MENSCHENMATERIAL

In the long run we're all dead.

- John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform

Person

As humans age, their capacities change. The truth of this statement is obvious - an infant can't do the same things that a child can, a child can't do the same things a teenager can, and a teenager can't do the same things an adult can. However, the boundaries between these labels are socially, legally, and societally constructed. Children were only restricted from working in the labour force in the United States in 1936. In Australia, businesses need a license to employ children. In Australia, the legal age at which a person can purchase and consume alcohol is 18 years of age. that's also the same age someone can get married. Regardless of what the law thinks about the relationship between age and maturity, certain biological, neurological, and practical truths are tied to a person's age. Their capabilities grow, are maintained, and then diminish. This is the case for all living things. It's the same for you. It's the same for me. It's the same for my cat. It's not fair at all, but them's the breaks and these are the cards.

As people age, their obligations change. These obligations are societally imposed. In Australia, a person is legally obligated to remain in schooling until they complete year 10, or turn 16. After that, they're obligated to work. The obligation to work is one which is most common throughout all of human life. However, there's something interesting here - people must work from the time at which they enter the workforce until the time at which they leave, and this necessity is socially, economically, personally, and situationally driven. For all people of working age, which in Australia is typically between 16 and 56 years, they are exposed to the same obligations as their peers who may be younger and older. Workers are exposed to the same financial, social, occupational, and professional obligations. Workers are subjected to the same legal protections, the same contractual demands, and the same societal pressures. For forty years, a person exists in a legal, professional, occupational ecosystem that levels them to the same degree as their younger and older neighbours. As people age, their obligations change until they don't. There may be some nuance - some people have children, other people undertake education, still others decide to take on a craft, but the broad theme remains the same. Work is what people spend most of their lives navigating, even if their bodies, minds, and spirits change with time. Work doesn't change. There are thirty-year-old line cooks. There are forty-year-old longshoremen. There are fifty-year-old pick-packers. There are sixty-year-old cart collectors. My barber is seventy years old.

As people work, they meet the unchanging demands of work with bodies that are changing - sometimes well, sometimes sick, sometimes energetic, sometimes fatigued, sometimes alert, sometimes sluggish, sometimes willing, sometimes compelled, always becoming older, always working. I used to labour when I was younger. I can't now - I've screwed every single ball and socket joint in my body. As humans age, their capacities change. Ageing is an inarguable, inevitable, and irreversible process. Kings in antiquity, myth and legend sought physical, spiritual, and then historical immortality, but the vast majority of humans are not kings. They are more comparable to gladiators, cast into occupational, social, relational and psychological arenas over and over armed with increasingly rusting implements and girded in steadily disintegrating armor. As workers age, their capacity to engage with demands of work degrades. In Australia, age is a protected property, alongside race, gender, and religious affiliation. However, there are provisions by which a worker may legally not be hired by an employer because of their age. The armed forces, public service, and judiciary have mandatory retirement ages. Applicants to physical roles can be excluded on the reasonable basis of their ability to perform the job. If work keeps people healthy, what happens to those who are forbidden from working because of age, because of time, because of natural physical processes? What happens when someone can't work because of age but must because of financial, personal, or social circumstances? To work is a demand but it is a demand that can be met at the predicate of a privilege - one must meet the demands of work to meet the demands of work.

You've got to be this tall to get on the ride.

Plant

As plant ages, its properties change. Industrial fixtures like process piping, reactor vessels, transmissions, and transformers all experience performance decrements with time. Non-complex tools like hammers and screwdrivers become brittle and blunted, needing repair or replacement. Complex machines with no moving parts - stereo controllers, computers, and spectrometry lasers degrade in their capacities with use, with eroded connections and strained resistances. Cars are the best example of this - the easiest way to depreciate a car is to buy one, and the easiest way to depreciate a car faster is to use it. Car tires degrade with mileage. Gearboxes degrade with use. Engines degrade with start-stop cycles. Our machines experience ongoing and continuous wear. An Australian will spend, on average, seventeen-thousand dollars annually on their car. An LPG forklift with a use life of five years will cost, on average, twenty-two thousand dollars annually accounting for fuel, parts, and servicing. The average Australian spent less than ten-thousand dollars on healthcare in the 2021-2022 year - the service cost of one forklift is greater than the average annual expenditure on health for two Australians. The service cost of one car is greater than the average annual expenditure on health for more than ten Australians. Imagine if similar consideration were given to investing in the health of workers. Imagine if a person was worth less the more they worked? There's a thought.

Work is the process that turns inputs into outputs. Work demands energy be directed toward substrate to transform it into useable product. Coffee beans are roasted. Lumber is milled. Stones are cut. Steel is welded. These substrates are transformed into things that are drunk, assembled, laid, and bolted. These substrates are transformed by machines. These machines are worked by people. In spite of the technocratic fetishisation of future funk like robots, artificial intelligence, and automation, there will always be a place for workers. The human will always be engaged, because to remove the human from work requires the re-evaluation of societal and market assumptions and drivers whose reconsideration is such an existential threat to the zeitgeist as to be as incomprehensible as a flying pig. Businesses, managers, and even workers themselves invest money in their tools and the materials with which they do their work, but do they invest in themselves? A basic stick welding setup can cost almost one-thousand dollars, but would a welding company spend that much money per worker attending to their respiratory, ocular, and muscular health? A coffee roasting system can cost almost ten-thousand dollars, but what is the workplace's investment in the people who work those machines, carry the bags, and mix the blends? We invest in the repair, audit, and baselining of our plant. Why don't we do the same with our workers?

Plant is nothing without bodies to enable its work. The worker may be menschenmaterial, but it is foolish to think of the worker as being any less worthy of capital investment than stock, plant, or premises. People are the living, breathing heart of any occupational venture. Steel mills need steelcaps. Houses need hardhats. Iron mines need overalls. Blue skies need blue collars. The economic, social, and spiritual wealth of the Western World is solely thanks to the blood, sweat and skin of the working class who traded the finitude of their life for the infinitely multiplied growth of shareholder value. Surely then, knowing that wealth can't be made without workers, is it not incumbent on businesses, on employers and on tradehalls to empower their manpower? Regardless of whether they hold a screwdriver or a stylus, a pen or a power drill, to be a worker is to trade time for money. Isn't that at least worth the consideration of care from an employer? The Occupational Health and Safety Act lays the incumbent responsibility of risk management on the business to reduce hazards to which workers are exposed as much as is reasonably practicable - isn't it practicable to at least invest one thousand dollars in a workforce wellness program?

A person is no less worthy of investment because they don't stay on the company lot.

Place

As buildings age, their structure changes. Work is something that is done in a place, on a substrate, to produce an output. Cabinets are made in warehouses. Cars are serviced in depots. Coffee is roasted in giant vats made by Italian (sometimes Turkish) engineers. All of these structures are made, are used, and changed, and the premises on which they are based change too. The vibration of bandsaws makes powder of concrete flooring. The drip of oil makes steel service shop walkways slick. The heat of roasting ovens buckles screws and throws out conveyor wheels. The weight of brick, mortar, and human meat combined with the accumulative effect of time serves to dose the built environment with a steady oscillating load-unload that gently, inevitably, applies pressure to structures with enough force to fray steel cord and flunk steel girders. The apartment block I live in was built during a time when I wouldn't have been allowed into this country and during a time in which the country from which I wasn't allowed to migrate wasn't even recognised as a nation. Half of my home is gently falling away into the lot nextdoor and taking the roof with it. Time inflicts its steady, gentle pressure on stones and brick, crumbling mortar and brick like the crust of a shortbread biscuit. Time applies its firm, inarguable hand to the metal and machinery with which we sustain the quality of the life we want our children to inherit. Time rests its irresistible weight on our shoulders, the same shoulders that hold up the weight of the world, gently curling us into a chastened crouch under the accumulated dose of time, trepidation, and travail, until its stern plummeting presence pushes us down and we never rise again.

As Australia's population becomes more aged, as Australia's housing situation becomes more precarious, as Australia's labour market changes, and as Australia's place in the world changes as the political topography we as a country are obliged to navigate becomes more and more uncertain, the average Australian will need more investment, more attention, more care. The average Australian is a worker. Social similarities run deeper than skin, deeper than race, deeper than creed. Time may have proceeded. Society may have evolved. The Worker has stayed the same, diligently attending to their tasks in their infinite patience, having their infinite industriousness harnessed by the drivers of wealth, investment, and capital, and still as hunched over as they were in the time of the Pharaohs, assiduous, but unassisted. Occupational health and safety is reactive as hazards are discovered and risk controls developed, but worker health is an area where proactivity has potential to add value - to contribute to the health, wellbeing, and dignity of the worker and support them, because they deserve it for their humanity, not their productivity.

What's written here isn't new. It's not novel, original, or unique, but it is something that's been on my mind. Change as a concept is so nuanced to tackle that entire professions are dedicated to helping people, organisations, and societies to navigate the transition of time, the development of truth, and the growth of paradigms. The one constant in life is the physical and empirical reality of the nature of work, of our obligations, that it must always be done, energy must always be spent, and time must always be taken. Remember that the time we have now is for caring, for working, and for making oases as we can. It's a cliche to say that, but in every cliche there's a kernel of truth that's repeatable enough for it to become a pithy aphorism as time passes, as it always will.