At work, are you really contributing?

The article was published in The New Indian Express, Feb 13, 2016, in a somewhat altered form. This is the original version.

Since the beginning of industrialization, technology has persisted in mutating economic modalities. The generation of workers joining the workforce today will perform economic activities vastly different from the previous ones. In only the last twenty years, the maturing of the Internet has defined and demanded new skill sets that didn’t exist earlier.

In his 2009 book ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,’ American writer Matthew B. Crafford questions whether the accumulative changes in our ways of working have necessarily been for the good. Crawford’s career graph, moving from a philosopher-academic to a think-tank member to a motorcycle mechanic, betrays which side of the debate he is on. Quite expectedly, the book delivers some scathing (and sadly, veritable) criticism of what some of us call ‘the cubicle life.’

Crawford bemoans the increase in complexity and ambiguity at work. For him, employees who find it difficult to explain what they really do (there are a lot of them) are signifying their acceptance of the non-contributive nature of their work. It is true that as businesses and companies have become more complex, the dawn of the cubicle-sized silo has been an inevitable one. And most cubicle occupiers feel like cogs in a giant machine, distanced from the locations where real value creation happens. Their main job is to clearly understand and communicate the various abstract concepts that are sometimes necessary, though never sufficient by themselves, for the smooth functioning of the company. In other words, they write emails to each other, emails seeking approvals, emails conveying approvals, emails clarifying points made in other emails, emails with critical presentations as attachments, and so on. For most, understanding that an email sent to another employee somehow contributes to economic value creation requires either conceptual pole-vaulting of the extreme level or a semi-religious faith that regards the company itself as some sort of an ideal in itself, an entity whose requirements should always be met (because at the least, it guarantees sustenance through paying a salary).

The remedy that Crawford suggests is to do something with one’s own hands, to tinker, to fix and to make. He narrates his transformation from an intellectual to a mechanic specializing in old motorcycles, and the subsequent thrills of real problem-solving. By real, Crawford mostly means things that don’t involve ‘electronic bullshit.’ This reader’s first seeds of dissonance started here. Crawford’s remedy is to move from the technology of this era to the technologies of previous eras. He fails to see that it is going to result in a neurosis similar to the one that fuelled the problem. If one feels hollow working as an HR manager, one doesn’t necessarily heal by learning pottery. The economic concerns stay, pottery doesn’t pay. So while it is noteworthy that Crawford sees the problems as structural, it is disappointing when he only provides an individualistic solution. As if there was no way to challenge the structure itself, politically.

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