So we are studying labor in the Middle Ages. So what?
The "So What?" test for the Labor Module is easier to answer than for most SEFARER modules, for almost all users (that is, students and teachers) who use this program do so as part of their own professional labors.
There are many reasons to think about labor in our own society. Here are a few -
Organized labor, widely credited with making enormous improvements in the working conditions for children and adults in the United States in the twentieth century, seems to be in decline. At the same time, great disasters in workplaces--for example, the fire in the North Carolina chicken-processing plant that killed 25 people in 1991--show that in some places, at least, working conditions are still in need of change.
As the above paragraph suggests, labor is a intensely political issue. The study of how labor has been socialized quickly leads us to inequities in the division of labor and the rewards for labor--tensions between men and women, between "blue collar" or manual workers and "white collar" or office workers and those in professions, and others. Are today's technical and/or white collar workers are a version of what the Labor Lexicon defines as a "labor aristocracy"?
What issues in our discussion of labor in SEAFARER strike you as political in the sense of pointing to inequities in the division of labor?
What ways are there to bridge ideas about labor in the modern world with labor in the early Middle Ages? Many of the concepts we use to discuss labor are derived from Marxist scholarship; Marx's writings are a critique of capitalism, an institution that was, at the most, taking very vague shape in the Middle Ages. This difference between the structure of labor in pre- and post-industrial society is both a theoretical and a practical problem. It is a theoretical problem because the terms for work and the distribution of goods and services produced by work are fundamentally different. It is a practical problem because our knowledge of the modern world is our chief point of departure for learning about the medieval world. Yet we cannot simply transfer ideas about labor from our own experience to the Middle Ages, even though our ideas of labor in the Middle Ages, derived, for example, from SEAFARER texts, are already cast in the shape of modern work institutions.
One way to help make the connection between medieval and modern is to take a look at what modern labor organizations are doing. One activity that we do not associate with organized labor is education. If you contact the ALF-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) in Washington, D.C., you will find that this group includes a Human Resources Development Institute that promotes literacy in the workplace. ALF-CIO recently published Worker-Centered Learning: A Union Guide to Workplace Literacy, a booklet that will teach you a lot about the ways in which even literacy can be exploited in the workplace.
So one more answer to the "So What?" of studying labor is that labor is closely related to education in the modern world. SEAFARER is both itself work and an educational project.
What kinds of questions can we ask to help us see the link between education and the status of workers in the medieval world? We forget that such famous authors as Virginia Woolf and John Ruskin were very concerned about the idea of work and the need of workers to be free. An enormously influential art, art history, and architecture critic, Ruskin was also a philosopher of labor (after a fashion), deeply concerned about material production and material culture. You can learn more about Ruskin's medievalism (his "creation" of a version of the Middle Ages), which emphasized the Middle Ages as a time of primitive and bracing originality, in Lee Patterson's book, Negotiating the Past, pages 10-11 (see notes 14-15).
Woolf's concern with the education of working women (and all women) is expressed in her now-classic essay, A Room of One's Own.
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