My name is Philip Randolph Wright.
Mr. Wright if we are doing business.
Right now we have something we need to talk about. Not an emergency just yet, but…
That’s the problem.
Bridges still stand. Water still runs. The heat comes on most mornings. The software mostly works.
But everything is a little rougher than it used to be. A little louder. A little less reliable. A little closer to failure every year.
People like to call this an infrastructure problem.
It isn’t.
It’s a maintenance problem.
More accurately, it’s a respect-for-labor problem.
Maintenance work is invisible when it’s done right. No ribbon cuttings. No headlines. Nothing dramatic. Just a system that keeps working because someone showed up, checked it, cleaned it, tightened it, adjusted it, and went home.
That kind of work doesn’t photograph well. It doesn’t feel innovative. It doesn’t impress investors.
So it’s the first thing we stop paying for.
Money has convinced itself that if nothing is visibly broken, no work is being done. That’s backward. The work is the reason nothing is broken.
Every system runs on human attention. When that attention is withdrawn, failure doesn’t arrive all at once. It accumulates. Small shortcuts. Deferred repairs. “Good enough for now.” Until now runs out.
You will pay labor.
You can pay a skilled worker to maintain a system and keep it running correctly.
Or you can pay workers—often more of them—to clean up the mess, replace the system, and rebuild what was neglected.
There is no option where labor is not involved.
The only difference is whether you treat that labor with respect on the front end, or desperation on the back end.
Maintenance is not a cost center. It is the agreement we make with reality that things do not take care of themselves.
When we stop honoring that agreement, systems don’t fail because they are old or flawed. They fail because the people who knew how to care for them were ignored, underpaid, or replaced with the hope that care was optional.
Civilization doesn’t fall apart in explosions.
It falls apart in skipped oil changes.
That’s not a social theory. That’s just how work works.
