Quote of the Day: Be Happy in Your Work!

(((That's right, I said "bourgeois;" moralizing about how menial labor can be fulfilling to the individual in an individual way is crap whichever way you cut it, a classic Gramscian hegemonic move, but here I think the target is the upper classes)))

I clicked a link today to a Forbes story on airlines and got this at the top of the splash screen:

"No task is so humble that it does not offer an outlet for individuality."
-William Feather

And all I could wonder was how pushing a broom offers an outlet for individuality, particularly if it is to be undertaken with Fordian efficiency. Anything that offers an outlet for individuality will be inefficient at some level, unless you want to make the twisted argument that machine-like (not to say machinic) efficiency is an outlet for individuality. Good luck with that one.

Still, it's striking that a moralizing work-ethic platitude like this shows up on Forbes, where one expects the readership is comprised primarily of well-off management types. Is this really about how important their paperwork or spreadsheets are? Is it an exhortation to management to take pride in their own menial labor? One suspects not. It smacks rather of reminding them how they are to think of the work assigned to the people who work for and around them.

Make sure you keep management on the capitalist work ethic program!