Sherry Chandler

It’s Labor Day and we should be celebrating the 40-hour week and the week-end. Right? Well, maybe not. Check out this NYTimes op-ed by Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing.

Left to our own devices, we seldom organize our time with 8-to-5 discipline. The pre-industrial world of agricultural and artisan labor was structured by what the historian E. P. Thompson calls “alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness wherever men were in control of their working lives.” Agricultural work was seasonal, interrupted by rain, forced into hyperactivity by the threat of rain, and determined by other uncontrollable natural processes. The force of long cultural habit ensured that the change from such discontinuous tasks to the regimented labor of the factory never went particularly smoothly.

In 1877 a New York cigar manufacturer grumbled that his cigar makers could never be counted on to do a straight shift’s work. They would “come down to the shop in the morning, roll a few cigars,” he complained to The New York Herald, “and then go to a beer saloon and play pinochle or some other game.” The workers would return when they pleased, roll a few more cigars, and then revisit the saloon, all told “working probably two or three hours a day.” Cigar makers in Milwaukee went on strike in 1882 simply to preserve their right to leave the shop at any time without their foreman’s permission.

In this the cigar workers were typical. American manufacturing laborers came and left for the day at different times. “Monday,” one manufacturer complained, was always “given up to debauchery,” and on Saturdays, brewery wagons came right to the factory, encouraging workers to celebrate payday. Daily breaks for “dramming” were common, with workers coming and going from the work place as they pleased. Their workdays were often, by 20th-century standards, riddled with breaks for meals, snacks, wine, brandy and reading the newspaper aloud to fellow workers.

An owner of a New Jersey iron mill made these notations in his diary over the course of a single week:

“All hands drunk.”

“Jacob Ventling hunting.”

“Molders all agree to quit work and went to the beach.”

“Peter Cox very drunk.”

“Edward Rutter off a-drinking.”

At the shipyards, too, workers stopped their labor at irregular intervals and drank heavily. One ship’s carpenter in the mid-19th century described an almost hourly round of breaks for cakes, candy and whiskey, while some of his co-workers “sailed out pretty regularly 10 times a day on the average” to the “convenient grog-shops.” Management attempts to stop such midday drinking breaks routinely met with strikes and sometimes resulted in riots. During much of the 19th century, there were more strikes over issues of time-control than there were about pay or working hours.

from Salon’s AP feed:

September 03,2006 | WASHINGTON — Meat-eaters usually assume a grass-fed steak came from cattle contentedly grazing for most of their lives on lush pastures, not crowded into feedlots. If the government has its way, the grass-fed label could be used to sell beef that didn’t roam the range and ate more than just grass.

The Agriculture Department has proposed a standard for grass-fed meat that doesn’t say animals need pasture and that broadly defines grass to include things like leftovers from harvested crops.

Critics say the proposal is so loose that it would let more conventional ranchers slap a grass-fed label on their beef, too.

Here’s a question for you. If this is okay to do, morally acceptable, why then is it not okay to have an abortion? Or, at the very least, why is it wrong to do stem cell research using rejected blastocysts?

Couples Cull Embryos to Halt Heritage of Cancer

As Chad Kingsbury watches his daughter playing in the sandbox behind their suburban Chicago house, the thought that has flashed through his mind a million times in her two years of life comes again: Chloe will never be sick.

Not, at least, with the inherited form of colon cancer that has devastated his family, killing his mother, her father and her two brothers, and that he too may face because of a genetic mutation that makes him unusually susceptible.

By subjecting Chloe to a genetic test when she was an eight-cell embryo in a petri dish, Mr. Kingsbury and his wife, Colby, were able to determine that she did not harbor the defective gene. That was the reason they selected her, from among the other embryos they had conceived through elective in vitro fertilization, to implant in her mother’s uterus.

…

For most parents who have used preimplantation diagnosis, the burden of playing God has been trumped by the near certainty that diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia will afflict the children who carry the genetic mutation that causes them.

Mind you, I am not condemning the Kingsburies. The article makes clear that they did not make this decision lightly. Given the same set of circumstances, I have no idea what choices I would make. But sitting here gratefully well past child-bearing with my children grown into relatively healthy young men, I find the notion of designer children a little chilling.

As doctors and genetic counselors at leading cancer centers like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York start to suggest the possibility of P.G.D., more young patients are finding that their answer lies in trading natural conception for the degree of scientific control offered by the procedure. And if the growing interest in screening for cancer risk signals an expanded tolerance for genetic selection, geneticists and fertility experts say it may well be accompanied by the greater use of preimplantation diagnosis to select for characteristics that range from less serious diseases to purely matters of preference.

Already, it is possible to test embryos for an inherited form of deafness or a mild skin condition, or for a predisposition to arthritis or obesity. Some clinics test for gender.

The implications of that last simple statement tend to raise the neck hairs of an old feminist like me. Moral clarity starts to muddy up a little here.

A little muddier here:

The process is also difficult and expensive. [Preimplantation genetic diagnosis], which requires in vitro fertilization, can cost tens of thousands of dollars. While insurance companies often pay for the more traditional uses of the procedure, they have not done so for cancer-risk genes, fertility experts say. The barrier to affordability, some critics fear, could make preimplantation diagnosis for cancer risk the first significant step toward a genetic class divide in which the wealthy will become more genetically pure than the poor.

So — a way to realize the Bell Curve?

Didn’t we reject this kind of messing around back in the Twentieth Century? It’s a question that must be asked.

Anyway, I mourn a bit for a couple whose child “will never be sick.” It’s a dangerous old world. Children are always going to be hostages to fate, even perfect ones.

As a pessimist, I think perhaps this kind of tinkering may wind up causing as many problems as it solves. Humans are smart enough to do many things they are not wise enough to do.

Soon, experts say, prospective parents may be able to choose between an embryo that could become a child with a lower risk of colon cancer who is likely to be fat, or one who is likely to be thin but has a slightly elevated risk of Alzheimer’s, or a boy likely to be short with low cholesterol but a significant risk of Parkinson’s, or a girl likely to be tall with a moderate risk of diabetes.

It’s a long article that lays out the complexities of the choices. Worth reading.

[Added note: Looking at this question, I think I got tangled up in my own rhetoric and forgot my original point which is not whether we should have the choice described here but this: If we are to be allowed to choose artificial insemination for the purpose of beating the genetic odds, to choose a sound embryo/child over an unsound one, why then are we not allowed choice in abortion? And why are we not allowed stem-cell research? All of these actions may lead us into morally gray areas, but in the one we are allowed freedom of choice and in the others we are not. I think that we are guilty of muddy thinking. Or of reacting with our emotions. OR of exploiting an issue for political gain...]