Division of labor.

As a graduate student, I read Dean Bakopoulos's article with interest ("Requiem for the American Dream," July issue). I once worked as a security assistant in one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison libraries. I shared the library late shift with custodial workers who routinely passed by me picking up trash, sweeping, and vacuuming. It struck me at the time that while the custodial workers routinely come to the library to clean, students routinely come to the library to read, and leave their trash.

This mundane contrast points to the prevalent division of labor, a social force so powerful yet so ordinary that most people, even the most progressive, take it for granted. For many Americans, and most progressives including Bakopoulos, the problem is that we don't appreciate enough poor and working class people who make our cars or clean our libraries.

Accordingly, the popular progressive solution is to improve living conditions for manual laborers by granting them living wages, health insurance, etc.--all the good things that many upper middle class and tipper class Americans enjoy.

The trouble with this conventional leftist prescription is that it leaves the existing division of labor intact. Bakopoulos's grandfather "might have turned out to be a playwright or a poet," but that would have just meant someone else took his crappy job in the auto plant. Maybe, just maybe, the best solution is to share the bad, not just the good, to ensure that everyone spends part of their workweek cleaning floors, making cars, stocking shelves, and doing other public chores. If it's no longer acceptable to assume that women should clean the house, why is it still acceptable to assume that some people--rather than all of us--should do the chores in the wider society?

Paul Lachelier

Somerville, Massachusetts