Clearly, machines promise to make work easier and more reliable. To do things by hand is to make life difficult. Difficulty can imply many things. Difficulty here provides the basis for the labour that extends the self beyond its own desires. In this sense, it is not that life wasn't meant to be easy, but that life shouldn't be easy.
Difficulty moves in the opposite direction to the call for more efficient work practices.
I can't argue against the line that market competition makes efficiency more important. What I feel I can argue is that the modern world requires a difference of this kind. Please consider These three articles involve a struggle to identify the place of the crafts in contemporary society. In essence, they move towards an alternative to the two major options that had appeared open. In the first option, the critique of the demise of craft story from New York was aimed at the nostalgic attempts to refrigerate the crafts in the humanistic sentiment of a past where humans could be seen as still containing the powers to change the world.