WelcometotheMachine.

http://www.art-for-a-change.com/blog/archive/2006_02_01_archive.html

"This way of life that's so devised/To snuff out the mind that moves"-Jeff Buckley.

The Modern human being, when not engaged in the mass-production of the species/crowded around communal troughs or watering holes, is otherwise located at their current place of gainful employment. The set-up varies depending upon the individual and their circumstance but for many people it's the classic 9-5 grind, for others, a weirder time-frame 6am-2pm, or nights. What troubles me about these alternative ways of life is that they're not good for anyone. As a worker the individual's health is bound to suffer.

Working strange hours affects regulated sleep patterns, which can eventually lead to mental health as a significant lack of good quality sleep, perchance to dream, can cause a person to see the real world in a distorted fashion; through a glass darkly. Whilst these visions are perfectly acceptable in the dream world and to a certain extent in the real world (you often see people holding court shocked and small audiences regaling them with wild tales of their latest cheese-dream trip) when they spill over, uncontrolled, they cause a person general detachment from the actual state of things making people come across as very strange without their fully realising it.

Much research has also been carried out of people @work. For example, working as a refuse technician (a Binman, who they kidding) exposes you to lots of infection and all weathers, scratching on the dusty floors of a warehouse or factory floor keep people in poorly ventilated areas, breathing in said dust, and out of sunlight, which, in controlled exposures, is good for the regeneration of skin cells and also improves mental health and tiredness levels (the back of the knees go first.)

But by far the most significant issue regarding this way of working is the mechanised routine of it all. I dropped this in earlier on; treating people in uniformly and with a colder reserved manner, less as human beings more as tools that can be forced to crank out greater profit, is bad, both for business and for the workers themselves.

If you treat a worker badly, especially by giving them the same dull jobs day in, day out, teaching them blind repetion and servility until death will only lead them to work below their full potential, which is inefficient. If for example, one were a janitor, and had to mop the exact same areas of floor every day they went to work (approx. 5:2) then they would soon come to appreciate the crushing boredom of their work and due to the many physical restrictions upon their working life (education/native intelligence/physical attributes) they come to grudgingly accept thus the pointlessness of hoping for a change in their life that probably won't ever come. This can lead to complacency in their work (already, that is a health and safety issue in many of the industry areas I have mentioned) and this harms the quality of their and the industry overall, as many other people in the same workplace are in a very similar position to one another (often this common ground is one of the only solid tenures of good relations amongst fellow workers)

The argument is simple, and uses Master Yoda's schema for the problem of Evil, as shown in "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi":

-Crushing routine leads to boredom (Mmmm), and thus, complacency.
- Complacency leads to a reduction in effort (it does), and so the quality of work suffers as a result.
- This in turn causes suffering for the worker who berated by their boss/kapo (they will be), and so they feel worse about themselves and the whole cycle begins again but only ever seems to get worse each time.