The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

by Alain De Botton

  The ship-spotters’ pastime harks back to the habits of premodern travellers, who, upon arriving in a new country, were apt to express particular curiosity about its granaries, aqueducts, harbours and workshops, feeling that the observation of work could be as stimulating as anything on a stage or chapel wall – a relief from a contemporary view which tightly associates tourism with play and therefore steers us away from an interest in aluminium foundries and sewage treatment plants in favour of the trumpeted pleasures of musicals and waxwork museums.

  The men down by the river have broken free of such expectations, they freely express their concern for the movement of freight and the thunder of conveyor belts. Whereas an ordinary onlooker might, from their pier, see nothing more than three lorries pulling out of a factory yard, they have learnt to recognise the continuing odyssey of a shipment of Brazilian cane, brought over on the freighter Valeria and now turned into sugar, leaving the Tate and Lyle refinery at Silvertown bound for a Derby establishment involved in raisin cakes. Their satisfactions are akin to those of an ornithologist who, on glimpsing through a pair of binoculars a creature which most people would dismiss as just another blue-grey bird, knows to celebrate the spring’s first sighting of a Phylloscopus trochilus, resting at the close of its four-thousand-mile journey from its winter habitat in the marshlands of the Ivory Coast.

  5.

  How ignorant most of us are by contrast, surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasp; we who know nothing about gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy only as a set of numbers, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves closer acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable. How much we might learn from the men at the end of a pier on the edges of London.

  They inspired this book, which the author hopes might function a little like one of those eighteenth-century cityscapes which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace – inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place which work accords each of us within the human hive.

  I was inspired by the men at the pier to attempt a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.

  i: A logistics hub

  1.

  Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has diminished almost to the point of obscurity. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.

  Critical to both our imaginative impoverishment and our practical enrichment is the field of endeavour known as logistics, a name rooted in the Ancient Greek military figure of the logistikos or quartermaster, who was once responsible for supplying an army with food and weaponry. Today the term is used to refer collectively to the arts of warehousing, inventory, packaging and transport, an industry which counts among its greatest achievements the ‘cool corridor’ between Africa and Europe down which cut-flowers and vegetables travel, the FedEx hub in Memphis, Tennessee, and the development of the corrugated fibreboard box.

  2.

  In the centre of England, a few miles southwest of the River Avon, near King James I’s palace at Holdenby House, stands a group of twenty-five imposing grey warehouses – of a sort common to the landscapes of all industrialised nations, the kind which line ring-roads and airports, yet rarely explain their purpose to on lookers, mutely repelling the curiosity or outrage they can generate. The warehouses together make up one of the largest and most technologically advanced logistics parks in Europe. Positioned beside three central arteries, the M1, M6 and A5, they are within a four-hour drive of 80 percent of the United Kingdom’s population, and every week, largely at night, they handle a significant share of its supply of building materials, stationery, food, furniture and computers.

  Despite their importance, the warehouses have no desire to advertise themselves to the public. They are spread out across a site of determined blandness marked by gentle gradients, ornamental trees and expanses of preternaturally green grass. They have no interest in the problems and possibilities of architecture. They care only for size. One looks up at their cathedral-like ceilings and finds, instead of angels, workaday, economical spans of steel punctuated by fluorescent strips, which guide the onlooker’s eyes back to rows of symmetrical shelving and the hurried motions of forklift trucks. That the logistics hub has been allowed to assume this stark and monolithic appearance signals our confusion about how much it matters what is in front of our eyes. We accept that museums can devote fortunes to acquiring tender Early Netherlandish devotional paintings no larger than hardback books, but we see nothing foolhardy in casually surrendering large strips of the planet to the impatient interests of men from Jones Lange Lasalle, out of a curious reluctance to concede that we may in the end be as inwardly affected by the sight of five square kilometres of warehouse space incised into the fields of Northamptonshire as by the benevolent gaze of a twenty-centimetre Madonna from the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden.

  Yet it would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.

  At the top of a slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through – and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one’s own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families. Patrons can tour the aisles of a generous self-service buffet, combine fish pie with deep-pan pizza or hamburger with curry, without needing to apologise for the size or eccentricity of their selections, and silently take a seat at one of the yellow plastic tables which look out onto the stream of ruby-red tail lamps outside.

  Roadworks are common on these stretches of motorway and serve to slow the traffic almost to a standstill, allowing one to follow the incremental progress of Skania and Iveco lorries packed with industrial quantities of items which one normally contemplates only on a domestic scale: chocolate bars, cereal, bottled water, mattresses and margarine all inching their way northwards in the darkness. The view has some of the consoling qualities of a river, whose constant play of shadow and current may lift an observer out of a mood of stagnation. It is life itself rolling past, in its most heedless, savage, selfish manifestations, endowed with the same impassive will which impels the spread of bacteria and jungle flora.

  3.

  The single-mindedness of the goings-on in the logistics park are most transparent at night, when the appearance of the moon questions the significance of efficient courier services from an interplanetary viewpoint, as does – from the perspective of eternity – a slender church spire built in the late fourteenth century, visible as a pitch-black arrow on the far side of the motorway.

  Nightfall used to be the time when
members of our species would acknowledge their physical limitations and huddle together to mitigate their fear of ghosts and witches. The logistics hub, however, makes few concessions to human frailty, the spirit world or the primacy of natural rhythms. Floodlights come on to compensate for the sun’s retreat, bathing the area in the nocturnal orange glow familiar from airports and military installations. Workers are dropped off by bus at a central reception area and clock in before seven. On a site which was once fields of barley and wheat, warehouses now await shipments of lawn mowers, work-out benches and barbecue sets. Passing motorists, seeing the glare from the forecourts through the fog, might be forgiven for wondering what ungodly preparations could be in train at this hour.

  The work that unfolds here casts most of us who unknowingly benefit from it in a passive role. We will lie in bed, now and then shifting from one side to the other, our mouths defencelessly agape, while a fleet of lorries is loaded up with the lion’s share of the morning’s semi-skimmed milk for northern England. To witness the park’s activities in the darkness is to recall those moments in childhood when we woke up after midnight and heard footsteps and other noises outside our bedroom door, the parental unloading of crockery, perhaps, or the rearrangement of furniture, and thereby derived a sense of the labours which underpinned the daytime order of our household.

  4.

  The largest warehouse in the logistics park belongs to a supermarket chain, which throughout the night receives dispatches from food suppliers and recombines them for onward delivery to stores across the country. The aisles of an average supermarket contain twenty thousand items, four thousand of which are chilled and need to be replaced every three days, while the other sixteen thousand require restocking within two weeks. There are fifty lorry bays running along the length of the building and vehicles arriving and departing at a rate of one every three minutes.

  Inside, staff circulate between shelves, placing goods onto automated runways, which rush them to rows of steel cages lined up behind the loading bays, where they wait to be driven to a range of obscurely numbered destinations. For example, 02093-30 refers to a cathedral town boasting a theatre and a brewery, a place which hosted a Parliamentarian army during the Civil War and retains several fine Georgian squares and which every morning, unnoticed by most of its residents, is visited by an articulated lorry from across the Pennine Hills, carrying in its hold Parmesan cheese, red jelly, fishcakes and lamb cutlets.

  Components of the national diet race around the building on conveyor belts high above the ground: thirty cartons of crisps for Northfleet, 1,200 chicken drumsticks for Hams Hall, sixty crates of lemonade for Elstree. Human beings, once segregated into dietary categories almost as strongly as by religious ones, into the peoples of rice or of wheat, of potatoes or of maize, now fill their stomachs with unthinking promiscuity.

  Time is of the essence. At any given moment, half the contents of the warehouse are seventy-two hours away from being inedible, a prospect which prompts continuous struggles against the challenges of mould and geography. Clusters of tomatoes still attached to their vine, having ripened to maturity in fields near Palermo at the weekend, are exchanging the destiny seemingly assigned to them by nature to try to find buyers for themselves on the northern fringes of Scotland before Thursday.

  Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

  It is early December and in a central aisle, twelve thousand blood-red strawberries wait in the semi-darkness. They flew in from California yesterday, crossing over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, writing a trail of nitrogen oxide across a black and gold sky. The supermarket will never again let the shifting axis of the earth delay its audience’s dietary satisfactions: strawberries journey in from Israel in midwinter, from Morocco in February, from Spain in spring, from Holland in early summer, from England in August and from the groves behind San Diego between September and Christmas. There is only ninety-six hours’ leeway between the moment the strawberries are picked and the moment they start to cave in to attacks of grey mould. An improbable number of grown-ups have been forced to subordinate their sloth, to move pallets across sheds and wait in rumbling diesel lorries in traffic to bow to the exacting demands of soft plump fruit.

  If only security concerns were not so paramount in the imagination of its owners, the warehouse would make a perfect tourist destination, for observing the movement of lorries and products in the middle of the night induces a mood of distinctive tranquillity, it magically stills the demands of the ego and corrects any danger of looming too large in one’s own imagination. That we are each surrounded by millions of other human beings remains a piece of inert and unevocative data, failing to dislodge us from a self-centered day-to-day perspective, until we take a look at a stack of ten thousand ham-and-mustard sandwiches, all wrapped in identical plastic casings, assembled in a factory in Hull, made out of the same flawless cottony-white bread, and due to be eaten over the coming two days by an extraordinary range of our fellow citizens which these sandwiches promptly urge us to make space for in our inwardly focused imaginations.

  This gargantuan granary is evidence that we have become, after several thousand years of effort, in the industrialised world at least, the only animals to have wrested ourselves from an anxious search for the source of the next meal and therefore to have opened up new stretches of time – in which we can learn Swedish, master calculus and worry about the authenticity of our relationships, avoiding the compulsive and all-consuming dietary priorities under which still labour the emperor penguin and Arabian oryx.

  Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order – and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.

  5.

  Dominating the eastern end of the warehouse is an encyclopedic selection of the inhabitants of the world’s oceans. Stacked on shelves in the middle of the English countryside are mackerel icefish from Australia, red rock lobster from Mexico, hoki from New Zealand, mahimahi from Ecuador and monkfish from Costa Rica.

  To consider the expressions of these creatures, with their faces by turns noble, gauche, ugly, wise and terrifying, is to be pulled from our ordinary agenda and made to acknowledge man’s co-proprietorship of the planet with some distinctive beings whom we have condemned to end their existence under rings of lemon because of no greater error on their part than the possession of a fleshy texture and a lack of small bones.

  How did the fish find their way here? How did they die? Who made the packaging? And, more imaginatively, what might a painter discover in rendering a mackerel’s skin or an engineer in examining a red rock lobster’s claws? Implicit in these questions is a broader failure to appreciate the interest and incidental beauty of the working world.

  I notice a shelf stacked deep with fresh tuna steaks. ‘Caught by line in the Maldives’ says the wrapper, a claim as concise and tantalising as an epitaph on a gravestone. That fish taken out of the water several continents away could in a matter of hours be here in a warehouse in Northamptonshire is evidence of nothing short of logistical genius, based on a
complex interplay of technology, managerial discipline and legal and economic standardisation.

  It is the almost conspiratorial silence regarding this achievement that intrigues and provokes me – and with time gives birth to a desire to seize hold of a fish and follow it, at a somewhat more leisurely pace, backwards into the sea. It might of course have been some other commodity: I might have traced a roll of sheet steel from a Bavarian car factory to the scrub of the Australian desert or a skein of cotton from a loom in Mexico to the irrigated fields of the lower Nile. The tuna’s lessons, while played out in particularities, are nonetheless general ones about the value of swimming upstream in order to observe the forgotten odysseys of crates, to witness the secret life of warehouses and hence to mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators.

  I decide that I will anchor my journey around images, for it is tangible details in which the logistical field seems to be most sorely lacking. Herewith follows, therefore, a photo essay whose sole ambition is to alter, if only for a second or two, some of the thought processes that might occur the next time one is confronted by an object that has been transported mysteriously and at an implausible speed halfway around the planet in the darkness.