How work makes us human

Collective benefit is what gives labour meaning, but the pandemic has exposed deep inequalities in the ways we make a living.

by Lyndsey Stonebridge for the The New Statesman

‘Before it became our family home, our house in the Aude was a factory for the recycling of wool into shoddy. Built next to the river around 1900, it once had just two large open floors. Bales would be winched in through the open top floor and pushed down the trapdoor to the second where they would be fed into the new-fangled tangle of machines powered by a small furnace. It was always noisy, hot even in winter, unbearably so in the summer. The acid from the chemicals was so strong it stung the eyes of passing children. At the end of the day, the ten or so men and women workers would descend down to the cool of the cellar and the wine barrels that waited for them there. The house was a place of labour, but it was also a place of human relationships; the collective tangle of tensions, resentments and friendships was as important for getting the work done as the bodies, the machines, the furnace and the river…’

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