San Diego Jobs Blog

In the last couple of years, it’s obvious that Americans have been searching for a guide out of the economic crisis into which we have entered. According to Margaret Wheeler Johnson of Financial Times, the candidates for rescue include: Barack Obama; Fed chief Ben Bernanke, personal-finance guru Suze Orman, the state of Idaho (which has largely escaped the effects of the recession), the nation of China (which the US hopes will start sharing the burden of consumption) and, of course, Bono. Surprisingly however, motorcycle repairman Matthew Crawford didn’t make the list, at least not until late last month that is. In July his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work became a surprise hit and has millions of Americans re-thinking their careers, getting back to our nation’s roots and what kinds of work will get this country back on it’s feet again. Johnson goes on to discuss Matthew Crawford, his book and all of these issues in her blog below.

“Shop class” is the American term for technical studies courses at secondary schools – classes that are fast disappearing from US curricula. The book is a protest against that sort of development – against white-collar culture and the educational system designed to populate it. Crawford, who has a PhD in political thought from the University of Chicago, takes America to task for devaluing skilled manual labour. Trade work, he argues, is more psychologically, intellectually and financially satisfying than the information-processing jobs for which students are typically prepared.

Just three days after publication, Shop Class reached number 23 on The New York Times bestseller list. And in the following three weeks, it went through five printings. When The New York Times Magazine ran a 5,000-word excerpt, readers responded on the newspaper’s website with comments like: “Without doubt the best article that I have read in 13 years. Thank-you”; “This is a wonderful, thought-provoking piece. I read it with mixed emotions: elation, admiration, envy, empathy, inadequacy”; and “You have no idea how much this article means to me. I suspect – hope – it represents the beginning of a shift in thinking.” Americans, perhaps, have found their guide.

Skilled labour has been part of Crawford’s life since he started doing electrical work at the age of 14. He picked it up again at university, to make extra money. He only began working on motorcycles in 2000, rebuilding his own 1975 Honda when he was supposed to be revising his dissertation on Greek political thought. In 2001, disenchanted with the insularity of academia, he accepted an executive job at the Marshall Institute, a conservative environmental think-tank in Washington. It turned out that his primary role there was to develop arguments about climate change that happened to be consistent with those espoused by oil interests. The work, says Crawford, wasn’t “befitting a free man”.

Crawford found he was yearning for work with real goals and tangible results – rewards he had always encountered working with his hands. So six months after joining, he left the think-tank to set up a motorcycle repair shop. As he writes in Shop Class: “there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think-tank.” And he began to wonder why the rest of America hadn’t cottoned on to this. Why did the culture deem the blue collar manual labour of carpenters and electricians inferior to drafting memos and policy papers?

It’s a question that Britons, too, have been asking. This spring, the inventor James Dyson argued that the country’s way out of the recession depended on it becoming a place that “makes things again”. “The recession is teaching us a hard lesson,” he wrote. “Modern Britain cannot wholly rely on the financial sector, or service industries … Britain needs to invent, patent and create.” Dyson thinks the change needs to start with education. And so does Crawford. Whereas students were once required to learn vocational skills that actually interested them, Crawford argues, today, they take courses to make them competitive university candidates.

Despite his academic background, Crawford claims that not all students benefit from university study. It’s not a new idea; what’s remarkable is that Crawford escapes the charges of elitism it usually invites by offering his own experience as proof of the intellectual and emotional satisfaction manual work yields. He also notes that plumbers and electricians often earn more than graduates, partly because they have a level of job security that, in the age of outsourcing, white-collar workers no longer enjoy.

It’s tempting to liken Shop Class to Robert Pirsig’s 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Over the course of a road trip across the US, Pirsig’s narrator reflects on technology and reason through the relationship between man and bike. Crawford acknowledges Pirsig as an influence, but Shop Class is not Zen. Crawford’s metaphor is not the journey but the journeyman, the tradesman who makes his way using knowledge he has acquired from coping with physical materials. “A carpenter faces the accusation of his level, an electrician the question whether the lights are in fact on,” he writes. “Such standards have a universal validity.”

In promoting the cause of the individual craftsman, Crawford rejects the “big business” model of capitalism. But he does so when the excesses of the financial system have extended beyond the limits of what is tolerable to even staunch proponents of a free market, when many of us are ready to reconsider what kind of work is valuable. Now, Crawford writes, “it becomes possible once again to think the thought, ‘Let me make myself useful’.”