#FieldNotes014: The 121-Hour Worker

Rough notes on work, gasoline and slavery

Photo by Olav Tvedt on Unsplash

It seems that this time of year, I'm usually reading one of Wendell Berry’s essays. Thanks to my friend, Imam Matthew Schumann (who co-hosts with his wife the Thoughtful Muslim Family), I started reading Wendell Berry’s 1971 essay Discipline and Hope. Whenever I read his work, the following four thoughts re-emerge:

1. Farming must be taken seriously;

2. Economics has displaced modern man;

3. We must become producers; and

4. We need to properly account for energy.

This time as I read the essay, a fifth thought arose: we ought to spend our time doing good work. But what is good work? Is it a question of meaning, of usefulness or of effort? I'd say that good work is grounded in gratitude and self-awareness. By gratitude, I mean the recognition of the great gifts of good land, good home, and good community. By self-awareness, I mean to recognition of our place in this world.

I'd like to take a moment to share an excerpt quoted, from The Southern Agrarians’ I'll Take My Stand, quoted by Mr. Berry:

“Turning to consumption, as the grand end which justifies the evil of modern labor, we find that we have been deceived. We have more time in which to consume, and many more products to be consumed. But the tempo of our labors communicates itself to our satisfactions, and these also become brutal and hurried. The constitution of the natural man probably does not permit him to shorten his labor—time and enlarge his consuming-time indefinitely. He has to pay the penalty in satiety and aimlessness.”

Let's face it, life is work. But spending time to shorten labor does nothing more than lead to aimlessness. The irony is that shortened labor is itself a sort of drudgery.

How did we get to shortening work to the point of rendering it meaningless? When modern man tapped into that abundant power of ancient sunlight, the very idea of work changed forever. Whereas prior to the Industrial Age, the wealthy relied on slavery to power their whims and lusts, now they had access to fossil fuels, which would ultimately lead to the powerful releasing the shackles tying their brethren down.

I want to walk you through a short reflection. This morning in Ottawa, Canada, a liter of gasoline costs about $1.40 CAD (let's say roughly $3 USD/gallon). One liter of gasoline contains 9.1 kWh of stored energy. For context, a healthy adult can sustain a power output of around 75 watts (0.075 kW) of useful work over a prolonged period (like an 8-hour day).

If a human being can produce 0.075 kW of work in one hour (or 0.075 kWh), then that 9.1 kWh in one liter of gasoline is equivalent to 121 hours of sustained human labor, or about the work of 15 healthy adults doing an 8-hour shift.

For $1.40 CAD, you can hire the equivalent of 15 healthy adults to work for you. Give that a thought, and consider the implications. We may have “freed” ourselves from “hard” work, but is it really good work?