I'm a UAW kid. For that reason I'm sure it isn't coincidental that Mike Rowe, host of the television show Dirty Jobs, has always been a source of constant fascination for me. In case you're unfamiliar with the show, each episode of Dirty Jobs documents Mike Rowe spending one day doing some socially integral job that we, despite having reaped the efforts of the workers, have probably never ever considered. It's fascinating if you have any interest in learning how exterminators kill rats or how old mattresses are disposed of, but there's probably sufficient entertainment value to be found in watching Rowe inseminate sheep or fall in pig shit even if you couldn't care less about the industrial foundations that make "civilized life possible for the rest of us," in the words of the show's introduction. It depends on your entertainment goals I suppose.

After reading the first few chapters of Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, I definitely was reminded of Mike Rowe, but I started thinking less about what he taught me about how the Golden Gate Bridge gets painted and more about his opinions regarding societal attitudes about industrial work. I think that Mr Rowe, having spent thousands of hours actually performing over 250 different jobs, is in a fairly unique position to comment.

In this video, which is about twenty minutes long, Rowe tells some funny stories and cracks some jokes but also hones in on what he calls America's "war on work." The video is great but if you don't want to spend your time watching it there's a link over on the right side of the screen to expand a pop-out transcript.

Rowe's "war on work" reminds me eerily of Veblen's "tabu on labor." Rowe and Veblen each have radically different hypotheses explaining its origin and Rowe's "solution" seems ham-fisted and of dubious efficacy, but I still think it's interesting how two individuals expressing their opinions over one hundred years apart seem to independently (well, I would presume independently) come to the same conclusion. It's enough to make a union boy weep. No wonder Ford hired him to sell pickup trucks.

-- AndrewCascini - 05 Apr 2010