On this Labor Day, remembering Mister Rogers as an advocate for labor and its love
This sculpture along Pittsburgh's riverfront memorializes Mister Rogers, who, in his advocacy for children was also a powerful advocate for labor. Flickr
On this Labor Day, I find myself in Pittsburgh. It’s a big labor town with a powerful union history and presence. My wife and I will be heading downtown to march in a parade with the U.S. Steelworkers. While walking along the rivers yesterday, though, we made a pilgrimage to the memorial for a powerful advocate for labor who isn’t always recognized as such: Mister Rogers.
While Fred Rogers is typically celebrated as a child advocate of sorts, Mister Rogers Neighborhood powerfully centered the work we all do. Among the many lessons Mister Rogers taught children was to value all the work we collectively do in the world. He challenged the way our society devalues labor, asking us to see all the work we do as necessary expressions of mutual care that bind us together, without which none us could live.
His show asks to see and value the work we do for each other differently from the way our society and economy typically do.
Episode after episode, Mister Rogers unravels for us, particularly through the show’s representation of work and labor, the mysteries of the made world, as well as the reality of our own abilities to take part in making our world, with which we engage constantly in our everyday lives. Take, for example, the beginning of the episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (#1528) in which Mister Rogers is trying to fix the faucet on his kitchen sink so he can have the water he needs. Unable to do so because he doesn’t seem to have the proper washer, Mister Rogers remains as calm and patient as usual and takes us on a visit to the workshop of his handyman neighbor Bob Trowe, whom we encounter as he is in the middle of fixing a shovel that has come apart. Mr. Trowe stops what he is doing to fix the faucet; and when Mr. Rogers comments that this help will save him some money, Mr. Trowe comments, “We’re saving on money, but we’re not saving on work. Somebody’s got to do it. Work takes time, you know.” This scene dramatizes many central themes of the show overall. First, the scene highlights Mr. Rogers’ lack of fear toward engaging the complexities of his world as he calmly takes apart his faucet to see if he can fix it. Secondly, when he can’t fix the faucet, he does not give into frustration or quit, but rather relies on the collective knowledge of the people in his neighborhood to help him out, underscoring how our inevitable dependence on one another is also mutually empowering. Third, Mr. Trowe’s comments remind us to appreciate and honor the work and expertise that others possess and that helps make our lives possible. Finally, the scene shows us a world in process, in a stage of repair, highlighting for us and for children especially that the world is always in a state of being made and re-made and that we can participate through our work and through obtaining knowledge of our world in the way Mr. Trowe and Mr. Rogers have.
The vision and understanding Mister Rogers presents of work and labor, I suggest, really center the show’s principal ideals of community and neighborhood in cultivating in children a consciousness of the world as process, not as finished product, and an understanding that their relationship with objects really constitute relationships with the people around them, both near and far. Mr. Rogers repeatedly highlights how the crayons we use, the marbles we play with, the sweaters we wear, the food we eat, the electricity we call on to light our homes, the mail that shows up on our door post, have an origin in human labor; and his show traces these origins by revealing to us the processes of production in the crayon or marble factory or the work the utility operator does on the power lines while also introducing us to the actual people who perform this work and make our lives possible, such as the mainstay characters of the mail carrier Mr. McFeely or the handyman Mr. Trowe. While we often live in a complex system of relationships in which our actual relationships with people are distant and even invisible, through the neighborhood Mister Rogers seeks to make those relationships visible and intimate. In orienting the child’s consciousness to comprehend the world as always in the process of production and not as a static finished objective entity, Mister Rogers simultaneously cultivates in children a sense of empowerment—that counters and relieves the kind of terror and powerlessness that can often dominate childhood--in their ability to take part in producing and shaping our world through their creative actions, whether we call them work or play—a distinction Mister Rogers insistently challenges. In their form and content the episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ask us to undertake, indeed themselves orchestrate, a renegotiation of our relationship with objects such that we become intensely aware of (1) the way our interactions with objects actually situate us in a complex web of relationships with people, (2) the way the work people do for us is essential for making our lives possible, and (3) the way we impact or can potentially impact the world through our work, especially that work we do not even typically recognize as such. With great sophistication that has the appearance of simplicity, Mister Rogers demystifies the abstractions of our complex political economy and comprehends them for us in the kernel of human relationships that they constitute, cultivating an appreciation and gratitude for the work people do, a re-thinking and re-valuing of work itself, and an affective comprehension of the work people do to meet each other’s collective needs as expressions and behaviors of love in a larger social sense. As he asks us to think about the collective work we do as the most profound way we relate to one another, Mister Rogers presents a cultural vision and set of values starkly at odds with our dominant national values today, particularly the way U.S. culture tends to valorize an individualist ideology.
In episode #1472, in which Mister Rogers takes us to a sweater factory, we see a great example of the complex and layered way his show theorizes work as a central activity that forges--and also acts as the nexus of--human relationships, indeed loving relationships, motivating a re-assessment of the way we value both people and the work they do. The episode begins (after his standard entrance and song, of course) with Mister Rogers showing us a picture of his mother and explaining that she is the one who knits the trademark sweaters he wears and for which he trades his sportcoats at the opening of each episode. The camera zooms in on the particular cardigan he wears this day to capture the detail and intricacy of each individual stitch, highlighting the craft and care his mother puts into her knitting, as he informs us that she uses “needles, yarn, and her hands” to make these sweaters, which, he elaborates, “is one of the ways she has of saying she loves somebody.” Beginning with this effectively artisanal type of production or work performed within the intimate familial context of a parent working lovingly to clothe her son, Mister Rogers presents a scenario that enables most viewers to comprehend the act of production in the service of meeting human need as an act of love and as an act that puts people in relationship with one another. At the end of the episode, Mister Rogers reflects on what he sees as one of the appealing aspects of things: “They remind you of people,” he says. This statement, asserting the affective dimension of objects for us, underscores also the fact that objects, as the concretization of human labor, represent quite literally, indeed they constitute, relationships between people, although often the reality of these relationships contained in objects such as a sweater are not immediately visible to us. Our vision or our consciousness is not trained for the most part within our culture to apprehend an object in terms of its history as a made object that people produced so that we can satisfy a need or desire. Mister Rogers quite intentionally intervenes in the development of children’s consciousness, training it to apprehend the object world historically so that we understand the work people do to make our world possible, asking us to renegotiate our relationship with objects such that we understand that our relationships with objects are actually relationships with people. Certainly, in representing for us the small and local circuit of his mother making a sweater for him, Mister Rogers makes it easy for the viewer to grasp the sweater as an embodiment of a loving relationship. Mister Rogers shows us his mother’s picture so we can easily link the sweater to its maker, understanding its history; and his focus on each stitch emphasizes again the sweater as an object of labor, putting us in a position to appreciate the sweater not simply as a static finished product but as a dynamic process. He asks us, too, in ways he models, to appreciate not just the sweater but its maker and also to adopt an attitude of gratitude for the maker by recognizing not just the work but the love and affection that others put into making sure our needs are met.
As profound as this episode is in what I’ve described already, it continues even further methodically and meticulously to re-orient our consciousness to grasp the world historically and trace back processually the origins of our object world to the scenes of labor where we find the people who make our world and with whom we are engaged in an incredibly meaningful relationship which, typically within our culture, we fail to recognize, as labor remains largely invisible and on the margins of our consciousness. For Mister Rogers, just as his mother is a loving caregiver, so are those who work to provide for us in the world at large to meet our needs, though they often get lost in the complexity and abstraction of our very large economy. The logic of this episode, then, as Mister Rogers takes us on a visit to a sweater factory, is to enlarge our consciousness to comprehend the aggregate sets of relationships in which we are engaged in our socio-economic world so that we can appreciate both affectively and intellectually people and the work they do for us on a larger social scale. He begins in the smaller household or family context as a microcosm of the larger social world of production, a local world which children—and all of us, frankly—can wrap their heads around more easily, and then moves from the home to the larger industrial factory where we produce goods and services to meet human needs on a much larger scale. Indeed, as we witness the process of how a sweater is made on the video tape Mr. McFeely brings to play in Picture Picture, the first scene we see features workers unloading enormous spools of yarn from trucks and bringing them into the factory, as Mister Rogers exclaims, in his modulated way as the factory floor is revealed, “Look at all those people and all those machines.” We then move methodically through the larger automated looms operated by people, through the steaming of the material, to people tracing patterns on the cloth, to others cutting the cloth, to people sewing different parts of the sweater and so forth. As we see a woman at a sewing machine attaching a collar, Mr. Rogers comments, “That must take a lot of practice, Mr. McFeely.” This focus on the craft and skill of the worker and the care the worker must put into her task echoes his focus on the care and craft of his mother’s stitch, and he implicitly asks us to make this connection and to value each similarly.
While it might be hard to say that the individual workers have any kind of specific love or affection for any specific individual who will later wear the sweaters they collectively make, Mister Rogers, I believe, wants us to recognize that the very behavior is loving and caretaking, that we are engaged in broad and expansive sets of relationships in which people we don’t even know are taking care of us and working to meet our needs, to provide for us. This behavior, rooted in the reality of our radical interdependence as a society, is a kind of love, and by bringing us to the scene of labor Mister Rogers moves us to understand the meaningful nature of the relationships in which we are engaged in our world—for our own good and benefit—which we can’t always see. In this sense, Mister Rogers is giving us a new vision, cultivating a perceptual form that can potentially transform how we feel, think, relate to others, and comprehend the world. Just as we recognize the intricacy of his mother’s knitting, we can recognize and appreciate the intricacy of the enormous processes of production in which we take part reciprocally, in mutually dependent but also mutually empowering ways, to take care of each other. Moreover, Mister Rogers, through this episode, identifies the work we do as a kind of love, even if a social love with a different kind or degree of intimacy and affection than we experience in a family relationship. Indeed, this idea is reinforced more than once throughout his many episodes, as we see in episode #1530 when Mister Rogers takes us on a tour of his studio to once again reveal to us the processes of production, in this case of his show. He introduces us to the various and many people who are necessary to make his show possible. “It takes a lot of people to make television programs . . . . And all those people care about you. They want to make the best programs they can for people like you.” Understanding the intricacy and care of the production processes that make our lives possible—that is, to understand our world historically--puts us in the frame of mind to appreciate others because we understand the human relationships in which our lives are embedded and the care and love others are giving us through their work.
The thrust of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to humanize—or deeply grasp the human dimension—of our larger socio-economic system works on many levels and has many consequences. First, as I’ve suggested, one mission Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood repeatedly fulfills is that of making labor, which is typically invisible to us, visible in all its intricacies. In making work and the worker visible and intelligible, we are then in a position to understand and appreciate the work that makes our lives possible. How can one appreciate what one cannot see or understand? This appreciation, which I think functions for Mister Rogers as a kind of stance on life that impacts how we treat others and how we (re)imagine social relationships, becomes a basis for challenging the incredibly deleterious cultural development in our political economic system which Harry Braverman has termed “the degradation of labor.” By this term, Braverman is referring to two phenomena. First, the term describes the way an intensified division of labor has eroded craft and artisanal expertise by taking work and breaking it into smaller and smaller tasks, thus de-skilling the worker. Where before, for example, one chef might have produced a delicious hamburger, at McDonald’s the production of the hamburger is broken down into a series of simplified and repetitive operations performed by an assembly line of people. The effects of this division of labor from the business perspective are that the worker can be easily replaced as supposedly the skill required is easily learned and that the work “merits” a lower wage. Second, the term refers to the way this process then supposedly enables us to de-value the necessary work people do; we come to refer to such types of work as “unskilled,” justifying the low wage at which the work is remunerated and, hence, in social terms, valued and appreciated. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, though, insistently counters this type of valuation that results from the degradation of labor. As we watch production at the sweater factory, for example, both Mr. Rogers and Mr. McFeely continually highlight the work people are doing, which we typically might take for granted or not notice, and its importance, the vital role it plays in our collective lives. At one point Mr. McFeely narrates the production process, saying, “Then the collar goes on. But not by itself. A person has to do it.” Mister Rogers then responds, “It takes a person.” When at one point the segment focuses on the woman who is packaging the sweater in plastic so it can be shipped, a task I would venture to say many of us don’t think about, Mister Rogers notes, “Each person has his or her own job there.” Mister McFeely responds, “That’s right. They all work together to make sweaters.” Thus, we are being asked, or instructed, to recognize not just the necessity of each task but also the collective and social nature of work which entails the interdependence of each task. Implicitly, this dialogue suggests we cannot value any one task over another—or devalue any task beneath another—because they all depend on each other and are equally necessary to making and bringing to us the goods and services we need to live. Indeed, within this conversation, it is even pointed out that “it takes a lot of people to run the Speedy Delivery Service.” While we might see only Mr. McFeely as the representative of the Speedy Delivery Service, we are being taught to understand and consider that we might not see all the work going on and to be aware of our potential blindness, a blindness Mister Rogers works hard to cure while he also seems to understand that maybe he can’t make every task visible, so he nods to invisibility. Mister Rogers, in making the work people do visible and in asking us always to consider and imagine those who might not be visible to us, fosters a stance of appreciation for the works of others which he roots in an understanding and recognition of our interdependence and the collective or social nature of work.
What is the importance, or what are the possible consequences of Mister Rogers’ cultivation of the sensibility or act of appreciation and historical vision for our material lives? Let me offer this explanation of what is important about what Mister Rogers is doing. Consider debates that have taken place in the United States regarding income inequality and whether or not Federal and State governments should raise the minimum wage. It strikes me that the way of looking at the world Mister Rogers presents suggests a position in this conversation. We tend in our culture to think about a job as something an individual does to earn a wage or salary to support himself or herself and perhaps a family; we tend not think about the ways the work others do serves us and makes our lives possible. Think, for example, about what you ask people or what you wonder when you learn what someone does for a living. Do you wonder how that person’s work benefits your life and our collective social life? Or, do you wonder how much money that person earns doing that job? Let me risk asserting that, regardless of how you individually answered these questions, as a culture we tend to be concerned about the latter. The attitude or stance Mister Rogers encourages us to take toward the world, however, is one in which we appreciate the way we are served, the way our needs are met both individually and socially, by the necessary work others do for us because we can’t realistically do everything for ourselves in this complex world (hold down a job, grow our food, build our own house, make our own clothes, teach our children, etc). His vision militates against valuing work in terms of its relative importance to other kinds of work but instead promotes recognizing the use value and necessity of the work people do for us all to live. He asks us to understand the work we do as a society collectively (“That’s right. They all work together to make sweaters”). His vision moves beyond the measure of wage as he underlines our mutual dependence on one another and as he asserts the work we do for each other as acts of love, of mutual caretaking. His vision of understanding work collectively is not consistent with a meritocratic value system that makes value distinctions between the kinds of work people do and the contributions they make to the world. He sees all work that serves a social purpose and meets a human need as equally vital.
While Mister Rogers is not engaging in making public policy or leading a revolutionary movement, he is nonetheless cultivating a sensibility and way of comprehending socio-economic relations as in some sense deeply human and intimate relationships, which, if such a sensibility were adopted, would necessarily, it would seem, lead to a material transformation of the form and content of our current socio-economic relationships. Mister Rogers, for example, does not make an economic or monetary value distinction between the acts of making an opera and making a sweater (each of which he features in different episodes), even if our current market-based political economy would likely decide an opera singer “deserves” more to perform his or her job than the worker in the sweater factory. Rather, Mister Rogers tends actually to equate these different kinds of social production in terms of their vitality and necessity to meeting the collective needs of our society and creating a humane and vibrant world which cultivates human creativity with the objective of realizing the most productive world to meet human need so we can create beyond need.
So, on this Labor Day, I hope this piece reminds us that Mister Rogers was, in addition to being a fierce advocate for children, was a staunch advocate for labor, helping us to understand the work we all do as expressions of mutual care, of love. While workers have struggled for centuries seeking recognition and justice for their labor (“the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”), perhaps Mister Rogers’ vision can help us understand the love that our collective labors are so that, as a society, we can collectively show some love to labor.