Hard labor

I had a dumb argument recently with my dad's wife, it was around various aspects of illegal alien workers. One of the retorts against me was something like "You have no idea how hard they work", to which my knee-jerk reply was something like "I've done hard labor" and her reply was a "When have you ever? *laughs*".

It's mostly fair in the sense of criticism against me that, especially as an adult, I live a soft life. (I know very well she thinks quite poorly of me in multiple ways, most of them unfair and ignorant, some of them fair.) But that's not really valid as an argument for anything. I readily conceded that no, I haven't done hard labor in any full time capacity. Or even part time job capacity. I've not harvested sugar cane or cotton or worked on a farm for money or on a crabbing ship or in a coal mine. I can only imagine how difficult it must be through others' reports and however much I can extrapolate from my own experiences.

Nevertheless I think some of those experiences count as hard labor. But perhaps it's just sparkling labor, and true hard labor can only be experienced if you're forced to work in near slave conditions for a long duration. (The slavery aspect is part of my arguments around the issue of illegal aliens, but it is also admittedly rhetorically over the top, but I don't think by that much. As an imported underclass they lack so many protections and opportunities that legal immigrants and citizens enjoy, and are frequently exploited on that basis, so for many it's not that much higher than slavery. Some slave owners treated their slaves well, too.)

To me, hard labor is the sort where your entire body is aching and you really don't want to go on, but you must, and you do unless you really physically, biomechanically can't anymore, to the extent of a horse no longer being able to move on. (You must rest horses eventually.) This distinguishes it from normal, unqualified by any adjective, labor, which is basically anything somewhat laborious and of indefinite duration. Cooking dinner for your family? Labor. Washing dishes? Labor. Folding laundry? Labor. Hard labor they are not, though. (Doing laundry the old fashioned way with a scrubbing board might qualify, however, and perhaps days consisting almost entirely of a variety of smaller labors add up to an existence of hard labor.)

Is duration important for the criteria of hard labor? Like, do you also need to experience the entire body aching from your laboring for multiple days? You go to sleep, but you wake up still aching, not wanting to move, but you must and do? (Maybe abusing pain killers to help?) Do you also need to develop blisters, and work through the pain of such blisters and other pains until you form good calluses? Same with chaffing?

Is it enough to experience the pain of blisters, and empathize with how bad it would be to have to work through them anyway?

Is it enough to experience total body exhaustion from gym workouts? If you can't raise your arms above your shoulders for a couple days after over-exerting yourself at the gym, is this functionally different from not being able to do so after being pushed too hard doing farm work? (And this is something you can't work through, you physically, biomechanically can't lift your arms very high for a couple days.)

What does it say that the level of discomfort and suffering is proportional to your prior exposure and tolerance of such discomfort and suffering as well as your overall health? A 600 pound person will be huffing and puffing and wanting to die after a short walk. Does their suffering matter less because most people won't be winded at all by it? Similarly, if you exhaust yourself in an hour or two dealing with some one-time project where you've got to excavate some 300 pound crap and take it to the dump, when if you were stronger you wouldn't be exhausted and you might even be able to lift the thing on your own into the truck, does that count as hard labor even though you didn't prolong the suffering for 10+ hours that day and the next and the next?

Does hard labor need to be unsustainable to count as hard labor, or, if you do in fact sustain it for a long period, and in fact adapt and get somewhat used to it, does it stop counting? I've hauled heavy stuff around and I've swung heavy sledge hammers, I can picture pretty well what it must be like to work on a team (or chain gang of prisoners) building out a railroad all day. Lay the ties, drive the spikes... it would be exhausting after not very long. But if you do this for a month, it will still be exhausting, but you'll surely have more stamina to go longer before getting exhausted, you'll have gained strength. Does it cease to be hard labor? What if your shifts get limited by a union or something to only 4 hours even if you could go longer?

Is it better that the vast majority of humans are no longer farmers, that so much has already been automated? Do humans need a certain level of exposure to hard labor to build character? If so, what's that level?

Well, I'll leave all those questions unanswered, they are for pondering and using to shape a philosophy, not so much for trying to come up with objective answers.

I still want to explore a bit about what made me say (and still believe) that I've done hard labor. It really requires me to scratch my memory beyond the first thing that came to mind, which I don't remember all that well anyway, and all the rest are even less well remembered. My dad probably remembers better than I do, because most of my memories are doing work with/for him, and the first thing that came to mind was when he was with his wife, so she might remember that work too but perhaps she doesn't think much of it.

When they bought their current house years ago, I was still a kid, like 14 maybe or younger. Their yard had a bunch of small red rocks all over the edges in place of dirt/bark and they wanted to get rid of those so they could plant various flowers and shrubbery. My dad offered me some monetary amount per wheelbarrow full of these red rocks that I could haul and dump into a corner. Lots of shoveling into the wheelbarrow, taking it over to the pile, dumping, and repeating. I don't remember how long I would work (it would have been limited to a day or two max at once, as I only visited every other weekend) or how many sessions there were, or what I got paid in the end. I don't remember if I ever got blisters from that, though I've certainly had blisters before. I just remember it was tiring. Was it hard labor? I think it was. Does it matter that I was a kid? Does it matter that it was certainly far below any minimum wage it would have cost to pay someone to do it, probably even an illegal worker?

I have lots of little memories like that, helping my dad out with various labor projects, and I would count them all. Some of the things were from before his divorce from my mom, most I think were after, some before he met his wife, but a lot after, so it's kind of interesting that she probably doesn't see any of that help as hard labor. But sure, fair enough, as I already said perhaps it's all just sparkling labor, and perhaps because I was helping my dad for most of it, not doing most of it solo, the sharing aspect makes it count less.

Some of the other things I remember from various times in my life: helping to dig holes for fence posts, shoveling cement, helping to put up fences, hauling fence pieces around, shoveling dirt/compost/bark from the back of the truck to a wheelbarrow to haul to places and spread around, helping to dig up and break up big rocks from the garden area, helping with various gardening aspects (planting, weeding, harvesting, watering, maybe the tiller once or twice), helping put up drywall, helping breaking up a brick fireplace and the giant metal box of it and helping to haul that sucker out and up to the truck to the dump, breaking up other concrete, hauling cinder blocks around to help make a retaining wall, chopping firewood with a maul...

Perhaps I didn't really want to come over even on the limited every-other-weekend schedule, and definitely didn't want to move in, in part because it felt like I'd just be put to work when I went over? Perhaps my desire to stay up late at night, and to sleep in as long as I could, and to take 30-60 minute or longer showers, was in part to spend as little time as possible dealing with other people's crap?

I used to be in scouts, made it to first class, one thing I remember doing was helping lay down an entire front and back yard's worth of fresh sod rolls for some elderly woman in the community. It took us all working together hours to do it.

If I racked my memory some more perhaps I could find some more things. But is this enough? Or does none of it count? Does it matter that basically all of it was before I reached adulthood, and that as an adult I try quite hard to not have to physically labor too intensely myself? (I'll do various fixes or projects, sometimes even some tiring yard work, but compared to my childhood memories they mostly seem not the same. Maybe one thing that would count was helping a friend move all day, I was exhausted by the end of that, especially getting some very heavy crap up flights of stairs.)

I should note that for actual work, I was a grocery store bagger for several months when I turned 16, and have worked in programming jobs ever since. Is it my fault that I haven't had to and likely never will have to perform hard labor in order to survive? Does such lack of direct experience somehow limit what I can imagine or argue about?

I don't know. Such emotionally manipulative arguments are just frustrating to find myself ending up in. Especially because she doesn't even finish them, at some point she'll get too upset and just run away somewhere else. (She thinks if all the illegal workers went away, heads of lettuce would cost $20, and that would be hard for single mothers of four, and I guess she thinks this justifies continuing to exploit an underclass.) This last time she was like "keep your voice down" and I'm like, I'm not even that loud, I'm only louder than normal out of consideration for my dad who didn't have his hearing aids in. Then to myself I'm just finding such a comment hilarious because most of the time I'm told that I'm too quiet or asked "what did you say?" because someone couldn't hear me.

Ahh family reunions are fun. I knew I'd get into at least one stupid politics related argument, I did at the one two years ago, and that it'd be really stupid. There are no winners in such things. Fortunately the reunion overall was quite enjoyable, lots of good conversations otherwise, and I always enjoy visiting with my dad.

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Posted on 2025-07-31 by Jach

Tags: personal, philosophy

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