Home work

On Aug. 18, we celebrated the 90th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. My mother recently celebrated her 92nd birthday. She was born without the right to vote, a fact that I often point out to my daughter in the hopes that she will never take her own rights and privileges for granted.

This weekend, we celebrate labor. Many of the rights we take for granted in our workaday world are quite recent as well.

The 40-hour workweek wasn’t legally established until 1938, just 72 years ago. There were some industrialists that didn’t wait for the government. In 1926, Henry Ford established a five-day 40-hour workweek in his automotive factories, and a few other companies followed suit.



Ford’s move, however, was not altruistic; he believed (and proved) that he could achieve the same level of production in five days as he had in six. He also believed that leisure was essential to consumption. Working people needed time, as well as money, to become good consumers, and consumers are what business is all about. Subsequent studies have confirmed his belief in the correlation between leisure time and consumption.

Our consumption-based economy is one of the concerns of Wendell Berry’s latest collection of essays, “What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth.”

Berry views our current economy as an “anti-economy” based on created wants (not needs) and serving ultimately to enrich only a tiny and already wealthy upper class.

“What Matters” is a collection of previously published and new essays. Berry’s thoughts on the economy are remarkably consistent and seemingly timeless. He marvels at the disconnection between money and food: “Apparently it takes a lot of money, a lot of power, and even a lot of education to obscure the knowledge that food comes from the land and from the human ability to cause the land to produce and to remain productive.”

Berry recently turned 76; poet, novelist, essayist and farmer, he has spent most of his adult life working a 125-acre homestead in the Kentucky county where he was born. His life reflects the values expressed in over 50 years of published writings.

First, he sees nature as our most important economic resource and one that must be governed by what he calls “the law of return” – when we take, we must also give back, this is the only way to maintain the health and vitality of our land and water.

Berry believes a viable economy starts with the household economy and a clear distinction between wants and needs. He calls for local economies, a concept much deeper than the current fashion for “eating locally” and one calling for a true commitment to place and community.

The recent failures in our economic system prove to Berry that its foundation is inherently immoral. He doesn’t shy from terms like “wicked.” Nor is he afraid to call for love and affection as necessary for true economic recovery — love and affection for the land and other natural resources that sustain us, love and affection for each other and our community.

Love, as we all know, is not always easy. It imposes responsibilities and calls for hard work. Berry has no problem with hard work, either for himself or for us.

In a 1985 essay: “What Are People For,” he wondered if the “obsolescence of human beings (is) now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work, especially the manual work necessary to the long-term preservation of the land, and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization. In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measures, short workdays, and retirement, why should there be any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambitions. In the country, meanwhile, there is work to be done.”

Twenty-five years later, there may still be work to be done.

Labor Day, 2010: We honor those who work and reflect for a moment on the work we ourselves are doing.

Photo by Morgan (meddygarnet: Creative Commons)