Packing boxes in an Amazon fulfilment centre could be the job of your dreams.
I don’t mean right now: not unless you have a particularly traumatic kind of dream. Please don’t move to Kettering on my recommendation and then sue me for the blisters you’ll get, trudging up and down miles of racking in search of obscure consumer goods, a pedometer tracking your every move. Right now, in the baking summer of 2018, this is probably in the top ten worst ways to spend your waking hours.
But I believe it wouldn’t take much to fix those warehouse jobs and make them satisfying, meaningful work.
If you’re one of the people who gets a bit misty eyed about the jobs of the past, how fantastic they were, and how they’ll never be replaced, I can hear you scoffing at the notion that putting stuff in boxes could ever be meaningful. Those who hark back to the pit villages and steel towns that gave working men a sense of pride and identity will tell me that putting stuff in boxes isn’t ‘man’s work’.
But those people are wrong about where meaning comes from in the workplace. True, some jobs are meaningful because of the direct impact they have in the world – some people save lives, educate children or create works of art. But there’s no such direct meaning in bashing coal off a rock face. Mining is gruelling, physical labour, but if that were enough to create meaning then the warehouse jobs could match it, exhausted limb for exhausted limb.
Perhaps miners spent their days picturing the collective fruits of their labour: families cosy in front of the grate, or factories and power stations whirring into action with coal-fired engines. But if this was what mattered, a warehouse worker could find this kind of meaning too, after all, every package is a story – a child’s new lego, a lawyer’s new folders, a start-up’s new laptops.
So let’s be realistic. No amount of sentimentalising about families using coal or opening boxes could make up for the day-to-day reality of a terrible job. The practical impact of coal in the nation’s life wasn’t the reason that mining jobs were loved by the communities in which they played such a central role.
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