The New York Times has a lovely article about where to find the art that portrays working people. I tend to think (wrongly) that the art of and about working people is from the 1930s, Socialist Realism. But much of the art described here is centuries old. People have always worked, but the great painters tended to paint royalty or mythical scenes or portraiture or still life, but not so much the people building and sowing and making.
One thing that occurs as you view the art of labor is how much of this kind of work–in factories and fields–has disappeared, either because it has been mechanized or outsourced. A factory that once employed 1,000 workers has either been transformed into a sleek production line run by robots and overseen by a handful of people. Or shipped to China or Mexico, where labor is cheaper.
Another thought is that unions arose to combat terrible working conditions and give working people a voice, so they were not treated as disposable by the bosses.
In the 1930s, the owners of capital hated unions. They have always hated unions. They don’t want to share power. They hate them still and do not lose an opportunity to reduce them and wherever possible, eliminate them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
in poetry, one that impressed me as a high school student (before becoming a teacher) was Man With A Hoe… that poem communicated to me …. and later I put it into context of male/female and the labor of women, children etc…… my aunt and mother worked during World War I in the woolen mills; they were 14 and 15 but the guys had gone off to the war…. this also left a strong impression on me and my mom always pushed high school diploma (whereas my aunt didn’t) and I have thought about the reactions of these two women raising their families within the milieu surrounding them in community and social life…. When World War II came along my brother was of service age; a school committee member came to the house and said “what are you going to do? paper the walls with high school diplomas?…. but my brother finished and went into the Navy in the same week. My mom didn’t want this guy to get elected again for school committee… some of those old attitudes about raising children are extant today; and some of those holding the attitudes are in elected offices and there is something we can do about that….
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“A factory that once employed 1,000 workers has either been transformed into a sleek production line run by robots and overseen by a handful of people.”
There’s really nothing wrong with that, IMO. The handful of people are higher-skilled and they’re paid better. That requires training so the question for me is who pays for the training, There’s only four possibilities- the government, the employer, a labor union or the working person. With the deliberate and careful evisceration of labor unions by politicians and wealthy people, labor unions don’t train as much as they used to, and we apparently decided at some point that employers have NO responsibility for training their own workers, so that leaves government or the workers picking up the cost and risk.
I don’t want younger people picking up the cost and risk of training because that just shifts the burden to the people who can least afford it, so I think we should bring back labor unions, force government to invest in training, and demand employers start picking up some of the cost and risk of training their own people.
Work is going to change and it should change. The one and only question for me is which party in these transactions takes the risk, burden and benefit of the investment in training. I don’t think 19 year olds should be picking up all the risk and burden since the private sector is getting most of the gains. Progress is fine with me, and inevitable,but not if it’s brutally unfair and right now it is.
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For me, the next few decades, maybe in a century or less what will happen to workers will be interesting..
The replacements of human labor depend on energy, often vast amounts of energy, oil, gas primarily now. As we move to ever more planet degradation and climate change becomes more and more relevant -:
How will all this play out. Perhaps, perhaps the “green energies” will supplant fossil fuels, perhaps not. Frankly I put little trust in our politicians to care about anything about their posteriors and those posteriors are bought by the moneyed interests which now include the vast wealth of the fossil fuels. As the fossil fuels become ever increasingly more expensive the vast manufacturing scene using high energy will become less viable.
What then?
It is said that producing much of our food utilizes more energy than what that food provides. How long can that go on?
Scientists studying history have found that as animals, societies become ever more specialized they tend to become extinct. Situations change and they cannot change fast enough to catch up.
Ergo, my observation about finding the future fascinating. [For me – frightening” i will with little doubt be long gone by then. For my children and especially grandchildren my view is that is very frightening.
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Man with a Hoe was a favorite image in late 19th century, early 20th century art appreciation books for children and young adults–virtues of hard labor. Another was Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters.
What is missing from the NY Times piece many narratives constructed around “art and work” is some attention to gendered ideas about work and the relation of work to social class–child raising, tending hearth and home, teaching and nursing, fashioning clay into cooking pots; weaving baskets with such finesse that these held water; the fiber and fabric arts of sewing, embroidery, dying and such…or think of images of workers in the oldest profession.
I started Labor Day by thinking of the official and off-the-books work undertaken by members of my family, going back as far as there are any credible records. Here is a partial list of occupations, not all of them aligned with those fabulous and unimpeachable “College and Career Ready” expectations for today’s youth.
Cattle ranching, truck farmer, greenhouse farmer, caretaker for a cemetery, a janitor, operator of a movie house, a janitor, a career fighter pilot, a Green Beret, an architectural draftsman, a mechanical engineer, an inventor, an auto sales person, a pro in baseball, a lawyer, a canner of foods, a seller of vegetable juices. a seamstress, an executive secretary, a missionary in Labrador, a teacher of English to Spanish speakers, a registered nurse, a professor of children’s literature, a writer of poems and fiction, a computer ethicist, an insurance agent, a salesperson for a manufacturer of shaving gear, a social worker, a counseling psychologist, and….and that is not including many fabulous careers of the teens, or my own history.
That was an amazing mental exercise. I hope this generation is not prematurely channeled into career paths. Circumstances, including the bare bones needed to survive, have so much to do with what life offers and requires, in labor and beyond labor.
I also started reading $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaeffer, a blend of gut wrenching stories of particular people living in poverty all struggling to work, surviving with near zero cash and courage beyond measure… and ugly statistics and federal efforts to address poverty, especially in the 1990s.
Anyone who thinks that schools alone can serve as the platform for addressing poverty are blowing hot air. Among these hot air blowers are Clayton Christenson ideologues who think that “breakout results” in closing the achievement gap are possible. They also seem to think that singular pursuing outcome is the solution to the problem. Add Obama and Arne Duncan and colleagues in the Brookings and elsewhere who think that increasing the failure rates of kids will motivate them and their teachers to win some sort of “Race to the Top” and save the economy as well.
So, happy and thoughtful labor day to all. Thanks to Diane for this blog and most of the contributors. Thanks to the only teacher union in my life who negotiated equal pay for equal work when that was a novel idea. That is still a novel idea, judging by the stats in $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
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“Man with a Hoe”
From “Man with a hoe”
To “Man with a ho”
A culture in decline
From painter’s doe
To rapper’s dough
A marking of the time
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Really a good one, provocative and succinct history.
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Thank you very much for calling our attention to this fine article. Many of the “classic” painters focused on work and working people. For example, there’s Van Gogh And, of course, many Social Realists of the 30s and 40s, like Shahn and Gellert, and black painters like Charles White.
It’s wonderful that museums are actually showing such work, after many years in which it was in their basements or de-accessioned. Bram Dijkstra has, in fact, argued in “American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920-1950” that such work constitutes the mainstream of American art rather than that wildly expensive abstractionism which, together with schools, seems to have become the playthings of billionaires.
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Somehow the Van Gogh URL got disappeared: https://www.google.com/search?q=van+gogh+painting+workers&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CB4QsARqFQoTCLuhtqyw5ccCFUw5PgodO4wO8w&biw=1024&bih=675#imgdii=e5tOKSmF4Hf9QM%3A%3Be5tOKSmF4Hf9QM%3A%3Brof57HnTlWu60M%3A&imgrc=e5tOKSmF4Hf9QM%3A
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And there’s much of the art of our own Robert Rendo:
https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+rendo+art&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CB4QsARqFQoTCO6Jx6Th5ccCFQkYPgodyW0F8w&biw=1272&bih=715
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I like your comment on the arts. I am an art teacher and even in my classroom things have changed. Computer graphics are valued over drawing and painting. Interesting how things change.
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