even as that person proves their reliability? What about the people who never falter in those positions but never “move up”? Is the point that we should-all-always be striving to move into better paying positions with more responsibility? If this is the case why is it that there are so many people who are in upper level management who never have performed “entry level” work?
For me I call this as the “Downton Abbey Effect”. As society moved through the Medieval Period and developed the feudal system, there became a set structure in society, and a set value to labor. If you watch Downton Abbey you can see that “broompushers” were entry level even then. Lords and Ladies do not clean. Lower class people who are there only by way of circumstances of birth are paid less to be responsible for the upkeep of the estate. The status of the Lords and Ladies is held in check by people who are devalued. There is only one way to keep this economic imbalance in place. Economic imbalance is created by disrespecting highly responsible people by way of lower wages.
I use this European model because Capitalism developed for the most part in Europe. Adam Smith being it’s “founder” of sorts. He directly benefited from the class system in Europe. The very notion that demand fuels cost is attributable to the rise of Capitalism as the default economic system throughout Europe, and then spreading globally with colonization and imperialism. Demand is always high for good “entry level” people, but for some reason the demand never influences the wage scale. Why?
Our values are skewed by the “Downton Abbey Effect”. Entry Level is effectively the old class systems on a grand scale. I haven’t even begun to dredge up the issues that could be examined through race or by way of a feminist critique, or a Marxist critique. We’re barely scratching the surface of how deeply ingrained this issue of devaluing labor is.
I for a long time believed this to be a central motivating factor for the betterment of human kind. I believed that “broompushers” deserved their low wages. It wasn’t reading Nickled and Dimed that altered my point of view entirely, but the realization that everything that we do is critical. Interconnectedness is easily understood when you examine how labor is divided in a company big enough to hire broompushers.
Take hotels for instance. Without housekeepers doing exemplary work people give the hotels bad ratings. Even more than the front desk housekeepers are the first in line for criticism if the place looks bad. The first to be fired when something is done wrong. You believe that management is more responsible, but management does not clean poop off of toilets, or vomit out of carpet. Clean rooms turn into repeat customers. Now how much should we value work performed often by immigrants? If you seriously despise the thought of cleaning up another persons vomit then you seriously need to reassess the value of housekeeping.
Which ties right back into the Downton Abbey Effect. CEOs and upper management have created a world where people are taught that their work is so critical that they must be paid into the millions. They are the current worlds Lords and Ladies, heck some of them are actual Lords and Ladies! What our world is suffering from is a delusion that is still being perpetrated by people who in the grand scheme “could give a fuck about you.”
This is why as we see the rise of Tech and Start-ups, we have to break free from these delusional notions of what “entry level” work really is, and how to properly compensate humans whose work is just as important as anyone else’s.
If you are going to create entry level work in your company, you had better create ways for people to leave the entry way. I don’t believe that the majority of people tasked with cleaning up your environment are being eyed to move up the proverbial ladder. Why not then, why not pay them in a respectful way? Who knows how many of them would like their position to be the thing that keeps their belly full, and a roof over their head while they take courses at a local college? Or even those people who are more likely stashing away extra bucks so maybe, just maybe their child can go to college. You have certainly heard that story before. In that case alone those constant toilers who never leave, and do send their children to higher education, they are the life blood of this world. They deserve everything, and then some.
Finally I want to talk about Mindfulness. This lovely buzzword that emerged from Buddhist Philosophy. How mindful are you if you never recognize the importance of the people who keep your space in order? You have no idea what mindfulness is if you never pay them their full value. Buddhism has a concept just as important as mindfulness that concept is equanimity. Let me draw on this quote to shine light on something that can be just as hard to comprehend.
Equanimity is a protection from the “eight worldly winds”: praise and blame, success and failure, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute. Becoming attached to or excessively elated with success, praise, fame or pleasure can be a set-up for suffering when the winds of life change direction. For example, success can be wonderful, but if it leads to arrogance, we have more to lose in future challenges. Becoming personally invested in praise can tend toward conceit. Identifying with failure, we may feel incompetent or inadequate. Reacting to pain, we may become discouraged. If we understand or feel that our sense of inner well-being is independent of the eight winds, we are more likely to remain on an even keel in their midst.
In many ways equanimity can be associated with judgment. If we can say something is pleasurable then in turn there is something that is painful. We judge one experience against another. If we employ equanimity then we can see through the delusion of good vs. bad, boring vs. exciting. Meditation is difficult to even consider if you do not have it in mind that there will be a benefit. If you believe meditation is just wasting time sitting around then it indeed is wasting time sitting around. If you believe that people who are broompushers should be paid less because it is an entry level position-then- what are you telling society about the people who make your working environment ready for work? If the work is important, critical? If life is more easy when your space is clean? Why are you paying these people less? What set of circumstances caused this group of people to be paid less? Simple economic inequality that has built up over thousands of years by way of oppression. Do you believe that you are a mindful person if you support thousands of years of oppression?
Our world might be designing robots to do “mundane” work, but broompushers are not about to be replaced in record numbers within the next century, or even the immediate centuries following this one. Why? Constant movement is the key behind the reason people don’t want these jobs. It is the reason robots will not be able to do these jobs because they will lack mobility and speed for a long time to come.
What are we going to do in the meantime to become people that love and value each other no matter what kind of job we perform?
