Have been driven in from the garden by the rain, after a satisfying morning of building a small flight of steps up to the terrace (which I also built). After an earlier day of builders’ labouring this week – lugging buckets of cement up a flight of stairs and supplying materials for production of that cement, I slept like a lamb, and while I may have been a bit stiff the next morning, generally felt much better for it. These experiences left me musing on just how good for you, and satisfying, physical labour is, and how badly we’ve managed to misallocate it.
We’ve now got a very small number of people in our society who work had hard physical jobs, usually at the cost of their bodies in wear and tear. And we’ve got a lot of people who either do nothing, or go to elaborate lengths – gym memberships etc – to try to keep their otherwise sedentary body in shape.
What if instead of dividing it this way, instead we had everyone doing a half-day a week of physical labour? You could adjust it for age and fitness – for less than hearty 70-year-old it might involve simply pottering around the local park deadheading the roses, for others it might be four hours of hard shovelling.
The Tories – well, inevitably they’re a rightwing government – want to introduce a form of national service for 16 year olds.
Rather than just picking on the kids, perhaps we all should be doing it, for our own good? Employers could be expected to allocate their workers’ time to public projects – but with rules to ensure that everyone did it, not just the junior staff (which is generally what happens with the corporate social responsibility “help the community” projects some companies run now.)
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