Learning is all about asking questions, and no one asks questions better than children. Boise State is home to more than 1,400 faculty members and researchers who are eager to answer these amazing questions.
Today, Shaun Nichols, an associate professor of history, answers a child’s question: “Why don’t my parents get to take naps and play at recess at work?”
Nichols is an associate professor at Boise State who researches and teaches students about the history of capitalism, labor and immigration in the United States and the world. He also teaches classes on American and global economic history, labor history and American intellectual history.
Question: “Why don’t my parents get to take naps and play at recess at work?”
Nichols says, this question gets to a core question about human existence: why is work such hard work!?
Work is fundamental to human life. Imagine you were one of the first inhabitants of the Treasure Valley, arriving here thousands of years ago. You face a giant wilderness. It’s ridiculously hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter.
What do you do?
Well, the first thing you would want to do is create some shelter so you can get out of the hot and the cold—say, build a house. Then you need food. Perhaps you start hunting, fishing or farming. That means that you need to start fashioning yourself clothing, tools, weapons, implements and so on. Basically, you quickly discover what most early humans realized too: to stay alive, you need to work at it! Throughout human history, this has been a constant. Survival requires work.
Idaho pioneers. Unidentified family with covered wagon. Four women, two children, and two men are in this photo. Four horses are hitched to the wagon. Photo property of the Idaho State Historical Society.
For thousands of years, small communities worked together farming, building and hunting to keep everyone alive. Over time, though, humans began to “specialize”—that’s just a fancy way of saying “getting really good at one particular thing.”
Let me tell you a story: I am, for better or worse, an amateur pumpkin farmer. I am not very good at it. The pumpkins and squash I grow are kind of ugly. Basically, I stink at farming. Back in the day, I’d be in real trouble. My family would be stuck eating misshapen squash all day. This would be a dreary life.
Thankfully, though, I am pretty good at teaching and writing about history. So, instead of having to spend my days farming ugly pumpkins to stay alive, I focus on something I am actually pretty skilled at. I teach history. Students pay the university to learn and the university pays me money to teach. Then, I can go exchange that money for all the stuff I need to live.
This process of “specialization” happened on a larger scale to humans all over the globe. Economists sometimes call this process the “division of labor”. Instead of everyone building their own houses, fishing, hunting, farming and doing all the other various tasks necessary for survival, those who were really good at farming began to focus on that.
They then traded the food they farmed for all the other stuff they needed to live. Others, who were not so great at farming but good at making stuff (say, furniture), focused on building chairs and then traded their chairs to local farmers for the food they needed. Over time, societies developed “money” to make these trades easier, but the concept remained the same.
To this day, not everyone can find work they want to do, of course.
Many people, sadly, end up with jobs they don’t like very much. (Indeed, one of the reasons your parents likely annoy you so much about “doing well in school” is because it improves the chances you will have more options for what job you end up with one day—and you can hopefully find one you do like!)
So when your parents head off to work, what they are really trying to do is put a roof over the family’s head, feed everyone and pay for all the other stuff your family needs to live. Just like the Treasure Valley’s first inhabitants, they are working hard to survive; they just now “specialize” in one particular task.
That said, could things be different? What if your mom’s job at (say) the doctor’s office allowed her to take naps, or go play outside with her friends every once in a while? Believe it or not, some jobs have just these sorts of benefits—but they are pretty uncommon.
In Norway, for instance, workers are legally entitled to 25 paid vacation days, up to 16 days paid sick leave, 59 weeks of parental leave at 80% pay, free health insurance and mandatory breaks. Some employers, like Google, have advertised “nap pods” for its workers: you can see one in action here! On the other hand, many states, including Idaho, do not require employers to offer any breaks at all!
But the question is still worth considering: could we one day move past the age in which every person has to spend all day working? After all, does work have to be so hard? Why can’t we all just spend the day doing what we want, and make machines do all the work for us? This might indeed be a possible future for all of us. But, at least for right now, most work remains just that—work!
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