The Indignity Of Labour

We were on our way to the Jalan Kayu Prata place this afternoon for tea and a snack, driving along Dover Road, when I noticed a group of labourers resting at the roadside. I think they were waiting to be picked up at the end of their shift since they were on the opposite side of the road from the big construction site for what appear to be some new university buildings - appalling examples of the New Brutalism in what passes for architecture these days, by the by. Also judging by the way the gents were slouched down in various deflated shapes I assumed they'd had enough for the day. They made up a tableau of tiredness to the point of something approaching exhaustion. And, as an afternote of sorts, a couple of their colleagues (I assume) were actually stretched out at full length along the grass verge adjacent to the main road asleep, poor souls, about a hundred yards further up the road.

It put me in mind of my discovery of just how exhausting manual labour can be, made when I was seventeen and, rather foolishly working seven days a week: five days at the factory I got a job at after leaving school, including all the overtime I could get, and two at the weekend job as an industrial cleaner I'd been doing then for a couple of years. Even as a reasonably fit kid I quickly worked out that the body just can't take the relentless demands this kind of work makes upon it - and I suspect it was a lot easier than construction work under the hot sun. Anyway I ditched the weekend job and survived until I could get away to university.

All that Soviet Realist propaganda with its images of their heroic workers is a big turn off because it falsifies. But the irony is, it falsifies something that is deeply real - the simple undignified heroism of the guys who go in everyday and get the job done because they have no choice. One thing factory work taught me, by the way, is never to work in a factory if you can help it.