slackin’
New York Times - September 4, 2006
The Summer Next Time By TOM LUTZ
Palm Desert, Calif.
IN late May, for those of us who teach, the summer stretches out like
the great expanse of freedom it was in grammar school. Ah, the days
on the beach! The books we will read! The adventures we will have!
But before hunkering down to months of leisurely lolling around a
pool slathered in S.P.F. 80, we need to take care of a few things:
see what got buried in the e-mail pile over the course of the year,
write a few letters of recommendation, and finally get to those book
reviews we agreed to do. A few leftover dissertation chapters. The
syllabuses and book orders for next year’s classes. Then those
scholarly articles we were snookered into writing when the deadlines
were far, far in the future — deadlines that now, magically, are
receding into the past. My God, did I really tell someone I would
write an article called “Teaching Claude McKay”? Before we know it,
the summer is eaten up, we’re still behind on our e-mail, and the
fall semester looms.
On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in
the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually,
only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who
tells you this wasn’t part of the lure of a job in higher education
is lying. But one finds out right away in graduate school that in
fact the typical professor logs an average of 60 hours a week, and
the more successful professors work even more — including not just 14-
hour days during the school year, but 10-hour days in the summer as
well.
Why, then, does there continue to be a glut of fresh Ph.D.’s? It
isn’t the pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the
lowest years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn’t really
the work itself, either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding,
but we face as much drudgery as in any professional job. Once you’ve
read 10,000 freshman essays, you’ve read them all.
But we academics do have something few others possess in this
postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys
point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs
in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the
least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the
illusion of control provide the most.
Left to our own devices, we seldom organize our time with 8-to-5
discipline. The pre-industrial world of agricultural and artisan
labor was structured by what the historian E. P. Thompson calls
“alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness wherever men were
in control of their working lives.” Agricultural work was seasonal,
interrupted by rain, forced into hyperactivity by the threat of rain,
and determined by other uncontrollable natural processes. The force
of long cultural habit ensured that the change from such
discontinuous tasks to the regimented labor of the factory never went
particularly smoothly.
In 1877 a New York cigar manufacturer grumbled that his cigar makers
could never be counted on to do a straight shift’s work. They would
“come down to the shop in the morning, roll a few cigars,” he
complained to The New York Herald, “and then go to a beer saloon and
play pinochle or some other game.” The workers would return when they
pleased, roll a few more cigars, and then revisit the saloon, all
told “working probably two or three hours a day.” Cigar makers in
Milwaukee went on strike in 1882 simply to preserve their right to
leave the shop at any time without their foreman’s permission.
In this the cigar workers were typical. American manufacturing
laborers came and left for the day at different times. “Monday,” one
manufacturer complained, was always “given up to debauchery,” and on
Saturdays, brewery wagons came right to the factory, encouraging
workers to celebrate payday. Daily breaks for “dramming” were common,
with workers coming and going from the work place as they pleased.
Their workdays were often, by 20th-century standards, riddled with
breaks for meals, snacks, wine, brandy and reading the newspaper
aloud to fellow workers.
An owner of a New Jersey iron mill made these notations in his diary
over the course of a single week:
“All hands drunk.”
“Jacob Ventling hunting.”
“Molders all agree to quit work and went to the beach.”
“Peter Cox very drunk.”
“Edward Rutter off a-drinking.”
At the shipyards, too, workers stopped their labor at irregular
intervals and drank heavily. One ship’s carpenter in the mid-19th
century described an almost hourly round of breaks for cakes, candy
and whiskey, while some of his co-workers “sailed out pretty
regularly 10 times a day on the average” to the “convenient grog-
shops.” Management attempts to stop such midday drinking breaks
routinely met with strikes and sometimes resulted in riots. During
much of the 19th century, there were more strikes over issues of time-
control than there were about pay or working hours.
I was recently offered a non-teaching job that would have almost
doubled my salary, but which would have required me to report to an
office in standard 8-to-5 fashion. I turned it down, and for a moment
I felt like the circus worker in the joke: he follows the elephant
with a shovel, and when offered another job responds, “What, and give
up show business?”
Really, though, I’m more like Jacob Ventling and Edward Rutter. I
don’t go out 10 times a day for a dram of rum, but I could. And in
fact, maybe I will. Next summer.
Tom Lutz is the author of “Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers,
Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America.”