In the U.S., we’re told to love work, and to find meaning in it, as if work were a family, or a religion. Jill Lepore chronicles how the unravelling of the labor movement ushered in a new era of work as life.
For much of human history, a great many people who tilled the land were serfs and slaves. The harder they worked, notwithstanding catastrophic events like plagues and droughts, the more they produced, and the better the landowner and his family ate. The idea that it’s virtuous to spend more of your time working was embodied by the figure of the yeoman farmer, a smallholder who owned his own land and understood hard work, in Benjamin Franklin’s formulation, as “the way to wealth.
Flour-works, grinding of wheat, rye, maize, rice, the barrels and the half and quarter barrels, the loaded barges, the high piles on wharves and levees,The hourly routine of your own or any man’s life, the shop, yard, store, or factory,During the decades when Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman were writing, factories were bringing all kinds of work out of the household and the artisan’s shop and into the factory through the division of labor, breaking down the work of making something into dozens...
Anomie is one thing, poverty another. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the labor movement grew in strength and achieved an astonishing set of gains. In 1877, railroad workers across America went on strike. In 1882, in New York, Americans held the first Labor Day parade.
The leisure that Keynes predicted never came. Average weekly hours for wage workers fell from 1930 to 1970, but, in recent decades, a lot of workers have been scrambling for more. Why? Put another way: Who killed Maria Fernandes?