GroshLink

In late May, for those of us who teach, the summer stretches out like the great expanse of freedom it was in grammar school. Ah, the days on the beach! The books we will read! The adventures we will have . . . we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.

Left to our own devices, we seldom organize our time with 8-to-5 discipline. The pre-industrial world of agricultural and artisan labor was structured by what the historian E. P. Thompson calls "alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness wherever men were in control of their working lives."

I was recently offered a non-teaching job that would have almost doubled my salary, but which would have required me to report to an office in standard 8-to-5 fashion. I turned it down, and for a moment I felt like the circus worker in the joke: he follows the elephant with a shovel, and when offered another job responds, "What, and give up show business?" -- excerpted from The Summer Next Time (Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America).

I [Tom Grosh] must confess that like the author, I am drawn to the flexibility provided by laboring on campus, which makes answering the question of what do you do in a given day or week difficult to answer as the various aspects of my life blend together in a fuzzy manner . . .

although this causes great joy and opportunity, the danger of finding my heart (even identity) in the work instead of being in Christ is something that I regularly remind myself and those w/whom I work. By contrast, my observation is that the 8-to-5 position too easily enables the laborer to disengage from a wholistic vision for their vocation, work environment, and peers. Instead of their vocation/work consuming their lives, many people w/8-to-5 positions separate vocation/work from friends, family, neighborhood, etc. Let's pray for one-another as we return to our labors tomorrow (of course, I'm working in some manner as I write this piece). Anyway, Happy Labor Day. Maybe some will buy me Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America and maybe I'll have time to read it next summer as a little too much is going on now the semester has started :-)