Worm’s eye view

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WORM’S EYE VIEW:

by Robin Guard

Like just about everything else these days, the idea of work has changed beyond recognition in a generation. When I was young, everybody knew what work was. My Dad went out to work. My Mum didn’t have to work. She stayed at home and cleaned the house and cooked all the meals and did the mending and put down the preserves and tended the garden and the livestock and raised four kids. My Aunt Doris, by contrast, never married so she had to work, poor soul. I used to wonder sometimes why she always seemed to look so much more glamorous than me Mum, but it was probably something in her genes.

Two generations later, everything has changed. My married children both work. They would prefer to say that they both have careers. They manage very well because when babies come along, they take turns with their spouses staying home with the children and going out to work. So they take equal shares of the grinding responsibility of having to get dressed up and drive to an air-conditioned place of work, and staying home with a crowd of kids and not working.

The rewards for work vary widely. My unmarried son is a computer genius, and goes to work five days a week, where he spends his time gazing at an illuminated screen and pressing buttons. He is very good at pressing these buttons. What he is doing is programming machines to do work that used to be done by people. They pay him quite a lot of money to do this. I also have a nephew who spends his time in front of a screen, pressing buttons which move large sums of foreign currency around. They pay him an incredible amount of money to do this, maybe more in a year than I earned in a lifetime. In fact, they pay him so much that in a few years he may not need to work at all.

At the other end of the scale, there are far too many people who want to work in order to earn a living, but can’t find a job. The days of secure jobs with benefits and a pension are becoming a distant memory. Part of the reason is that employers are finding that they can operate better with machines, which don’t need benefit plans or pensions. These machines are expensive, so people with money invest in the companies to help them buy the machines. The companies can then lay off the people, and they prosper. So the investors make more money, and the rich get richer, et cetera. But I don’t think this can go on for very long, because although the companies are getting very efficient and competitive, they are soon going to run out of customers, who have all been laid off and don’t have the money to buy anything. I think it is quite possible that capitalism is going to implode soon, just as communism did.

Do you remember Parkinson’s Law? In the fifties, Professor Parkinson astonished the world with his insight when he stated that "Work expands to occupy the time available for its completion". He quoted as examples the case of the incredibly busy entrepreneur who runs a successful business and is a good husband and father, and somehow also makes the time to become chairman of the local chapter of COG. By contrast there is the person with nothing to do, who will take an entire day to write and mail a postcard. Such a person will never volunteer to do anything useful because he can’t possibly spare the time.

Down here on the farm, I have to admit that I enjoy hard physical work. I really enjoy digging a plot of ground by hand, although my children point out that I could do it faster with a machine. People all around me on neighboring properties are also working but they define work as guiding a machine. I enjoy direct physical work for the same reason that a lunatic enjoys banging his head against the wall, which is that it feels so good when I stop. It is the contrast that brings the pleasure. Just as strawberries eaten in their short, local season taste so much better than those that flood the supermarket shelves in the middle of winter, so leisure is little appreciated when there is too much of it, and greatly enjoyed when it is earned. All pleasures pale when they are too easily obtained. At my age I should be hitting a small ball over mown lawns like everyone else, but I just wouldn’t find it satisfying.

I am convinced that the popularity among farmers of chemical farming nowadays is that it requires so little work. Your local fertilizer agent, backed up by the man from the Ministry, will be only too happy to advise you on the quantities of chemicals you need to raise a profitable crop, and all you need to do is load it into your machinery. Then you can sit in your comfortable cab and guide your rig up and down the rows. If everything goes well, you won’t need to get down and muddy your shoes on that nasty dirt at all. The hardest job will be turning the machinery around at the headrows.

But surely they have computer programs nowadays that could guide a tractor up and down and turn it around? If they don’t, they should have. It would save an awful lot of work.

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