A Deficit of Autonomy in our Economy…
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on November 23, 2022.
There is a massive misfit afoot in our community: we have people with no jobs and jobs with no people. The finger of blame goes round and round – people are lazy, jobs don’t pay a living wage, downloading transportation to the worker makes working unviable, child care is unaffordable and/or unavailable, bosses manage people poorly, employees lack work ethic…
There is a grain of truth at every stop in this wheel of blame, but while we are mesmerized by the spinning, we will make no progress at posing it as a problem to be solved. So let’s take a step back and re-imagine what the problem is.
In her podcast on climate anxiety, Heather McLeod cites Bren Smith, author of Eat Like a Fish: my adventures farming the ocean to fight climate change, who holds ‘a deficit of autonomy in our economy’ responsible for people withdrawing from or being unhappy in their work. McLeod sings ‘I’s the b’ye who builds the boat’ to illustrate how Smith experienced autonomy in work – he took pleasure and meaning from the life of a fisherman until he could no longer tolerate its ruination of the environment and the economy. He re-imagined his relationship to the sea and the food therein to build Green Wave, a very successful and sustainable cooperative ocean farm that grows kelp and harvests it and the sea creatures that live in it.
Long ago, when I was just starting out on a social work career, doing child welfare, a school principal, after discussing the child that brought me into her world, asked why someone like me was doing this (nasty, she implied) work. I whipped back, with the misplaced self-confidence accessible only to those not yet mellowed by the vicissitudes of life, that it was challenging work that required the best and the brightest. I feel a kinship with Bren Smith in loving hard work that demands your best: like Bren, I walked away when the institutional parenting that I was delivering children into was as dysfunctional, albeit differently so, than the circumstances from which I was removing them. Like Bren, I found other ways to attack the problem and find meaning and value in my work.
I think that medical practitioners and education workers worn out by valiant and persevering service through the long pandemic, and maybe others in the Great Resignation, feel/felt similarly to Bren and me, and I hope are equally successful in finding more disrespectful and rewarding working conditions.
We need a sense of autonomy not only in the world of work, but as. Citizens in a culture that is teetering on the brink of disaster (which probably describes our world almost cyclically, but that doesn’t make it any less real or worrisome.). I smiled, ruefully, it must be said, when a local municipal councillor mused recently that taking advantage of the volunteers who wanted to dismantle a beaver dam that was causing problems was more trouble than having paid staff do it. He was not wrong – one could see the red liability lights blinking double tempot, the insurance agent going bonkers – but there is something desperately and distinctly amiss with him not being wrong. Much of the responsibility, even opportunity, for building community by contributing directly and with purpose to the things that to our collective advantage, has been distanced from us. There is a deficit of autonomy in our democracy, as well as our economy.
The history of this community, rather like Bren Smith’s early fishing days, was built on the putting together of necessary people and essential jobs. Building shelter, raising or finding food, caring for the dependent, challenging those whose actions or inactions undermined the well-being of others, creating the infrastructure that served collective need – this is the work that built our rural culture. ‘Progress’ aside, it is still the work that keeps our culture strong and healthy.
At this very moment, we have people who need shelter, who need food, who need to be cared for, who need to be taught how to be contributing citizens, who need to be constrained from harming the general good (who, ironically, are more apt to be the privileged than the needs – greed trumps need). And not enough people who want the jobs that in theory address those needs.
But are there people who want to do the work? Like dismantling the beaver dam. Like bringing respect and dignity to illness and death. Like bringing the marginalized into mainstream culture.
I think so. But they’re not doing it as a job, they are doing it as citizens. Let’s re-imagine a path forward with that in mind.
