What Makes Work Meaningful?

The answer has less to do with qualities like creativity or prestige and more with the nature of the labor process.

Édouard Joseph Dantan - Serre en construction (1890)

In a piece I wrote last month for Grace Blakeley’s substack, I got a lot of great feedback about the relationship between creativity and labor. My overall argument was that while it’s common to name certain kinds of labor “creative,” doing so both masks the fact that all labor is creative in some sense, and further masks a kind of class consciousness that could help build a broader working-class solidarity.

Though there were many thoughtful replies, one stuck out to me regarding this messy relationship between the two, and the broader relationship with class. Paul Gibson, a bike-frame builder, had some really insightful comments from the perspective of a crafts-person:

saying all labour is creative might be true in a broad sense, but if flattens something important. There’s a real difference between work that’s fully specified in advance and repeated, like an assembly line, and work that’s worked out through doing, where judgement develops in the process.

Paul brings up an important point here: the division of labor had degraded many forms of labor to the point where much of it feels meaningless from the perspective of the worker, with broader political implications (Alex Hobson recently wrote about this - I highly recommend reading it).

Here I don’t disagree at all. Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was a central text for my own book The Labor of Architecture, and his analysis proves more useful every day when it comes to describing the degradation of labor through the process of scientific management. Noting the various machines the owners of capital had introduced into the production process, he emphasized that it was the process that affected the most change, not the machinery itself:

Despite the variety of means used in all the innovations we have been describing, their unifying feature is the same as that which we noted at the outset of this discussion: the progressive elimination of the control functions of the worker, insofar as possible, and their transfer to a device which is controlled, again insofar as possible, by management from outside the direct process. It is this which dominates the new place of the worker in production processes, and it is this above all which is slighted or entirely neglected in conventional assessments.

But Braverman also alludes to something else though that I think is crucial: we should be careful about conflating ideas like “creativity” with “meaning.” Let me explain through the example of the building industry.

In his comments, Paul described my analysis as “abstract” and “from the outside,” but it comes very much from personal experience. My first job after graduating with my undergraduate degree in architecture was not in an office but on a construction site. Working with AmeriCorps for a several years in New Orleans, I helped direct other volunteers as we rebuilt homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. And here I’d agree with Paul: looking back, this work was the most meaningful work I’ve done. Yes, the service was a big part of that, but so was the autonomy of the work. My boss (still the best one I’ve ever had) taught me what I needed to know and then largely left me alone to manage a construction site with volunteers. Her management was anything but “scientific;” it was intuitive and liberating.

In this sense my working day was almost fully in my own control, both from the perspective of overseeing the work of others but also the work itself. Especially in the older homes we were working on, our judgement was constantly used to determine the best course of action, both from the materials we needed to use and the best techniques for their use. There was never a correct solution, only many possible ones. From straightening wobbly walls to raising 150-year-old foundations one jack pump at a time, we encountered every possible quandary of the residential construction process. I was exhausted every day from using every part of my body and mind.

But was it creative work? To return to the point of my original post, many would not describe construction work as creative. Most of the discourse around the idea centers on designers, tech workers, artists, and others in the “knowledge sector.” Obviously, I’d disagree, not only for the sake of an interesting thought exercise, but for the sake of galvanizing worker-based action between related but also arbitrarily separated disciplines towards a productive solidarity.

On the other hand, for the work that would define the rest of my career, architecture, I’ve never met someone who wouldn’t describe it as creative work. There’s lots of intellectual judgement involved in the design process, from the determination of space usage to the interpretation of building codes to the selection of materials. In that sense it fits the description. But a broader look at historical trends reveals a general degradation much more in line with what Braverman warned about over 50 years ago.

The same process described in Labor and Monopoly Capital is now happening to architects. As most of their material - that is craft - production has been replaced by the computer, the knowledge and skills embedded in the labor process have been ceded to the tools of scientific management and machinery. One only need to look at renderings that used to be illustrated by hand in the form of watercolors or pen and ink. These were standalone works of art. Now, designers can produce photo-realistic images at the click of a button (only after paying the subscription fee, of course). It’s not hard to see the end game, but will we stop describing architectural work as creative?

This is why I caution again equating creativity with meaning. Much of the way we use these words comes from cultural constructs, which does not make it untrue, but limits the potential of their understanding in certain ways. And here is the crucial point from Braverman: what makes work meaningful or degraded has less to do with creativity (or lack thereof) and more to do with whether the labor in question has been subjected to a kind of scientific division via the capitalist process.

To use Adam Smith’s famous example of the production of a pin, both the act of making an individual pin and only attending to one part of it on an assembly line are both creative acts because a pin is still being made. Just because workers are doing less of the full process doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing any less to the production of the pin; in fact, they are helping to produce many more of them. In other words, they are technically (and socially) creating more. But what makes these two examples different is who owns, and hence dictates, the process of production.

For me this is the essential point, and another reason why I think it’s important to understand most work as creative. There are of course exceptions, like those jobs that extract profit without producing anything. But our ability to interact with nature and transform it into products and services that fit our needs is at the core of the definition of creativity. And this work can be meaningful, but it depends on who controls the process. If we’re working for ourselves, or oversee much of the process, then we will find more meaning. But if we are alienated from the holistic picture of the labor process, we will only find drudgery.

This also helps us understand where we should target our frustrations, and where our struggle should be centered. Not in the culture wars of labeling certain work more creative than others, but in the struggle to make our workplaces more democratic so we can all participate in meaningful work.

And while we might find comfort in our work being “creative,” we are all subject to the forces of capital that continue to degrade the work and world around us. I’ve seen this process first-hand steal the best parts of a profession that was thought to be insulated from it. However, only when we take back control of the whole of our working lives will we all feel the creativity in the work we collectively do, and the work yet to be done.