The union-bashing and labour-trivializing that has come into vogue of late has typically been predicated on a small set of dubious assumptions:
The first is the notion, extensively debunked on this site and elsewhere, that the wages and benefits enjoyed by unionized workers are undeservedly generous, and have served only to exacerbate the economic downturn. Aided by the kinds of subtle rhetorical techniques beloved by news editors everywhere—the strategically positioned photograph, the passivized headline, the carefully selected metaphor—this perception has achieved a commonsensical flavour amongst unsuspecting readerships throughout the West. Narcotized from years of propaganda, we have been conditioned to scapegoat those who produce the wealth rather than those who have mismanaged it. The relationship between personal wealth and personal worth, we are assured, is a linear one: the more money a person has, the more he’s contributed to society, so let him be. Those who have literally given their lives to their industries, by contrast—often enduring lurid occupational hazards along the way, such as daily exposure to toxins and radiation—are called overpaid parasites.
The second of these assumptions is the notion that there is a qualitative distinction between “skilled” and “unskilled” labour whereby certain kinds of activities (e.g. picking apples) inherently merit less remuneration, because one does not need special credentials to undertake them, while other kinds of activities (e.g. marking essays) merit more remuneration, because such positions do require special accreditations. I will not here examine the legitimacy of this belief. I will say, however, that the dichotomy—designed as it is to engender feelings of envy and resentment—lends itself beautifully to the managerial divide-and-conquer tactics familiar to labour organizers. When a cafeteria server’s wage is perceived to be too high, the teaching assistant is supposed to gaze ruefully at her hard-earned B.Sc. diploma and become indignant. When a laboratory technician loses her job, the bricklayer is supposed to feel a frisson of delight at the revelation that education does not confer immunity. We are all supposed to seethe bitterly when those less “skilled” than we refuse to know their place, and to smirk when those more “skilled” than we are brought down a notch or two.
The third of these assumptions is the conviction that university diplomas and professional degrees confer uniqueness and irreplaceability. Janitors are, allegedly, all more or less interchangeable; PhDs are not. This is the logic upon which my friend, the administrator, was drawing in lamenting the dispensability of her position. But is this even remotely true? When a university department sets up a hiring committee in order to fill a vacant professorship, one of the first things they do is determine what kind of specialist they are looking for: someone who studies land tenure systems in East Africa, for instance, or an arctic archaeologist. A formal job search is then launched, and, for each and every one of these vacancies, hundreds of roughly identical applications pour in. For each and every professor—or lawyer, or doctor—who retires or resigns, someone equivalently qualified is waiting in the wings. Does this mean that all arctic archaeologists are interchangeable? No. What it means is that, in an economy that treats us all as utilities, formal education in itself accords neither indispensability nor individuality.
We ought not delude ourselves. We all wield skills that are vital to our collective survival: the construction worker no less than the engineer, the lab technician no less than the endocrine surgeon. When a waste collector finds himself unemployed, society does not screech to a halt, true—nor does it when an architect finds herself unemployed. There are no unalterable or essential criteria behind these distinctions, whatever the economists say. Labour is labour; we are either all replaceable or all irreplaceable.
