What Profit Have Workers From Their Toil?
Grace Ghering
2.8.2025
Feeling self-satisfied, I sat down on the couch with my coffee. Look at how productive I am! My laundry is going, my dishes are in the dishwasher, my house looks tidier than it has since before Christmas. Thank you, Lord, for these labor-saving devices!
Immediately my prayer of gratitude turned reflective. Labor-saving. They save me labor. But is labor actually saved by their existence? Do fewer people actually put in fewer hours so that machines can take over the laborious tasks of housewifery? I sipped thoughtfully.
Before I received these helpful little appliances, somebody had to design my dishwasher and washing machine. This is a white-collar job, a “dignified” job, one that gives steady paychecks and benefits and patents to some American engineer. To create the physical product, this engineer exported the design to a factory in India, where hundreds of people created and assembled its parts. The factory workers will not be using it themselves, of course. They won’t be eating dinner, so they won’t need to do the dishes.
Onward with the thought experiment, however. Once the washer has been procured, it needs to be powered. In days of yore, you used a bucket and chopped firewood to warm the water. Or maybe you just walked to the neighborhood stream and used its power for cleaning. Today, however, we use electricity – which in Ohio is powered primarily by a mixture of natural gas, petroleum, and coal.1 Although the United States has been decreasing its use of coal in the past two decades,2 we are actually seeing a rise in black lung disease because miners are digging deeper and being exposed to more toxic silica than they used to.3 That is one of the human costs of electricity. And anyway, no matter what energy source is used, they cost the consumer money to purchase – which in the end represents the consumer’s labor in the form of a paycheck. No real labor savings here, just labor moving around, and with questionable ethics.
Perhaps labor, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed. I suppose that in some sense labor and energy are nearly synonymous. And energy has to come from somewhere. It may come from people, who collect materials and make products; it may come from the earth, in the form of coal, natural gas, wind, water, nuclear, etc. I doubt that any energy is actually saved by using a washing machine or dishwasher. The labor-energy just doesn’t come from my volition; it comes from somewhere else.
I ponder these things in a flash as I hold my steaming coffee. Hmm.
At least this coffee is Fair Trade. That means it’s morally safe.
Right?
Oh boy.
My spiraling inner crisis of a coffee break reminds me of the scene in The Good Place when Michael realizes why nobody in the modern era has been able to get enough “points” to make it to the show’s heavenly afterlife:
Too true, Michael. The world is complicated. It is an understatement to say that I am overwhelmed.
In 1534, Douglas Weingar of Hawkhurst, England gave his grandmother roses for her birthday. He picked them himself, walked them over to her, she was happy. Boom. One hundred forty five points.
In 2009, Doug Ewing of Scaggsville, Maryland also gave his grandmother a dozen roses. But he lost four points. Why? because he ordered roses using a cell phone that was made in a sweatshop, the flowers were grown with toxic pesticides picked by exploited migrant workers, delivered from thousands of miles away, which created a massive carbon footprint, and his money went to a billionaire racist CEO who sends his female employees pictures of his genitals!
… Don’t you understand? The Bad Place isn’t tampering with points. They don’t have to! Because every day the world gets a little more complicated, and being a good person gets a little harder.4
Luckily, my God does not base salvation on a point system. But he does warn me that denying the laborer his wages and oppressing the poor are sins that cry out to heaven (see Exodus 2:23 and James 5:4). Do my daily choices and purchases cry out to heaven? Sure, my culpability is lessened for unintended consequences, it isn’t a material cooperation with evil, yada yada yada. But lives and afterlives are at stake! And a trite “Sorry, you as an individual can’t do anything about the supply chain” is not enough to clear my conscience!
When I use my washing machine or dishwasher, I should at least be aware that many people’s work, many hours of their lives, were spent to make them. I should try to purchase things as well as I can that are made in places that uphold the dignity of the laborer and their labor. And I should consider whether I need to get off my butt and try doing some hard labor myself, because what else am I really doing with my time? What am I saving my labor for?
I do all sorts of important things! I need time to play with my son, to change his diapers, to take him to the library. When I cook dinner, he keeps interrupting me, so I don’t have the time to do dishes too. I have prayers to pray, books to study, closets to organize. You expect me to hand wash all those baby clothes?
These activities are good uses of my time, to be sure. But the reality is I have time to do them because somebody else does the hard work for me. I do not wash my own clothes; impoverished workers in third world countries wash them. We have outlawed slavery here, but we exported it across the ocean. We still live off the backs of the workers.
Why should I have a right to this easy life and to these wonderful acts of the soul when those who make my convenient life possible cannot listen to birdsong, cannot read stories, cannot even care for their own children because they are locked in a factory from sunup to sundown? Should not all human beings have the opportunity for a good life? By being a consumer of the products created to save me labor, I provide demand for workers whose lives are completely at odds with my beliefs about what constitutes a good life. I am complicit with the loss of family time, disconnection to land and nature, and godless drudgery that faces both Wall Street stockbrokers and Chinese factory workers. If I plunder others’ labor-energy to save my own time, I will surely be accountable for that at the end of all things.
If God told Adam and Eve to work and attend the garden, who am I to say that I am above such things? The people who make sourdough and chop wood for their stove (I do neither) are certainly entering into God’s command to till the earth. Is my laundry day as dignified by God’s standards? Is my purchase of clothing from Old Navy supporting work that is as dignified by God’s standards? Choice by choice, I must try to build a world where work will not be toil but fruitful labor, and where people will be properly respected and able to till the soil the way God intended.
I think all these passionate thoughts, yet I am shackled to my lotus-eating habit. How to get unshackled? Pray to God for help, probably. And listen to Wendell Berry’s sage advice about this predicament:5
We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to ‘need.’ I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.
May I be troubled so that one day I am sane.
Note: The title is a reference to Ecclesiastes 3:9.
2 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62444
3 https://www.ajmc.com/view/the-persistent-threat-of-black-lung-disease
4 http://youtube.com/watch?v=BfNy3L3nE6c
5 Berry, Wendell. “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.” The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, 2017. (259)
Grace Ghering
Grace resides in OTR with her husband, son, and a growing number of houseplants. She enjoys backpacking, urban exploring, mushroom foraging, acting, making fairy houses, thrift shopping, and geeking out about Wendell Berry and Cincinnati history.