What Makes a “Good Job?”
My favorite office was 10 feet up a ladder in an apple tree. I’ve worked a variety of jobs, from pencil pushing and filing papers to scrubbing toilets and making cappuccinos. No work environment has rivaled the apple orchard, though. Picture: a September morning, with the first crispness of autumn in the air. The sun is coming lazily up over the opposite hill and a mist is settled in the valley. There’s a weathered, old blue pickup below you with a steaming mug of coffee on the tailgate, and you are surrounded by bees humming ponderously about, too drunk on the sweetness of apples to give you any trouble. Around your neck, an apple sack, and you fill crate after crate of beautiful, golden and red fruit. Sure, it gets hot later in the day, and there are parts of the job that include sitting back in the shed and washing thousands of those apples for sale; it’s still work, after all. And yet, there’s something satisfying at the end of a day of that kind of work that’s different from office work. Driving home through the woods on gravel roads, sweaty and sunburned, but feeling good.
I’ve also worked physical jobs that were not so fulfilling. Painting houses has its own sort of fun to it, and definitely a sense of satisfaction at transforming something old into something new. It’s also long, hot, and sweaty labor, and a little bit dangerous, too, what with those tall ladders precariously balanced to paint a bit of soffit. But here, a manager makes all the difference. A taskmaster who breathes down your neck, a micromanager, or a leader with other shortcomings can turn even satisfying work into an interminable chore.
Looking across the various kinds of work in which I have been engaged, whether more physical or more office-based, a few themes do seem to emerge about what makes for satisfying labor. I find that the framework laid out by the philosopher, author, and motorcycle mechanic, Matthew Crawford, resonates . Crawford himself came from an academic route, working in think tanks and in academic publishing, but always found himself somewhat drained and dissatisfied by those fields of work. It was when he found a craft, in the form of motorcycle repair, that he zeroed in on what made work, in his view, really satisfying.
In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford argued for the virtues of manual work in contrast to the “ghostly kinds of work” so often found in corporate environments. Among the chief of these virtues are agency and competence. A skilled tradesperson becomes a master of her craft, knowing the ins and outs, beginnings and ends of her work. An electrician can come into a house that is dark and when she leaves, voila, there is light. She has addressed herself to a particular problem and can see in front of her the fruit of her skill. This is in contrast to some of the processes of the office, on the one hand, or the manufacturing line on the other, where we might be some small part of processes and systems over which we have little control and which we can’t even fully see. The craftsman can look at something in the physical world at the end of the day and say “I made that, and it is good.”
There’s something about craftsmanship, too, that has about it the feel of an art. A good plumber or painter will sit back and really admire the work of the worker who was there before, or shake her head ruefully at the lack of beauty and rationality in the work. And there’s brotherhood, too, between those who know the craft really well. There’s camaraderie and a community of support amongst those who know the ways of wires, pipes, wooden beams, and so on.
None of this is to say that work in the trades is all roses, or that it doesn’t have its own frustrations. At the same time, work outside of the trades can embody some of the same virtues just mentioned. The question is, perhaps, how we can introduce meaning, competency, agency, mastery, and purpose into office work and manual work alike, so that it is dignifying and not degrading
For his part, Matthew Crawford suggests more young people see the trades as an economically viable, respectable, and satisfying career path, and even those who will not enter the trades, he thinks, ought to learn to work with their hands. These are questions we can ask ourselves, both of our hobbies and our work. What are the ways we can bring the virtues of good work into our own profession, or where can we identify them in the work we do? If we have a managerial position, how can we promote the dignity of our employees? What are ways we can work with both our heads and our hands? Given that work occupies such a great portion of our lives, these are questions well worth asking.
Nathan Beacom is the Executive Director of the Lyceum Movement.
