MANUAL LABOR
I remember long ago, maybe in the 70’s, seeing a billboard in India for a man’s suit, “Ready made for the price of tailor made.” The point was that for no more than the cost of going to your darzi, your tailor, to sew you up a pair of pants, you could buy a pair of pants right off the rack.
Today I went to my darzi at A Stitch in Time on Sweeten Creek Highway with a pair of pants to get the legs shortened for my Amtrak trip. I had bought the pants for $40 at Travelsmith on line. The price to shorten them was $18. All the very pleasant lady tailor had to do is to cut off three inches and sew once around the bottoms of the pants. When I asked her what it could cost to get a pair of trousers made she said would be so high that she wouldn’t even estimate it, and then guessed $200. She said she used to make trousers for the Navy for $7.50 apiece.
I remember in India having the barber called to our house to cut my hair as I sat at 9 on verandah beside the garden. The barber was almost a servant. After the pandemic I have been cutting my hair myself with an electric cutter. I remember my mother counting out the dirty clothes with the dobhi, the washerman, who would take the pile on the back of his bicycle down to the river where he would beat them on a rock to clean them and then dry them in the hot sun. Now my washing machine and dryer do that. One machine after another does what servants used to do or housewives, even in America. I can remember my grandmother toiling at the washing machine with a wringer and then ironing all day. This transformation is true at home and it is true in all kinds of production. And this is during my lifetime. The world is turning upside down. And it is marvelous. The world has turned digital. My books are all digital, my newspaper digital, my music is all digital a printer can print up a house, a molar or a human ear. The world is turning upside down. Yesterday as I tried to figure out how to do use super resolution in Adobe Lightroom the young man who finally directed me was sitting in New Delhi. We talked about my dentist, Dr. Kakar, in Greater Kailash #2 (even dental work is going to India) and his upcoming trip to Varanasi with his grandfather which he said was on his bucket list to do before he left India to seek his fortune elsewhere, probably with Adobe. Not long ago I paid a great deal for a suite of Adobe products which came on a CD in the mail to install on my computer, now I pay $21 a month and Photoshop and Lightroom are updated automatically over the Internet.
What machines and the computer are doing is a great deal of the repetitive manual assembly line and other labor that servants did in India or blue collar workers have been doing in the United States and getting paid fairly well to do. It is these jobs that have gone to Bangladesh and Indonesia, but even in China are being replaced by machines. These are what my barber considers to be good, family sustaining jobs, but which seem mind numbing to me. The textile industry used to be very important in North Carolina. The enormous Beacon Blanket Factory in Swannanoa, already highly automated, was abandoned and then burned down. The Owen family who owned it and much of Swannanoa with its company homes surrounding the factory opened a much more automated Owen Manufacturing right next to where I live. It was also sold. The unskilled blue collar jobs except for Stitch in Time, which charges very high prices for a small job, are gone. To me this is the elimination of mindless work that mindless machines can do better and I celebrate. To my Fox News watching barber this is the destruction of America and he is furious.
The hard work of roofing and painting and landscaping is now, in the Asheville area, done mostly by Latinos.
The textile mills are coming back to North Carolina on a smaller scale, but now with no workers at all and this doesn’t make my barber happy either. And of course, during the pandemic I learned to cut my own hair so even my barber can feel the threat of loss of work.
I can’t make sense of this that makes anyone feel good, but I keep trying.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 