Houston Southard

Nikil Saval - Cubed

In 1880 less than 5% of the workforce worked non-manual labor. As trade expanded, the amount of clerical work increased. And as the number of people working in offices grew, the question arose of how to optimize efficiency. Those who did spend their days in an office were often the source of derision, at least until those weak and spindly workers began to inherit the Earth, or at least the 8-hour workday.

Offices took cues from factories, lining desks in long rows. Frederick Taylor's (may he rest in pieces) goal was to remove inefficiencies from the office as he argued for an extreme division of labor. He created the position of the manager.

By separating knowledge from the basic work process, Taylorism ensured a workplace divided against itself, with a group of managers controlling how work was done while their workers merely performed that work. Office design was about keeping people in place.

Clerks became the fastest growing occupation because of industrialization. Free of blue-collar manual labor, working with their minds, they did the opposite of producing things. They re-produced things. Their function existed to copy papers. To waste. They were the feminine worker, the couldn't cut it in the mines stock separate from real men, dependent and subservient.

The term white collar emerged as a result of this clerk boom, because they needed to self-identify as non blue-collar, distinguished by a bleached collar in immaculate white and starched extra stiff.

The thing was, clerks made the same wage as manual laborers. Collared shirts were expensive, so businesses catered to them by selling collars so they could better resemble their merchant betters.

That our lives are defined by work is common in our culture, instilled when we’re asked what we want to be when we grow up, confirmed by standardized tests concocted by a housewife with a Jungian fetish that tell us what career we’re most suited for, and set by the stresses of choosing a major.

Seeing people from a century ago suffer the same workplace woes we face today should make us consider changing the story we tell by removing work as the paragon of our day-to-day lives. The facts are that a job will not save you. Certainly not in this economy.