A different kind of hard

Interesting discussion over at TAPped about this piece from the NYTimes yesterday:

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

What's got Ezra's ire up, and a lot of other folk's as well, is the casual use of theterm sweatshop. And that's a fair point.

Meanwhile, calling blogging a "digital-era sweatshop" is an insult to actual sweatshops. Blogging is, to paraphrase Bob Dole, indoor work, no heavy lifting. Indeed, I'm always fascinated by how little self-consciousness the professional class has about their lives. You often hear folks with six figure salaries talking about how "hard" they worked to get ahead. But working at a law firm isn't any harder than, say, laying tar, or standing on your feet selling cell phones all day. It's just more highly valued.

I've laid tar (and concrete), as well as dug a few ditches, mown people's lawns and painted their houses, and bled my fingers on an assembly line building swamp coolers, among my several ill-advised career moves. I'm also a two-time grad school dropout who didn't have to pretend to understand Foucault when I read him back in the late 80s.

And you know what?

That shit is hard work too.

There are some very good arguments to be made in favor of valuing manual labor higher, in terms of compensation, and digging coal out of a hole a mile and a half under the ground is a lot more dangerous than, say, being the CEO of a poorly run airline.

But really, the greatest stress comes not from the actual nature of the work, but from knowing that your income is never going to equal your needs. That you're always one illness or car wreck away from disaster. And whether you're a lecturer at the University, a seamstress at the mill, a paralegal in the law office, or washing dishes at the corner bar and grill, if you're barely paying the rent, it's that stress that defines your life.