Feeling self-satisfied, I sat down on the couch with my coffee. Look at how productive I am! My laundry is going, my dishes are in the dishwasher, my house looks tidier than it has since before Christmas. Thank you, Lord, for these labor-saving devices!
Immediately my prayer of gratitude turned reflective. Labor-saving. They save me labor. But is labor actually saved by their existence? Do fewer people actually put in fewer hours so that machines can take over the laborious tasks of housewifery? I sipped thoughtfully.
Before I received these helpful little appliances, somebody had to design my dishwasher and washing machine. This is a white-collar job, a “dignified” job, one that gives steady paychecks and benefits and patents to some American engineer. To create the physical product, this engineer exported the design to a factory in India, where hundreds of people created and assembled its parts. The factory workers will not be using it themselves, of course. They won’t be eating dinner, so they won’t need to do the dishes.
Onward with the thought experiment, however. Once the washer has been procured, it needs to be powered. In days of yore, you used a bucket and chopped firewood to warm the water. Or maybe you just walked to the neighborhood stream and used its power for cleaning. Today, however, we use electricity - which in Ohio is powered primarily by a mixture of natural gas, petroleum, and coal.1 Although the United States has been decreasing its use of coal in the past two decades,2 we are actually seeing a rise in black lung disease because miners are digging deeper and being exposed to more toxic silica than they used to.3 That is one of the human costs of electricity. And anyway, no matter what energy source is used, they cost the consumer money to purchase - which in the end represents the consumer’s labor in the form of a paycheck. No real labor savings here, just labor moving around, and with questionable ethics.
Perhaps labor, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed. I suppose that in some sense labor and energy are nearly synonymous. And energy has to come from somewhere. It may come from people, who collect materials and make products; it may come from the earth, in the form of coal, natural gas, wind, water, nuclear, etc. I doubt that any energy is actually saved by using a washing machine or dishwasher. The labor-energy just doesn’t come from my volition; it comes from somewhere else.
I ponder these things in a flash as I hold my steaming coffee. Hmm.
At least this coffee is Fair Trade. That means it’s morally safe.
Right?
Oh boy.
My spiraling inner crisis of a coffee break reminds me of the scene in The Good Place when Michael realizes why nobody in the modern era has been able to get enough “points” to make it to the show’s heavenly afterlife:
Too true, Michael. The world is complicated. It is an understatement to say that I am overwhelmed.
Luckily, my God does not base salvation on a point system. But he does warn me that denying the laborer his wages and oppressing the poor are sins that cry out to heaven (see Exodus 2:23 and James 5:4). Do my daily choices and purchases cry out to heaven? Sure, my culpability is lessened for unintended consequences, it isn’t a material cooperation with evil, yada yada yada. But lives and afterlives are at stake! And a trite “Sorry, you as an individual can’t do anything about the supply chain” is not enough to clear my conscience!
When I use my washing machine or dishwasher, I should at least be aware that many people's work, many hours of their lives, were spent to make them. I should try to purchase things as well as I can that are made in places that uphold the dignity of the laborer and their labor. And I should consider whether I need to get off my butt and try doing some hard labor myself, because what else am I really doing with my time? What am I saving my labor for?
I do all sorts of important things! I need time to play with my son, to change his diapers, to take him to the library. When I cook dinner, he keeps interrupting me, so I don’t have the time to do dishes too. I have prayers to pray, books to study, closets to organize. You expect me to hand wash all those baby clothes?
These activities are good uses of my time, to be sure. But the reality is I have time to do them because somebody else does the hard work for me. I do not wash my own clothes; impoverished workers in third world countries wash them. We have outlawed slavery here, but we exported it across the ocean. We still live off the backs of the workers.
Why should I have a right to this easy life and to these wonderful acts of the soul when those who make my convenient life possible cannot listen to birdsong, cannot read stories, cannot even care for their own children because they are locked in a factory from sunup to sundown? Should not all human beings have the opportunity for a good life? By being a consumer of the products created to save me labor, I provide demand for workers whose lives are completely at odds with my beliefs about what constitutes a good life. I am complicit with the loss of family time, disconnection to land and nature, and godless drudgery that faces both Wall Street stockbrokers and Chinese factory workers. If I plunder others’ labor-energy to save my own time, I will surely be accountable for that at the end of all things.
If God told Adam and Eve to work and attend the garden, who am I to say that I am above such things? The people who make sourdough and chop wood for their stove (I do neither) are certainly entering into God’s command to till the earth. Is my laundry day as dignified by God’s standards? Is my purchase of clothing from Old Navy supporting work that is as dignified by God’s standards? Choice by choice, I must try to build a world where work will not be toil but fruitful labor, and where people will be properly respected and able to till the soil the way God intended.
I think all these passionate thoughts, yet I am shackled to my lotus-eating habit. How to get unshackled? Pray to God for help, probably. And listen to Wendell Berry’s sage advice about this predicament:5
May I be troubled so that one day I am sane.
Note: The title is a reference to Ecclesiastes 3:9.
2 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444
3 https://www.ajmc.com/view/the-persistent-threat-of-black-lung-disease
4 http://youtube.com/watch?v=BfNy3L3nE6c
5 Berry, Wendell. “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.” The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, 2017. (259)
Grace Ghering
Grace resides in OTR with her husband, son, and a growing number of houseplants. She enjoys backpacking, urban exploring, mushroom foraging, acting, making fairy houses, thrift shopping, and geeking out about Wendell Berry and Cincinnati history.
