Modern wage labor strips the craftsmanship that once gave bakers self-esteem

Evidence

If you are a baker at Safeway, you know that you are not a famed dessert chef on the Food Network, that there are thousands of other Safeway bakers around the country, all wearing the same uniform and using the same recipes as you do. If you were a village baker in seventeenth-century Europe, people who depended on you for their daily bread appreciated your skill. If you were particularly good at producing a sweetly scented loaf or a tray of delicious buttery rolls, your reputation as the best baker in town would spread, perhaps among the surrounding villages, and you would feel a sense of ownership and pride. But today, the average baker at Safeway doesn’t have much room for craftsmanship or creativity. Fellow Americans generally don’t show much appreciation of their cake-decorating accomplishments; customers treat expert bakers like servants. Their paycheck doesn’t express much appreciation either. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 237

Categorization

• XREF: The craftsmanship-loss contrast echoes Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and the alienation arguments of the labor movement. — connects to: Industrialized labor destroys manual skill and familiarity with things — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2307; US businesses chose machines over worker skills decades ago — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 571