Streamline Training & Documentation: A Revolution in the Understanding of Work

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

A Revolution in the Understanding of Work

I have been an admirer of Gordon Wood, a professor of history at Brown University, ever since I read his book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How A Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any that Had Ever Existed. This major study won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for history.

One of the most striking propositions Wood argues is that the people of colonial America came to view work in quite different terms from the traditional conception assumed by people back in England.

Instead of work being a curse of those living in poverty, for American farmers and artisans work was a source of value for them personally that enabled them to support their families at a comfortable standard of living. After explaining this state of affairs, Wood notes:

Yet because such equality and prosperity were so unusual in the Western world, they could not be taken for granted. The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, any threat to the colonists' hard-earned prosperity, any hint of reducing them to the poverty of other nations, was especially frightening; for it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity.

Wood goes on to quote a South Carolinian named Christopher Gadsden, an eighteenth-century merchant and political figure who has left us a considerable written record of his times.

"No wonder," said Gadsden, "that throughout America,we find men extremely anxious and attentive, to the cause of liberty." These hardworking farmers and mechanics were extraordinarily free and well off and had much to lose, and "this, therefore, naturally accounts for these people, in particular, being so united and steady, everywhere," in support of their liberties against British oppression.

This idea that work can be a source of one's own prosperity, rather than a mark of belonging to the underclass, has been a strong current throughout our nation's history. The countercurrent fed by discrimination against blacks is a glaring discredit, but the slow process of eradicating discrimination is also premised on the concept that people's hard work should enable them to achieve a decent standard of living that is in no way dependent on race or other irrelevant factors.

###

Labels: Productivity

<< Home