on the use of other people

i walked into a lift last week and saw a security guard sitting there. some apartments have service lifts which are used for furniture etc. and it was his job to sit in this lift for ten hours a day, “securing” it i guess.

this service lift was padded with thick green cushions and lit by a single harsh fluorescent light which made it look kind of like an asylum. he was dressed in a uniform with tassels and epaulettes - the braided shoulder boards of a soldier - a simulacrum of battle dress. i couldn’t believe he just sat in that box all day long. the thing i had a harder time believing was that someone, somewhere made this decision and thought it was a reasonable thing to do.

this upsets me because of the absurdity of it all. out of all the ways to ensure the security of a service lift, this has to be the laziest. i understand putting people on a problem so that it’s solved but i don’t get the creation of a problem and then using a person’s time (and possibly sanity) to patch it up.

it seems like people equate the value of something to the price. just because labour is cheap it is used indiscriminately like a tap that will never run out of water.

a common counter argument is that the worker consented to the job but how real is consent if a situation coerces someone to consent to anything at all. in the same building there are people mopping the carpark all day long because the machine that cleans the floor is broken. progress has to be the replacement of drudgery with machinepower. regression then has to be the human toiling in the shadow of unused capital.