Thoughts on Work

I've been reading a book lately by Matthew Fox (the activist and former Catholic, now Episcopalian priest who founded Wisdom University) called "The Reinvention of Work," and it's a fascinating read. Work is something that I've spent a great amount of time pondering, and I think this book is helpful in guiding these questions forward: What does work mean? What do we do when there isn't enough "good" work to go around? What do we do when the "good" work keeps getting outsourced or offshored and those who can still stay employed find themselves in an ever more insecure and stressful position at work? What if the "work" we're creating is destroying the Earth we depend on for our very sustenance?

I remember years ago seeing a documentary on a Department of Energy site on some river on the East Coast (likely the Savannah River in South Carolina), and how even though the work being done on the site had poisoned the rivers of the town and had been ecologically devastating, there was pressure from the community to keep it there and open because of the jobs that it provided. It started me thinking about the meaning of work and whether there wasn't a better way to sustain human beings.

Fox points out that there are over 1 billion unemployed people on the planet; that this of course is a huge problem in and of itself. But he also points out that "Jobs, jobs, jobs" isn't necessarily the answer; that the type of work we create matters. He cites a Canadian study that showed that life expectancy is more closely linked to how much of a sense of control people feel in their work lives than it is to their access to health care, something we might do well to keep in mind as we push for universal health care coverage. Having lived with crappy but expensive health insurance for three years, I think the health care crisis is real and I'm all for single-payer universal health coverage. But we also need to be thinking about how to allow for people to live lives of dignity and meaning, and how to restore health and balance in this crazy world.