War on Work

Mike Rowe gives an interesting talk about his experiences hosting the “Dirty Jobs” television show. I’ve never seen the show, but much of what Mr. Rowe talks about towards the end of this presentation strikes me as being contextually relevant to the present crisis.



He believes that the American society has declared a civil war on work. He mentions four players in this process: Hollywood’s contribution with laughable portrayals of workers, Madison Avenue's messages “life would be better if you could work less”, Washington’s deals and policies that negatively affect the working class, and, what he calls, Silicon Valley’s tendency to design “innovation without imitation”.

Mr. Rowe talks a “marginalization of lots and lots of jobs” and he feels the only way to battle the war of work, to counteract it, is to pursue vigorously a PR campaign about work (manual and skilled labour). The type of work he calls grandfather stuff.

This made me reminded me of a situation I encountered a year ago, when I supervised a grade 9 student’s two-week work internship. The student was to create a podcast about work. The content of his podcast was a series of interviews he made with people in his family and neighbourhood, all about their professions and trades. Amongst others, he interviewed his father an electrician, neighbour a hairdresser, aunt a kindergarten assistant, and grandfather a plumber.

He asked each of the interviewees whether any role model had inspired them to choose their professions. All the people he interviewed, except his grandfather, answered this question with no. No one helped them choose their profession; no one showed them the way. The grandfather though, he had the fellows working on and installing the water mains for the city with their blowtorches, toolkits, and bawdy sense of humour, that made him think, “That is what I want to do”.

What about you? Did you have a role model in choosing your profession?