The wages are injury enough; the insult in some ways even worse

Finally, somebody asks the right question.^[1] It seems that, in Pittsburgh and, I’m betting, a lot of places,

The thing that I hear the most is that everything’s service-related You know, “I’m looking for a job that’s gonna utilize more skills than making a hamburger or wiping down a toilet.”^[2]

We—including myself—often speak about class in economic terms. There are those who earn a living wage and there are those, including myself, who don’t. In passing, in a blog entry here last night, I criticized again the refusal of the U.S. to recognize a human right to a decent job, a real job, a job that pays enough to live on, a job that offers benefits even like paid time off, a job that offers some hope of retirement.^[3]

But at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy is “self actualization.” This is not merely the absurdly constrained notion of enabling workers to be creative and develop more efficient and effective means of doing their otherwise menial jobs as some supposedly “conscious” capitalists would suggest.^[4] This is a more broadly developed view like in the fucking dictionary of all places:

the realization or fulfilment of one’s talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone.^[5]

Self actualization is about artistic and intellectual self-development, education, indeed, exploration, the possibility of a fulfilling life in whatever directions a person might find interesting. It is the very opposite of an alienated production line job.

Current ethical thinking on human rights supplants a “human rights” construct with a “capabilities” construct, suggesting that each sentient being, yes, including non-human animals, should be able to live their life to their maximum potential, constrained only to the degree that such potential might constrain similar possibilities for others. For example, my potential to kill someone obviously constrains their possibilities and would therefore be proscribed.^[6]

But on the other hand, that my only career option, even with a Ph.D., seems to be driving for Uber and Lyft^[7] even in the face of an alleged “labor shortage” that’s really about a determination to keep wages as close to zero and working conditions as minimal as possible^[8] is a serious failure. And of course that failure is far from mine alone; there are lots of people stuck in menial or boring jobs that have little to do with their talents, their interests, or their aspirations.

The “capabilities” construct ascribes to government a responsibility to ensure that everyone has a real opportunity for a fulfilling life.^[9]

Accordingly, we might view class not merely in economic terms but also in terms of a division between those who have fulfilling work and those who don’t, for example, between, on the one hand, those Silicon Valley assholes who think they can solve the world’s problems with artificial idiocy and, on the other, the bus drivers who drive those workers to their jobs in luxurious WiFi-equipped buses that have become the scourge of San Francisco neighborhoods. In the latter class, we would include the “faculty and intellectuals [who] have been discarded, living as coffee baristas and wait staff versus the alternative of a homeless existence in a McDonaldized contingent academia”^[10] as well as the folks who’ve found a better way to scrub toilets in “conscious” capitalist wet dreams. But also in the former class, we might include my mother who, after divorcing my father, found a successful career in journalism, trying always to report the perspectives of the less privileged along with those of the more privileged.

It happens that this “capabilities” class division often coincides with economic class: The workers riding to Silicon Valley jobs in luxury buses are generally pulling in six-figure incomes; the drivers not so much. The riders are often willfully blind to or even arrogant towards the social inequality that surrounds them; they care less about housing for the homeless than they do about removing the homeless from the sidewalks in their gentrified neighborhoods.

This “capabilities” class division also coincides with a valuing of humans as individuals. The reason I consider my time with Linuxcare, a failed dot-com startup, the best job I ever had is that it was the one place where I actually felt valued for a job I could do. I’ll never forget that on the day of my departure, my boss gave me flowers—perhaps not an appropriate thing for a woman to give a man, but nonetheless a token of the value she ascribed to me and of her well wishes for my future.

The only other place I have been valued for my capabilities is when I was a student—“self actualization” again. I am otherwise, as John Asimakopoulos phrased it, “discarded,”^[11] trash on the side of the “information superhighway.”

Imagine how that makes me feel. Imagine how that makes other similarly “discarded” human beings feel. The wages are injury enough; the insult in some ways even worse.

1. ^[1]Matt Petras, “In the continuing pandemic, businesses need workers, but are jobs meeting the needs of residents?” Public Source, August 12, 2021, https://www.publicsource.org/pittsburgh-workforce-covid-unemployment-hiring-worker-shortage/↩
2. ^[2]Jamaal Craig, quoted in Matt Petras, “In the continuing pandemic, businesses need workers, but are jobs meeting the needs of residents?” Public Source, August 12, 2021, https://www.publicsource.org/pittsburgh-workforce-covid-unemployment-hiring-worker-shortage/↩
3. ^[3]David Benfell, “To be an international human rights rogue and to spread the contagion,” Not Housebroken, August 13, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2021/08/13/to-be-an-international-human-rights-rogue-and-to-spread-the-contagion/↩
4. ^[4]Chip Conley, Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).↩
5. ^[5]Oxford Dictionary of English (2010), s.v. self-actualization.↩
6. ^[6]Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011).↩
7. ^[7]David Benfell, “About my job hunt,” Not Housebroken, n.d., https://disunitedstates.org/about-my-job-hunt/↩
8. ^[8]David Benfell, “Factory farmed humans,” Not Housebroken, May 17, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2021/05/17/factory-farmed-humans/; David Benfell, “About that alleged ‘labor shortage,’” Not Housebroken, June 10, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2021/05/09/about-that-alleged-labor-shortage/↩
9. ^[9]Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011).↩
10. ^[10]John Asimakopoulos, Acknowledgements in The Political Economy of the Spectacle and Postmodern Caste (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2020), xiv.↩
11. ^[11]John Asimakopoulos, Acknowledgements in The Political Economy of the Spectacle and Postmodern Caste (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2020), xiv.↩