The Universe of Discourse

Does someone really have to do the dirty jobs?

Doing the laundry used to be backbreaking toil. Haul the water, chop the wood, light the fire, heat the water, and now you are ready to begin the really tough part of the work. The old saying goes "Wash on Monday", because Monday is the day after your day of rest, and otherwise you won't have the strength to do the washing.

And the saying continues: “Iron on Tuesday, mend on Wednesday”. Routine management of clothing takes half of the six-day work week.

For this reason, washing is the work of last resort for the poorest and most marginal people. Widows are washerwomen. Prisons are laundries. Chinese immigrants run laundries. Anyone with enough money to outsource their laundry does so.

The invention of mechanical washing machines eliminated a great amount of human suffering and toil. Machines do the washing now. Nobody has to break their back scrubbing soiled linens against a washboard.

“Eskimo child with wooden tub and washboard”, c. 1905, by Frank Hamilton Nowell, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

But the flip side of that is that there are still poor and marginalized people, who now have to find other work. Mechanical laundry has taken away their jobs. They no longer have to do the backbreaking labor of hand laundry. Now they have the option to starve to death instead.

Is it a net win? I don't know. I'd like to think so. I'd like to free people from the toil of hand laundry without also starving some of them to death. Our present system doesn't seem to be very good at that sort of thing. I'm not sure what a better system would look like.

Anyway, this is on my mind a lot lately because of the recent developments in computer-generated art. I think “well, it's not all bad, because at least now nobody will have to make a living drawing pornographic pictures of other people's furry OCs. Surely that is a slight elevation of the human condition.” On the other hand, some of those people would rather have the money and who am I to deny them that choice?

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