I’m about to launch an e-book, so it won’t come as a surprise that words matter to me. They are the tools I use to make stories. As such they are of great value to me. They deserve respect. Words, however, are not always used for peaceful activities like storytelling. Like any human invention, in the wrong hands, they can go from tools to weapons.
I could give you many examples of this. I will stick with just one pair for the purpose of this post: the words “worker” and “employee”.
We see them everyday. So much so that we don’t question their meanings anymore. Today, they both imply a person who does a job, and generally the former summons the idea of manual work, while the latter covers the rest. (And yes, it’s not set in stone, but you get it’s the general use I’m referring to.)
Let’s look at them, though, shall we?
“Worker” comes from the verb “work”, obviously (*). It designates a person who performs an action. The suffix -er signals an agent, someone who does something. The worker is in charge of what his hands do.
“Employee” comes from a word that means “to make use of” (**). The “employee” is someone who is made use of, as signaled by the suffix -ee (***). Someone is in charge of the employee and his hands are no longer his.
See what I’m getting at? How did we go from being workers to employees, and what does that say about us, about the world we live in, and about the “employers” who “employ” us. (For the sake of experimentation, replace the words by their simpler counterparts: “user” and “use”. It’s an unpleasant analogy, isn’t it?)
My point is this:
Words shape thoughts, not the other way around. If a word comes to define you, it starts to define how people, including yourself, think about you. Moreover, if a word displaces another, it slowly starts suppressing people’s ability to think certain things rather than others. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be a worker, in possession of my own skills, rather than an employee, who just serves a purpose. It doesn’t matter if you have a boss or if you are independent. It’s a matter of conception, of image. Do you work for your boss or are you employed by him? It makes a huge difference.
You may believe that I’m over-thinking this, that it’s not that big a deal. Trust me, there’s no such thing as “over-thinking” (by the way, you might want to reflect on how this word was coined and to what end), and yes, it is a big deal. Alienation is a very big deal. It is the mean by which the ownership of your skills is somehow taken from you.
In our day and age, people tend to think of “worker” is a bad word, one that designates a grunt with greasy hands. It is not trivial that the word that means “he who does a deed” has become a bad word and is replaced in most instances by another that means “he who is used”. In a time when more and more people are joining the Occupy movement, claiming to be the 99% that the 1% should learn to respect, such words have power.
My word of advice: don’t be an employee. It may not be easy to change the circumstances of your lives, but you can easily change the way you see yourself. So, go on! Be a worker. Work is good, work is yours.
