"Rich Man's Burden"

I originally thought about doing a piece on the new Republican VP candidate, but looking over the coverage she already has gotten, I figured I would leave well enough alone and go to something requiring more thought than the air head from Alaska. She is were she is because of the need for the McCain folks to put a “Fountain of Youth” next to a potentially dead candidate. The enthusiasm over Palin at the Republican Convention proved my point. “At last we got a live one.”
Back to the “Rich Man’s Burden.” That was the title of an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times Sept. 2nd. The article is about how so many professionals can’t even take Labor Day off. They may not go to an office, but they are wedded to their laptops and Blackberries 24-7. What interests me about the piece is how over the past few decades the definition of “work” has changed.

The writer, a New York University sociologist, quotes Max Weber, an early 20th century German sociologist, who described what he called the Protestant ethic. There was a religious imperative to work hard, spend little and find a calling in order to achieve spiritual assurance that one is among the saved. I might add that the basic idea expressed by Weber was very much part of Martin Luther’s philosophy, as well as Freud’s notion of Lieben and Arbiten as being fundamental to good mental health. All this from a bunch of German authoritarians. The article was a plea for understanding the “rich man’s burden.” As you might have guessed, I am having some trouble with that notion.

So much of my own life’s labors was concerned with how society gets its work done. Who does what and how are they rewarded for their efforts. In the world of socialists, anarchists and freethinkers that I grew up in, the only people who really mattered were those who actually made something that benefitted society as a whole. Coal miners were primary as we depended on them for electricity; bakers, for without them there would be no daily bread, and so on. My father referred to people who sat at office desks all day as “bloodsuckers” living off the labors of others but producing nothing themselves. Okay, so you can see why I still have some problems with feeling sorry for our present day professionals who are stuck on their laptops and Blackberries.

So what is my dilemma? I know that the nature of work has changed radically over the last century, and yet I am not sure how to redefine it? In my time the generally accepted definition of “work” was “the application of energy to an object in order to change it.” I am aware of the concept of “knowledge” as a commodity to be created, marketed and sold, but it doesn’t easily fit into my old definition. I still have some difficulty getting worked up over some “poor guy” sitting at a Spa in South Florida with laptop or a Blackberry manipulating numbers and calling that work. And as the article says, he or she may be doing that continuously day and night.

Remember, as a very young man and for most of my life, I did get very worked up about people being exploited at the workplace. So why am I not worked up, as the Op-Ed writer in the Times is, about modern day professionals stuck at their laptops? Is it because I am not sure exactly what they are producing, if anything, besides smoke and mirrors? And yet I wonder, have I missed something along the way that radically changed the nature of “work?” Does that something have a far more reaching definition then in the days of physical labor? In our world of Cyberspace, how do we define work? I’d like to hear what you think.

Thank you Kate N.H.W.Y.