All Labor is Skilled Labor

Summer is a fun time to work in theater, if by fun you mean "laborious, repetitive and dull." If the spot you're some time without a show or shows, generally what you'll be doing is maintenance.

Maintenance can be technical or purely utilitarian or, as is generally the case backstage, a healthy mix of both. You can service video walls, reconfigure networks, change out hardware, update firmware and software on the gear you use to run shows, or do super simple chores like cleaning, vacuuming, and organizing. You are, in effect, resetting any or all aspects of the theater for the next run, whether it be a season or most of a year.

The good news is if one you find a way to get over yourself and inevitable feelings of the work being excessively dreary or beneath you, you can get to a place - there’s a new name for it every year or so…mindfulness, a vibe, a flow state - where the tedium sort of melts away and whatever you’re doing becomes meditative. Valuable. Maybe even enjoyable. Simply, doing simple repetitive tasks gives you plenty of time to think, and seeing as how this will be most of my month of August in 2025, I've been doing just that.

I'd even go so far to say that if you can't learn to appreciate tasks characterized in this way, you're going to find that you're going to struggle long term with many of the hours in an average person's average day, filled as they are with a fluctuating number of things most people do within their literal *every* day. These tasks - brushing your teeth, picking out clothes, making food or coffee, doing the dishes or emptying the dishwasher - can, if you think about it, just feel like the end of the world; endlessly drearym overwhelming. Like sure, you’re washing your plate after dinner. But on a long enough timeline, you’re going to wash that dish a few hundred times a year, multiplied by…the rest of your life. I have some dishes I’m sure I’ve washed a few thousand times.

One of the things I keep finding myself thinking about is being regarded as “unskilled labor,” which as a fairly skilled blue-collar guy working amongst other still even more skilled men and women, you might imagine, sticks in my craw a little bit. And having the overly busy brain I seem to have, I find my mind cycling between thinking about this label along with the phrase “all labor is skilled labor.” I've been accused in the past of occasionally being a brainy guy, and like many people who are thought of that way I enjoy complicated, analytical work most. But the older I get, the more I find I can enjoy this kind of "mindless" stuff and have come to realize that this whole idea is a misnomer. A redirect. To what end I’m still not sure. The US being something of a predatory capitalist economy, you could probably guess about as well as me...they're devaluing labor, because cheap labor means greater profit.

Now, apart from the fact that in some sort of abstract world anyone can do most any everyday task, having had to work alongside highly educated folks while watching them attempt to do mundane tasks I can say categorically and unequivocally that this is 100% not true. Because life in the United States under capitalism requires that we are all somehow always judging everything we see for its relative value vs difficulty, I'm sure most of us have heard someone sneer at something and say "any idiot can do that." Probably on Long Island, which seems to be something of a global hub for this sort of mindset. Anyone can clean a toilet. Anyone can paint a Rothko. Anyone can sweep a street. Just like you couldn't take most office cleaners and sit them at a computer to build elaborate queries to extract data from a massive database, you very much couldn't take the most people who sit at those computers and ask them to sweep a street. Or build something Or 15 of the exact same somethings. Or do some sort of deep cleaning. Or collect trash for 8 straight hours a day.

Why is this? Because like it or not all labor is skilled labor.

I'm a fairly strong, fit guy. I can lift heavy stuff all day long, and often do. I can and do spend days performing boring, repetitive tasks. And knowing this, I know that I could never be a sanitation worker. I'd throw my back out in a second. I'd get ingested by the truck. I'd slip in something, or be covered in garbage, or break every third bag and leave the street covered in the very stuff of which I was intending to be ridding it.

Sanitation work is work that needs doing...spend a little time on your favorite search engine reading about what happens to a city during a garbage strike if you doubt that. Is it a filthy job? Yes. Does it take a lot of knowledge to get started? Probably not a hell of a lot past "here's where the stuff goes, here's the handles that do XYZ, here's how you don't die." Do many people want to do it? No way. But you bet your ass it takes skill. Even as any one of us stuck behind a NYC Sanitation truck rages as it crawls its way down the block, impeding all traffic save for bicycles, one can't help but marvel at how hard the work is, how precise they have to be, how the drivers manage to squeeze those trucks up and down crowded streets and yet still land them right at the spot where the folks in the back need them to stop. And what happens if the handle that does XYZ suddenly stops functioning, and the truck can no longer continue to ingest and compact countless bags of trash? Do you take it out of service and go back to the yard or do you make do and keep going? How does one make do, in any scenario you might imagine? If you do retire it for the day, what happens then? Who takes up the slack? Do you go grab another truck and keep going?

When I was photographing his tools in his basement, I goaded my father into coming down to watch and hang out. At that point in his life he was pretty sick with the various complications of congestive heart failure and wasn't moving around much. To make things worse, a knee he'd had replaced decades before - well past the projected lifetime of the prosthetic at the time - had gotten bad to the point where most movement was painful. So between not being able to move around without losing his breath and pain of moving even with a walker, it was tough to get him out of the chair. Somehow I managed.

The process of photographing the tools was fairly simple. I had several lights, a white background to put them on, a camera, a laptop. The setup was a little complicated, as the camera had to be level on multiple planes and square to the object being photographed to minimize distortion, and the light levels and angles would change depending on reflections and shadows. If the camera had to be raised or lowered, the carpet meant that I'd at least need to check that everything was still level all around. The camera connected to the laptop and was triggered by way of the space bar. Once the space bar was pressed, the camera would fire and the image would pop up on screen. The connection could be fussy. Once the image popped up, I'd evaluate it to see if I needed to make any changes.

My father, having been a carpenter his whole life, was surprised at the amount of checking and rechecking that was going on. I think he thought some version of "any idiot can photograph tools." He remarked about how much work and measuring and assessment was going on, and I said to him "yeah dad, this is a craft too." Skilled labor. Thousands of shots, the same results over and over.

So what you might eventually find yourself learning is that while a certain job might consist of a series of tasks which taken individually seem like they require little to no skill, the entire job itself, to be done well in a seamless way at scale, will always require skill. Always.

Of course, when I use words like "average person" I'm obviously not referring to people who can afford to pay someone to do most of their everyday tasks for them. Many of us actually have to brush our own teeth and pick out our own clothes and decide what we want for dinner every day. Do laundry. Grocery shopping. Clean the bathroom. And for all of us who do that, I think most of us gloss over how hard all that stuff is to do every day. I'd again refer back to sitting in judgement of the work other people do, one doesn't have to go too far back in time when you could hear the suit-and-tie, three martini lunch crowd talk about how their wives had it easy, because “all they had to do” was cook and clean and keep the house running.

But all of that is labor, too, and in addition to being physically demanding it’s incredibly emotionally taxing as well. It's tempting to get off in the weeds about the wider uses of the word "labor" in general, and how well it can serve to maybe mentally recategorize things we previously considered to be merely annoying tasks...the phrase "emotional labor," for instance, kind of neatly encapsulates a whole host of tiny jobs which together I personally find more exhausting than physical labor.

But once again, if you can find a way to get past the “I can’t believe I have to do this again” parts of life and find your way into the meditative core of each, any opportunity such as this can be ripe for some deep moments. Some of my best thinking has been done while folding laundry, chopping lots of vegetables or waiting for a train.

One could call this “mindfulness” which has risen from a deeply serious Buddhist concept to a buzzy social media phenomenon. It was in high school that I first came upon the idea of giving yourself fully to even the smallest tasks…if you’re sweeping the floor, BE sweeping the floor. If you’re doing the dishes, BE doing the dishes.

It’s easy to sneer at, but in a situation like most of our hour-to-hour reality, it’s hard to center ourselves in anything. I’m not sure when it first became first mindfulness and then capital-m Mindfulness, but I do know that its popularity has increased along with the difficulty in actually performing it.

For instance, I’m writing this on a train. I’m sitting alone, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, typing away. But inches from me outside, the world is rushing by. Two people are conversing behind me. To my right, someone is idly doomscrolling social media with their sound on loud enough that I can hear it through both music and aforementioned noise cancellation. Should I remove my baseball hat such that my entire field of vision is accessible, there are multiple monitors flashing ads and public service announcements, out of sync. Someone else is watching the news on their phone, again without headphones. It’s taking actual effort to keep my mind where I am, which is writing. And thinking.

So when one thinks of labor, one must not only think of how simple it is, but also of how difficult it is to do over and over without breaking body or brain, and at a level of compensation that allows one to make a living but not so much that they can get rich doing it, and to make money for whomever is hiring them. Should you decide to go look, there are endless examples to be found online of people performing simple functions with a level of concentration, agility, speed and actual grace that they become entertaining and hypnotic to watch. Immigrant farm labor in the US is a perfect illustration of this. Is it easy to pick a watermelon? Sure. Anyone can pick a watermelon. Families with little kids leave cities to go to farms and actually pay to do it on weekends. Five watermelons? Tougher but doable. How about all day for weeks until you’ve cleared a series of farms, 10-12+ hours a day, bending and straightening, in relentless sun and endless heat, as a group of three guys throwing those watermelons from one to another to another, somehow having found a way to spread the energy required amongst them, not so much catching and throwing as redirecting, up onto a truck into giant boxes, all without damaging any? If not, why not? Is it skilled now? At what point does it become skilled? After the first hour? The first day? And what exactly about it became skilled? It’s still just picking watermelons, a job a kid can do on a suburban farm on a weekend, no?

I was speaking with a surgeon the other day. It's tough for me to expound on my day with her when they're days like this...she's off saving kids' lives day in and day out, and I'm cleaning and sorting audio cable and converting work lights in the grid of a theater from flourescent to LED.

One of the points I was trying to make to her was that one can be so skilled that they're almost not qualified to do anything repetitive. There aren't too many places in her world where a surgeon has to set up a workflow to bang out a series of steps over and over to accomplish a crappy chore within a rigid, set period of time while being glared at by one or more management types who are constantly checking their watches and trying to look busy doing anything other than merely watching people work.

Even what a layman might think of as a "routine" surgery could easily kill that same layman in a pretty long list of interesting ways. I’d say nothing is routine when any number of variables can take the whole expedition sideways at any given moment. Yet most surgeons and even a lot of everyday non-surgical folk regularly refer to a variety of different procedures in this way, often without thinking about how just 100 or 50 or in some cases even just 5 or 10 years ago many of them existed purely as a "wouldn't it be cool if" scenario in the back of some doctor's mind, or as a stern-expression and quiet head shaking invocation from teams of folks in ties around tables in corner conference rooms on high floors whose jobs require them to mitigate risk.

So while an appendectomy performed laproscopically can now be called a relatively routine procedure, there's a vanishingly small chance that there will ever be a day where a roomful of anesthetized folks is set up in a line for a team to do them one after another, assembly-line style. Perhaps only in a war zone or in some sort of visiting doctor situation can one envision such an moment.

That kind of task requires a different sort of brain. Surely it can exist in a surgeon, but it can be a trickly switch to flip. And that same surgeon, in the kitchen on a Sunday working on meals for the entire week might struggle with order-of-operations-type decisions, because her mind isn’t set up that way. It’s not that she’s not capable, she just rarely has to perform under those conditions with those kind of requirements.

As we were getting ourselves set up for a day of what would hopefully turn out to be mostly brainless yet somehow mindful missions, another stagehand and I were chatting and passing some time. We were to measure, color code, brand and categorize every audio cable in the theater. Not hard, perhaps, in and of itself. It's a series of tiny little steps, done in a specific order, any one of which one could most likely assign most any second-grader:

Grab a cable. Strip off all the old velcro, e-tape, shrink tape, labels and whatnot. If any of that leaves gunk behind, clean it off. Uncoil it, getting the knots out if it was coiled incorrectly. Measure it. Coil it up, add a velcro cable tie with the color that corresponds to how long it is, knowing which color conforms to what's a standard for much of the industry, Mark it with a paint pen. Add a sticker with the name of the theater. Take shrink-tape, cover the paint and the label, use a heat gun to shrink it tight. Hang it on the correct hook, the color of which matches both the paint and velcro you've added. Repeat.

Easy, right? You'd think. That second grader would be rolling their eyes in no time because you're talking to them like they're a first grader. Except how do you do it at scale? We're talking hundreds of cables here. They're not standard cables, there's some slop in there, some are 25' like they should be, but most are 24' or 26'. What if they're 29'? Or 35'? They're really just supposed to be 5, 10,15, 25 or 50. We don't have colors for 30, 35, 40 and 60 feet, but there are a bunch of cables that are that length. And the paint, it takes 15 minutes to truly dry rather than the "seconds" advertised on the package. Where do you hang dozens of cables so they can dry without getting paint everywhere? And some colors go on smooth while others require you to put on a first run, then go over it again and again with a 10 second pause in between, or else the tip just removes the wet paint as it deposits it elsewhere. The stickers, bought from some place online for a laughably low price for custom printed items, don't stick very well, and forget about how they want to stick on tacky paint on rubber cables even less. Then there's the shrink tape. Sure, it shrinks, but that means the edges curl. So how long do the pieces have to be to make sure they don't curl right off? Turns out it takes a little feel, you can sort of dance it past the heat gun while keeping that cut edge out of the direct heat, getting it to shrink enough to do the job without turning into a curly, gunky mess.

All of this, importantly, is done in a room not made for any of this, sitting at tables that are half in the way of two other crews who are working either in the carpenter shop or the orchestra pit.

So, you can't just sit down and get started. In order to do something like this, you need to think it through, and your efficiency increases with the time you've spent laying everything out. You have to spend some time preparing the space. Make room to hang pieces separately while they dry, and another to cool and set. You can't use a measuring tape to measure each one, it would take forever and you'd spend half the day fighting the tape. Can you stretch a measuring tape across the floor and tape it down? Can you use trim tape instead, which is flexible? Can you just mark the floor? Do you use tape or permanent pen of some kind? Or does it need to be that precise at all, meaning you can get away with using arm-lengths, knowing that your arm-width (your "wingspan") is generally your height, so if you're 5'10" and a cable is four arm-widths long with a little left over you can call it 25'?All of this takes a while to set up, just a bunch of little satisfying decisions to make. Again, all little things "anyone can do," but most people don't think about. Order of operations matters. Common sense, one eventually learns, is not nearly common enough to be called "common sense."

So once you've set up your room and laid out everything you need, have all your tools assembled and you've figured out the steps in some order that seems to make sense and identified where everything needs to go as you're performing them, now you need to get down to the unrelenting part; actually accomplishing the task at hand. There are several ways in which you can do this….you can grit your teeth and just get down to it. You can fight and sigh and roll your eyes, audibly complaining, checking the clock every three minutes or so and really dragging out the day. You can put on a podcast or watch something on your phone or tablet, which for some people can serve as a serious distraction.

OR you can learn to appreciate the work, the nobility of even the smallest chore. Will this change the entire theater? Make a show a hundred times better? Not even a little. It will make a couple dozen lives a tiny bit easier on loadins and loadouts. But this doesn’t mean you need to let that rob you of the satisfaction of doing something well.

I’ve also found that there are multiple components of one’s self that can be engaged by these kinds of tedious activities. That once I’ve gotten through the first half dozen or so and find a reasonable enough rhythm, something happens that I’ve always had trouble describing. My hands are busy, and some basic, maybe anxious part of my brain is occupied by the steps, and it’s as if the flowy, wandering, curious part of my brain can light up.

And once that’s happened, I’ve learned that I can enjoy almost anything…I can clear sidewalks of heavy wet snow for hours before I start to realize it’s been a while. I can hang lights or build lighting ladders for days on end, getting everything 'just so." Set up and strike my photo setup, or photograph an entire box of tools.

When you're throwing around a phrase like "unskilled labor," what you're really doing is demonstrating that you've incorrectly valued a certain portion of a task or an organization. "Any idiot can do that, you're paying them too much." Ok, well, can you eliminate it? What happens if you eliminate it? How does the cost of the idiot's work stack up against the cost of it not being done?

And on the other side, if you find yourself hating what you’re doing, thinking to yourself “this is stupid. Any idiot can do this.” Just remember…perhaps that’s the case, but also perhaps not. Either way, YOU’RE the idiot doing it right now, so maybe be the best idiot you can. For there’s a jarringly simple idea behind the phrase “love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life,” and that is if you find a way to love the work in front of you, no matter what it is, you will also never lack opportunities to stretch out your mind.

There's a phrase I've always loved: any job worth doing is worth doing well. I have a corollary, which is that any job worth doing well requires skill.