This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
The Alienation of Work
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
The emerging economy is opening up new ways to reconnect workers to their work and the profits from their work.
One of the most striking blind spots in our collective angst over the lack of jobs is our apparent disinterest in the nature of work and how work creates value. This disinterest is reflected in a number of conventional assumptions.
One is the constant shedding of tears over the loss of mind-numbing manufacturing jobs. I doubt a single one of the innumerable pundits decrying the loss of "good manufacturing jobs" spent even one shift in an actual assembly line. There is a reason Henry Ford had to pay the then-astronomical salary of $5 per day to his assembly-line workers: the work was so physically demanding and boring that workers quit after a single shift. The only incentive that would keep people doing such hellish work day in, day out, was a big paycheck.
Henry Ford's $5-a-Day Revolution
After the success of the moving assembly line, Henry Ford had another transformative idea: in January 1914, he startled the world by announcing that Ford Motor Company would pay $5 a day to its workers. The pay increase would also be accompanied by a shorter workday (from nine to eight hours). While this rate didn't automatically apply to every worker, it more than doubled the average autoworker's wage.
While Henry's primary objective was to reduce worker attrition--labor turnover from monotonous assembly line work was high--newspapers from all over the world reported the story as an extraordinary gesture of goodwill.
Another is the confusion over what constitutes the means of production in a knowledge economy. The term means of production has its origins in Marx's analysis of capitalism, but the means of production change along with the processes of creating value.
As a result, Peter Drucker identified the worker's knowledge (human capital) as the means of production in a knowledge economy in his book Post-Capitalist Society.
Many readers have misunderstood Drucker's point; their objections include 1) the software workers use is essentially owned by Microsoft and other corporations; 2) only corporations have the means to use workers' knowledge and 3) means of production is an outdated Marxist term that is being mis-used by Drucker.
These objections miss the point. A skilled knowledge-worker can create $100,000 of value with a $500 PC and $300 of software. What percentage does the software represent of the output ($100,000)? Not even 1%.
As for corporations being the only owners of capital who can deploy workers' knowledge, millions of self-employed people suggest that this blanket statement is not entirely true. Yes, enterprises that deploy billions of dollars in material capital (oil drilling rigs, shipyards, etc.) cannot be replaced by the self-employed, but what percentage of the economy requires billions of dollars in capital to operate? In a service-dominated economy, capital-intensive industries are a shrinking slice of the pie.
Rather than focus on employment, why don't we examine the nature of work? Why don't we ask how work creates value in a knowledge economy that is commoditizing/automating whatever labor can be commoditized/automated? How about asking if work can be re-shaped to become meaningful beyond the paycheck being earned?
Let's review the idea that work that isn't controlled and owned by the workers is inherently alienating.
In Marx’s view, workers were alienated from the product of their work because they did not own the product or control the means of production. Marx argued that the absence of ownership and control was also an absence of agency (control of one’s destiny) and meaning. Workers were estranged from the product of their work, from other workers and from themselves, as the natural order of the product of work belonging to the one who produced it was upended by capitalism.
Marx characterized this separation of work from ownership of the work and its output as social alienation from human nature. Capitalism, in his view, did not just reorder production into enterprises whose sole goal was profit and accumulating more capital; it destroyed the natural connection between the worker, the processes of work and the product of his work.
Marx was thus one of the first to analyze work not just in terms of economic output but in social and psychological terms.
This tradition was carried on by writers such as Eric Hoffer, who saw work as the source of life’s meaning, and Christopher Lasch, who saw the rise of consumerism as the basis of meaning and the rootless cosmopolitanism of the modern economy as the source of a culture of narcissism. For Lasch, the relentless commoditization of life disrupted the natural social relations of family, social reciprocity and the workplace, depriving individuals of these sources of meaning and replacing them with an empty consumerism that worshipped fame and celebrity.
Lasch explained these dynamics in his landmark book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations.
The marketplace's commoditization of everyday life--both parents working all day for corporations so they could afford corporate childcare, for example--created two alienating dynamics: a narcissistic personality crippled by a fragile sense of self that sought solace in consumerist identifiers ( wearing the right brands, etc.) and a therapeutic mindset that saw alienation not as the consequence of large-scale, centralized commoditization and financialization but as individual issues to be addressed with self-help and pop psychology.
In Lasch’s view, both of these dynamics ignored the loss of authenticity that resulted from the commoditization not just of production but of every aspect of everyday life. In this sense, Lasch’s social analysis is an extension of Marx’s original insight into the alienating dynamics of commoditized wage-work, in which workers and their work were both interchangeable.
Lasch’s analysis brings us to the source of modern alienation: it’s not just employees who are interchangeable--employers are equally interchangeable. The interchangeability of work, employees, employers, products and services is the key characteristic of commoditization.
What is the takeaway for those seeking a job or career? There are several takeaways.
One is that the sources of value creation are linked to the level of agency (control of one’s work) and ownership of the work: work that is not process-based (i.e. that cannot be commoditized) and that is experientially sensitive to mastery enables a higher level of agency and ownership because the worker owns the means of production--his human and social capital.
The second is that the dramatic lowering of barriers to education and the ownership of tools powered by the Internet has greatly expanded the opportunities to escape an alienating dependence on the state and cartels for employment and on superficial consumerism for meaning.
If we trust networks rather than states or corporations for our security, we automatically gain agency (control of our work and lives) and an authentic sense of self gained from owning our work and the results of our work.
It is important to understand that corporations exist to make a profit and accumulate capital, for if they do not make a profit and accumulate capital they will bleed capital and disappear. To believe that organizations dedicated to making a profit could magically organize society in ways that benefit every participant is nonsense. Corporations organize labor and capital to accumulate capital. It is absurd to expect that such organized self-interest magically optimizes the social order.
This is not to blame all the ills of society on corporations; it is simply to note that corporations are limited by their limited purpose. Their purpose is not to organize a healthy, sustainable economy; it is to organize labor and capital in such a way that the corporation can accumulate capital in a marketplace controlled by supply and demand.
Corporations have profited greatly from the alienation of work and the social order, as narcissistic debt-based consumerism is a highly profitable economic order, even if it is socially dysfunctional, unsustainable and destructive to individual agency and meaning.
The expansion of decentralized, distributed networks, the near-zero cost of knowledge and the declining cost of the means of production (digital memory and processors, software, 3-D fabrication machines, robotics and tools) offer newfound opportunities for workers to reclaim their agency and ownership of their work and output.
Rather than rely on centralized states and corporations to organize labor and capital, collaborative networks can do so without alienating workers from their work and disrupting the sources of meaning.
The emerging economy is opening up new ways to reconnect workers to their work and the profits from their work. These include traditional models such as self-employment and worker-owned cooperatives and new models of collaborative project-based work.
How do we change a dysfunctional, unsustainable and alienating system? By investing in new ways of creating value and alternative models of cooperative work and ownership.
++++++++
This essay was excerpted from my new book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy which is on sale through Tuesday evening (Pacific Standard time) at a 20% discount for my regular readers ($7.95 for the Kindle edition, 20% off of the list price of $9.95. The print edition is $20).
You can read the introduction and first section of the book here.
»
- 11211 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
- Wendell Berry
Justice and mercy are in short supply, so we must up the demand.
Justice is only doled out to those not connected, mercy only for those who are.
Time to turn that shit around, eh?
Time to stop playing a game that is rigged against us, and make our own.
Don't know who Wendell was, but sounds like he doesn't understand that when it comes to the crunch supply and demand trumps justice and mercy every time.
For a much better understanding of everything, try perusing the following:
The Invention of Capitalism, by Michael Perelman
Wealth, Power and the Crisis in Laissez-Faire Capitalism, by Donald Gibson
And of course, one must always include the latest study from one of America's prinicipal crime factories, Princeton University:
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf
To understand the onerous concepts of profit, labor surplus and economic surplus (Veblen), is to begin to understand everything!
How true. When I first read the title, I thought of this, actually.
McDonald's accused of favouring foreign workersMcDonald’s is under federal investigation over possible abuses of the Temporary Foreign Worker program at a franchise outlet in B.C.
"The pattern is that the temporary foreign workers are getting more shifts and that the Canadians are getting less,” said employee Kalen Christ, a McDonald’s "team leader" who has worked at the Victoria location for four years.
I see actual CO-OPs being a huge thing in the future again. Not the fake Corporate ones, but honest spit in hand and shake on it CO-OPs.
The world is going to get alot more local.
I agree and think you are right, because Americans are slowly waking up to this reality, that multi-National globalist corporatism isn't in their best interest!!
The problem is, we've breed out over the last two generations in this Country, all the free thinking, entrepreneurial, innovative, hard working types, and replaced them with free loading, entitled, self loathing, under-educated types!!
Running a Co-op or a small business is only possible with the first type of Americans I described, the later is well suited for a globalist oligarchy but nothing more!!!
America is caught in a catch 22 of its own making, and no one will be coming to our "rescue" I'm pretty sure!
How about a return to the past. Thriving small businesses not being crushed by taxes, regulations and excessive legal intrusions would help a lot of the mess we are in now.
What do you think this is, America?
I'd say the world is going to get "glocal," i.e., highly distributed but totally interconnected, with 3D printing returning manufacturing to the home (http://bigthink.com/ideas/will-3d-printing-spark-a-home-manufacturing-re...) and thereby sparking a de-urbanization movement in which small communities will consist of "cottage industries" that are both self- and other-serving.
In other words, fewer and fewer corporations, smaller and smaller governments, and ever-expanding network effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law) facilitated by an "Internet of money" (http://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of-money) that drives pricess to the vanishing point and thereby ushers in the end of scarcity and the beginning of abundance.
You've got the picture, Dick!!
+ 50!
Best of all, the picture will eventually have no state in it at all, as abundance will render its impetus null and void, there being no reason to steal what is free to all.
That is what we are doing. But I must add : for some things you need the big machine, plant etcetera. So we buy components form the big machines, to build on a local small scale. Our end product is cheaper ( direct sale to end users) and better. And we know what we sell... .
I hope your right because they are eating us self employed alive, doubt many can even get out of the shoots now.
You are right... which is why we have to Stop Obeying Them.
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
That's the same old progressive meme for making a fair and just society which led to the present over controlled condition we have. Wendell Berry is a liberal activist, I wouldn't expect any new ideas.
People have always been trying to control the sociopaths. Even in grammer school, the sociopaths are a problem and the teacher that can't control them eventually loses the entire class.
The "old progressive meme" of anti-nobility was also an attempt to control the sociopaths. It worked for awhile. But, the nice people forget who needs to be controlled and the sociopaths create bullshit that no control is needed for "the job creators".
Such is life. The sociopaths win.
Sociopaths only win when whole persons are manipulated into obeying them.
Good quote
I posted this on another thread but may as well post it again here. I've never abused this privilege before.
If a nuclear bomb exploded in downtown Washington, what should you do?
http://theweek.com/article/index/259829/if-a-nuclear-bomb-exploded-in-do...
I don't know what you should do, but I know what I would do.
Celebrate. Get ripped and throw a party and throw some lead btw towards nowhere in particular (in lieu of fireworks which are illegal).
As an aside in case anyone forgot, this is April 15, USSA federal income tax filing dead line.
Did you know your friendly tax accountant is an agent of the USSA gov? I know this will be old news to most ZHers, but some newcomers here might benefit from the knowledge. I will write no more than that on that subject because as we all know there is something today surrounding our communications apparatus (apparati?) called a 'chilling effect' and that is something I take very seriously.
Just as lawyers are officers of the court.
Go ahead, say something. As soon as you self sensor, they win.
Not seeing the problem with talking about tax guys when in the paragraph above you speak of celebrating a nucUlar bomb going off?
(that was serious, not a jab)
pods
Ha-ha, I see your point. But I was only kidding about celebrating the 'nucular' bomb. Who could take that seriously? I would have to be one twisted fuck to do that.
You're right about the censoring. How about this:
My tax guy is fired as of today. (But he won't find out 'til next year.)
I'll do my own fucking tax returns from now on. Like I can afford to pay for my own rape anyway.
hahahahahhahahahahahahahaha!!!
CWB, be warned about doing your own taxes. I have done them for years until the Inferno Revenue Service audited me last year. Bitches can rot in hell.
+1. I'll never do my own taxes again. When I went free-lance 10 years ago, I used TurboTax (pre-Timmy). I found numerous different places to enter the cost of printer paper. I figured there had to be a better or worse place to enter it but I couldn't tell. I thought I was due a $600 refund. I decided to take my taxes to a CPA recommended to me by a colleague. He found me an $1800 refund, and charged me $400. So I came out $800 ahead, and I've never done my own taxes since. I do my own record-keeping and sorting, and my own basic book-keeping. But never my own taxes. Just try to figure out how to deal with any changes to an HSA, for instance. Forget it. Pay a pro. The IRS is nothing but a bullpen of pros looking to nail you; you need your own pro to keep them at bay.
Exactly... An auditor does not want to deal with you and is going to shit in your face... at least tax professionals can keep them at bay a bit. Further, having someone else sign off on your return is worth something.
That said, the newest trend for tax professionals (and lawyers alike) is to turn in clients for tax fraud and collect the bounty. Privilege has its limitations.
@chief wonder bread
I would pray (although I'm a atheist so not sure who am I praying to) that White House is in full session when that nuke explodes. That way we can finally have a new government.
Face Palm....So they used the WSJ article as the excuse for the Gold pounding, so Gold should sky rocket on this news correct?
China physical gold demand to rise 25% by 2017:
Big thank you to Charles Hugh Smith for asking the right questions about the nature of work.
Lots of high-fallutin' words to say hippie communes are a pretty good thing, plus unrestrained sex.
Education should be about learning to excel at something that you're actually interested in. If you enjoy doing it, it's not work. If you're working you're wasting your life.
Oh Boomberg, you have a way with words.
Marx characterized this separation of work from ownership of the work and its output as social alienation from human nature.
It's called increased productivity via labor specialization.
No, you can't have the airplane, here's your paycheck instead.
Get over it or go make Christmas ornaments for a living.
The expansion of decentralized, distributed networks can change a lot of things but not this.
"...the means of production change along with the processes of creating value."
Hold it. Hold it... If you believe that "value" is merely something that "aggregate demand" will pay for, you are nothing more than another Keynesian. What merely attracts buyers does not constitute "value".
REAL "value" is not only what other people will pay for - "money" can be printed anyway - but is what can be mined, farmed, fished or manufactured...ONLY.
The rest ~ including those i-gadgets ~ is resources being CHURNED...
And - as we peasants are seeing - it's quite possible to starve and freeze in a "knowledge economy"...
What I hate is the way work alienates me from napping. It's dysfunctional, I tell ya'. Unsustainable! (Yeah, that's the ticket...)
Cutting out the useless paper-pushing middlemen is essential, period.
They are what drives the commoditization process. And increasingly so as the global economic system reaches it's logical conclusion.
Value will return, but on a local level first. Real people, real work, real products, etc.
Paper pushers won't be needed in that economy.
Not all workers have the risk tolerance or skills needed to take advantage of "newfound opportunities for workers to reclaim their agency and ownership of their work and output."
Over the course of my working career, I've watched the mega-corps, for the most part, degenerate into sociopathic organizations that chew up their workers and grind them into nothing. Of course, the largest of them have merged with government to create this fascistic system where we are all being looted of our money and time
My friend is having her boss threaten her with replacing her with an H1B even though her 70 hours a week on salary just are not good enough for him. She told me that he yells at all of his underlings constantly. I told her to let him try that with me. I'll hand him his head on a stick.
I am one of the guys he speaks about. I've invested 2K in capital equipment and software for my business, and the global mega-corps can go fuck themselves back to hell as far as I'm concerned.
Sorry if you don't mind me asking what business are you starting?
IT consulting is my gig. Very much knowledge based, and I'm highly experienced in enterprise IT. I've been doing it for 2 years with my gross revenue growing around 30% YOY each year.
It's really hard work, but I could never work as a direct employee again. I've found I love being an entrepreneur.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I run circles around younger guys in my field due to my experience. I also enjoy learning new things which is a requirement in this field and excel at out of the box thinking.
I also get to do things that I never would have been allowed to do in my former corporate job like sales and networking which I've learned I'm pretty good at both.
Basically, I'm done with corporate America. I tend to work with smaller businesses that still have the human factor intact.
Everyday, I strive to put less of my money in the mega-corp coffers. I buy used and from local merchants. In my opinion, we're back to the robber baron days.
coastal
Good for you. I'll be sending you some positive brainwaves.
I think the biggest thing alienating people from work is the fact that they work their asses off only to see inflation creeping up on them.
You can never hit stasis in this type of system. That is why all these pie in the sky sustainable ideas are bunk in our system.
Exponential growth or bust. So you work you ass off and find you are not falling behind quite as far as the guy who decides to spend time with family rather than slave at the job.
The money system is more to blame than anything else. Everything in life is about amassing enough money so the exponential decay of that money is less than the interest earned on it.
Fucking rat race you can thank the banksters for.
pods
if you accelerate fast enough you can hit stasis in this system...so long as that momentum holds up, of course. but this system tends towards getting your vector bent as a given.
Bingo!
There are so many broad generalizations in this piece that are not true in many cases. For example, Demming recognized in the 50s the desire of workers to do good work and that to produce the highest quality of work they need to feel they have control over their work environment. His influence has led many cororations to develop models for encouraging workers involvement in how their own shop is run.
Corporations are individual to such an extent it it difficultl to make broad generalizations about their purpose and goals. They do share a common goal: to serve consumers upon whom they are completely dependent for their existence and the livelihood of their workers. Too many people want to pretend the service corporations do to consumers doesn't exist, but most attempts to control corporations translate to attempts to undermine consumers and force them to accept what someone else thinks they should get. The goal being to shift from a model where consumers decide what they want to one whee they are a slave to someone else's whims.
Good article, but - personally - I think "work" is vastly overrated (how's that joke go: If work was fun they wouldn't have to pay you.)
One thing he was getting at, that he didn't go into explicitly because CHS covers this elsewhere, was that much of what we call "work" is not really work at all.
Marx, Drucker, the Banksters, the radical liberals, the radical feminists, and the open borders proponents are all of one mind. It's time we stopped taking their insane advice and stop taking their destructive help.
What about the "radical Conservatives" who love using the the power of Big-Gov to bomb the sand people and make laws regulating sex?
How about ALL statists, who want to control other people's lives in a wide variety of ways.
Wannabe slavemasters all.
If there was a point to this Marxist rant I missed it.
Try reading it again. Others on here "got it".
Here's a tip. When an article mentions Marx that doesn't make the article Marxist. The Libertarian economists might not have a clue about human nature either, but that doesn't mean all their ideas should be ignored.
If you can't take a critique of capitalism seriously because it mentions Marx, you might want to check yourself at the door. We need more people that think critically about things, and that might include bringing a particular theory of marx, namely the idea of "means of production", into a discussion on what work actually constitutes.
I dream of a hydrogen fusion based maker society
Large industrial corporations and work as we know it disappears
Everything is solved, Fukushima, climate change, space colonization
It is all a matter of sufficient energy
It is all a matter of sufficient energy
And of cleaning out the evil subservience meme that currently owns mankind.
no such thing as climate change
euro socialists invented this and promoted it to slow production in other areas of the world to prop up their dogshit economies
euro productivity is an oxymoron
The whole reason I read this article was summed up in the final sentence and not addressed at all, rather just posed as an open ended rhetorical statement.
So tell me how do we do this?
"In Marx’s view, workers were alienated from the product of their work because they did not own the product or control the means of production. Marx argued that the absence of ownership and control was also an absence of agency (control of one’s destiny) and meaning. Workers were estranged from the product of their work, from other workers and from themselves, as the natural order of the product of work belonging to the one who produced it was upended by capitalism."
It has always struck me that on this alienation theory, the workers of old (that is, prior to capitalism) must have been maximally alienated, because serfs (to say nothing of slaves) did not really own anything - for how can property own something? And later, during the rise of commerce and industrial craftsmanship, these people did not own most of what they traded or manufactured. For example in Europe, merchants bought wool on credit from England and shipped it to what is now Belgium, then other merchants bought it - again on credit - and paid weavers, fullers, and dyers to manufacture the finished textiles, these artisans were usually collectivized in guilds (hanse) and most would not have owned their tools and equipment, and none of them owned the wool they worked with.
Basically what Marx did was take his 19th century readings in history as an objective and complete picture of human history, and generalize them into a worldview, in the exact same manner as the French philosophes who invented the mythical "state of nature". But the history which they used to inform, situate, and justify their theories and worldviews never happened on this planet.
Orthodox Marxism is a labor cult (see: Homo Faber). It is in no way the antithesis of capitalism as it has ever existed in history; they're both anthropocentric secular religions of industry and technology, of man dominating nature in order to realize his own ends. So one should be entirely unsurprised to hear things like "Eric Hoffer [...] saw work as the source of life’s meaning", which simply means that he shared the attitude of almost every other (post-)Enlightenment thinker, including orthodox Marxists. The belief says infinitely more about those who believe it, and the societies, cultures, and economies they lived in, than it does about reality. The labor cult is a relatively modern invention, I think in its modern character it dates to the Enlightenment, but was heavily influenced by Protestantism, which in turn simply put its own spin on a Catholic idea dating back to at least the high middle ages. But in fact in any premodern agricultural society, there is marked and systematic social stratification, and in all such societies we find the same thing: those at the top create a religion, secular or not, which rationalizes, naturalizes, universalizes, and justifies the role of the laborer (upon whose labor the entire civilization is ultimately founded). Whereas all others have been fundamentally hypocritical, Marxist communist political economy was/is an attempt to correct in practice the relation between the economic value of the laborer* with his low social and political and economic positions. But it's still just a labor cult, and it made a huge number of problematic assumptions, methodological errors, and faulty conclusions (for example, excluding from "the proletariat" all non-urban laborers, such as farmers - a clear mark of the historical situation where Marx and Engels developed their ideas, contrast this with Maoism and especially with Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge agrarian communism [FYI: Marxist-oriented communists explicitly rejected any applicability of their theories to agrarian societies, LOL!]).
So overall I'd have to call CHS's attempt here shallow, misleading, abortive, etc. The problem with such missives if they often correctly identify problems, but never correctly identify causes nor solutions.
"Rather than rely on centralized states and corporations to organize labor and capital, collaborative networks can do so without alienating workers from their work and disrupting the sources of meaning."
Alienation is a mystification. We are to take it on CHS's word that work is a source of meaning (which is never defined). We are imagine how this process occurs, because CHS doesn't tell us. And we are to accept that alienation is a real and meaningful phenomenon experienced by real people to their detriment, because CHS quotes Marxists who said so.
If you're looking for "meaning" in your work, hope that you're stupendously easily satisfied, or else you're gonna be looking for long, long time. In the real world, now as always, people work because a) they want to eat and/or b) they don't want to live hand-to-mouth and/or c) they enjoy the benefits conferred by possessing what we call "fuck you" money. A fry cook at McDonald's can wax poetic about the "meaning" of his labor all day, owning his means of production won't magically happen and it won't make his tedious work any less tedious. In reality, the fry-cook who magically gains some wealth just becomes a capitalist and pays someone else to make his fries. If only hourly laborers owned their means of production, their mind-numbing and soul-destroying and abominally boring and repetitive mechanical labor would suddenly, magically, be pregnant with "meaning" - and the fact that they are still poor and underemployed and struggling to make ends meet would simply fade into irrelevance, amen.
The degree to which such thinking ignores actual economics is comparable to the degree to which children's cartoons ignore Newtownian physics. Perhaps we should address the question of the condition of the possibility of economic value before we begin fatuous rants about (undefined) "value" and (undefined) "meaning" which implicitly presuppose a world overflowing with both.
The article is awesome. CHS has got it. Its time to move him to the top fellas.
For Lasch, the relentless commoditization of life disrupted the natural social relations of family, social reciprocity and the workplace, ...
Funny how no one ever questions the erosion of family natural social relations by social security schemes since Bismarck, to mention only the most obvious omission!
Might it be because that would be a step on the toes of too many readers?
Sorry CHS, but your post smells like a exercise of approval fishing.