Dignity of Labour

Dignity of labour refers to the philosophy that every occupation is important and deserves the same respect as any other, i.e, no job should be considered inferior.

All labour that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

Martin Luther king

Let me tell you a story about the time when I first came to understand the dignity of labour. I was in grade III and part of a class of fifty. We were a mischievous bunch and wrecked havoc in the absence of a teacher. It was during this time that we had discovered the fun activity of throwing water from our water bottles at each other. Needless to say, this left the class wet and messy. Our science teacher, distraught at our behaviour asked us, who was going to clean the mess? The first word that came to our mouth was Didi (which means elder sister in Hindi). At the time, our school employed 12-15 women from a near-by village as janitors. They swept and wiped the floors, ran messages from the administration and performed other odd jobs. They were the people that students called for when someone had been sick or had spilt something. The solution to every non-academic problem was Didi. The teacher however didn't fancy the solution we had offered and decided to teach us two valuable life lessons. One being that in life you had to clean up your own mess, she ( the science teacher) made us clean the water ourselves and the second one was about the dignity of labour.

In school we had a ritual where we stood whenever a teacher entered the class and greeted him/her with a good morning or good afternoon. This was done as a mark of respect for the teacher. However, we didn't follow this ritual when a didi entered the class for in our minds, she was just a cleaner and unimportant, plus we hadn't been specifically asked to do so. All this changed that day, the science teacher taught us to value her role in the school and instructed us to stand and wish whenever a didi entered the class. We were a little shocked but went through with it. Till this day, I remember the look of surprise that a didi had when she entered the class and fifty odd students rose and chimed "good morning didi". We enjoyed the look of surprise on their faces and it became a part of our ritual. Looking back, I realise the positive effect that it had on me and how it changed me for the better. This incident coupled with the fact that our school felicitated and recognized all staff (on stage) on Labourers Day (May 1st) gave me strong faith in the dignity of labour.

The dignity of labour depends not on what you do, but how you do it.

Edwin Osgood Grover

The society is like a well oiled machine and each one of us is a cog, remove one and chaos ensues. Every occupation has its own requirements and are classified mainly into two categories, physical labour (jobs which require more brawn) and mental labour (jobs which require more brains). However, the world today has grown to detest physical labour. While we can hear children of an engineer or a doctor say that they want to become like their parents, rarely do we hear a farmer's child say he wants to be a farmer or a plumber's wanting to be a plumber. This is because the farmers or plumbers don't respect the occupation themselves and don't want their children following their footsteps. They consider the job they do to be inferior to the one's that require mental labour. The world, according to them is run by people wearing suits sitting in air conditioned offices. We can't blame them either for thinking this way, jobs involving physical labour pays much less and is not as respected as jobs that involve mental labour. Though this is a sad state of affairs it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon.
People need to realise that each and every job is important. As Shakespeare would say, the world is a stage and each of us has a role to play. The world cannot be run by Doctors or engineers alone.
I will end here with one of my favourite quotes.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper. He should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted , or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all hosts of heaven and earth pause to say; “Here lives a great sweeper who did his job well”

Martin Luther King Jr.