So I've always remembered this one story that nagged at me for years. The story of John Henry and the Steam Driver that he raced and beat. There are many retellings with different settings, but the theme is always the same.
One man vs. one machine to show which is better. And in the story John overworks himself to keep up with the machine, and wins. He subsequently dies from the work he did, but it's a testament to how one man's perseverance and determination can overcome any odds!
Except it's not. As a kid, I didnt think about it much. Hard work meant respect and satisfaction, and that's what I learned. But the context behind the story is much, much more important and as I continue to work myself to exhaustion every day I realized just how stupid the story actually is.
The young black man in the story was either a slave, or a prisoner, or a myth, historians aren't sure. But if we look at the first two, where there is some documented evidence of young men working on tunnels with that name (though it's debated which one is from the story), we see that this young man is representative of a labor force that was created by a system of exploitation and/or racism. The story then begins to look a bit different, as these labor practices are inhumane, deadly, and can/did have long lasting effects on how we treat the labor force in our country. We see prison labor all the time, and for nothing more than peanuts. It's a system that preys on the poor and minority populations of our country, and one being touted as great for business, and so great for mankind, in this story.
Then, if we take a look at the ideology of the man vs. the machine and how man is pictured as triumphant, it's more obvious that this story is awful. It is not a triumph if you die just to outwork a machine for a day. That machine was more than likely still in operation long after John Henry passed. And the idea that we as a labor force should be proud of our back breaking work in the face of technological advancement is hysterical. These machines are designed to lessen then work load, not compete for a job. The “machines will replace our workforce” scare should be seen as a blessing. We need people to do hard work, yes. But we do not need to do hard work for most of our lives to earn barely anything while we live in fear of being replaced. People shouldn't be forced to do this work to “earn a living”, we should be living and striving to better our ways of working.
So yeah, the lovely little story of my childhood that spoke of morals such as “perseverance” and “hard work” is b.s. It's a story about exploitative labor practices and the fearmongering of being out of a job because the machines are taking over, even though the idea of inventing new technology is to help advance us as a society and save our laborers from destroying their bodies in the name of creation. Fuck the idealized story of John Henry, and fuck the labor practices that were used back then that are still in practice today.