We lose jobs, find jobs, love jobs, hate them, sometimes all at once.
A lucky few snag their dream, early, then work with growing satisfaction and success.
But most of us are like English poet Philip Larkin who, at 31, was stuck in his fourth year as an assistant librarian. He saw his job as a fat frog, plopped atop his true spirit, crushing it, and wrote the poem “Toads,” which begins:
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
No, he couldn’t. Larkin was a librarian for 30 years. We need that job, Larkin writes, “Just for paying a few bills.”
With Labor Day this Monday, and the future of employment in question, thanks to AI and other disruptions, it might be worth pausing to consider the central role work holds in our lives.
Our jobs define us. You can’t call someone “a housewife” in an obituary anymore — it’s considered demeaning. She “manages a household.” But nobody is “a person who plumbs.” We are plumbers, accountants, newspaper columnists.
We also define our jobs, if we can, molding them to our purposes.
“At first I was impressed with the time he spent in his office, arriving early and leaving late,” said Larkin’s employer. “It was only later that I realized that his office was also his study where he spent hours on his private writing as well as the work of the library.”
For many, a job is the most significant part of their lives, second — maybe — to family. In that light, Labor Day should be more than a long weekend. It should be a big celebration, and once was, with Labor Day parades filled with professions, proud street sweepers in their dress whites, carrying their brooms like rifles.
But machines sweep streets. Technology, that great job killer, looms over employment, threatening “the AI jobs apocalypse.” Half of white-collar jobs could be taken over by AI, according to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, with unemployment at 20%. Some think that view too dire.
An old story in a new realm. Automation scythes through work. At the last brick company in the Chicago area, the Glen-Gary brickworks, “nobody touches the brick; it’s all computerized.” A few decades ago Glen-Gary had about 240 employees. Now they only need 24.
My job puts me in contact with all sorts of occupations, and I’m frequently awed at how satisfied people are doing work that would put me cowering in a corner. Once I watched a man stand in a refrigerated room, running his bare hand over whitefish filets, pulling out pin bones with a needle nose pliers. He’d been at it seven years, and was grateful to be in this country, working. The immigrants at Cologuard, up in Madison, whose jobs are to open jars of excrement and test the contents for cancer, consider themselves on the forefront of medicine and are proud of saving lives. Harry Heftman ran the hot dog stand at Randolph and Orleans for more than 50 years, and was the most upbeat man I ever met.
Me, I worked behind the counter for a few minutes at the cafeteria at Vienna Beef as part their two day Hot Dog U, could barely keep the orders straight, and wanted to kiss the ground when I got back to my office.
I suppose I would have gotten good at it, over time. That’s one of the joys of working — we develop skills. I have an unusual job, on several metrics. I’ve been at it a long time — 40 years this coming March. The median stint at a company for an American employee is four years.
How’d I last that long? The union helped. I’m a quick study. Freedom is always cited as important in a job, and I have latitude over what goes into this space. I could have asked AI to snap out this column in an eyeblink, and maybe next year someone will. Maybe I’ll be one of the bench sitters Larkin considers in “Toads Revisited,”
Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Guys who are:
Watching the bread delivered…
Think of being them,
Turning over their failures
Larkin, older, sees work in a new light. The poem ends.
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.
That’s a bleak finish. I often quote Noel Coward’s breezy, “Work is more fun than fun.” Then again, work for Coward was gazing at the blue Caribbean, nursing a cocktail and coining witty lines for his next play.
We all do what we can, and what we must. A lucky few even do what we want.