Disciplining The Help

by digby

You wonder why populism (or revolution) seems to arise with regularity and then you read something like this, from Yglesias:

“Why are low-skilled men withdrawing from work just when unskilled jobs appear plentiful and immigrants are flooding into the country to take them?” asks Lawrence Mead who answers, “male work discipline has deteriorated. Poor men want to work and succeed, yet many cannot endure the slights and disappointments that work involves. That’s why poor men usually can obtain jobs yet seldom keep them.”

[…]

Rather than suggest, however, that low-skill men would be more inclined to favor formal employment were formal employment rendered more attractive through, e.g., higher pay or more dignified working conditions, Mead suggests — really — that we deploy the coercive apparatus of the criminal justice system in order to mold such men into a more readily pliant worker class. “Nonworking men deserve to earn more,” Mead concedes, “but they also must be required to work, as they seldom are today.”

Fine, as long as every “skilled” worker is required to spend at least two years working in a low-end job being treated like a lackey for no money. Call it a right of passage and requirement of citizenship. If they do that and come out at the other end still talking about how low wage workers just need “discipline” and how they cannot endure “slights” then I guess they will have proven how superior they are. But I will bet that it would only take a week or two before most of these effete, spoiled brats would have a very hard time finding any reason to get up in the morning .

Creating greater and greater income inequality, increasing the pressure on the underclass and using law enforcement to coerce citizens in dead-end jobs to have “discipline” is an excellent way to to have a stable, thriving society, all right. After all, it worked so awfully well in the past.

I find it hard to believe we have to have these discussions all over again as if they’ve just discovered the concept of “character flaws” in the “lower classes.” Welcome to 1896. Or 1796. Maybe people like Meed should spend less time lecturing about “discipline” and more time thinking and reading about what low level, mindless work does to the human spirit. Perhaps this novel might shed some light on the subject. It was written over a century ago but since we seem to have to relearn everything we’ve ever learned from scratch, maybe it could save some time. (Even just this chapter might be of help.)

.