The Nature of Work. Chapter 1

"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second telling other people to do so.

The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid".

The idea of not working, by winning a state sponsored lottery for example, or winning at some form of gambling, remains more than attractive. It creates figures of envy, or admiration; and fuels more attempts to win by losers, to gain enough money so as never to need to work again.

What are the attractions of not working? One answer is, not working for other people. This can create a paradoxical situation where one is working for oneself, and often working harder than before; or at least working longer hours. Starting a new small business will typically involve long hours. Further, there can be a desire to create work for others, including the unemployed. So the search for not working for others, can produce more work for both the small business entrepreneur and possibly employees.

The initial attraction of leaving work in this case can be seen more accurately as leaving employment. What this means is not simple either. It can mean a desire to control one’s own working life, in terms of daily time keeping, decision making, or the thrill/danger of investing one’s own savings in a new venture. This is not an escape from work at all; but an escape from control by others in a firm’s hierarchy. Indeed this is one classic answer as to why one should work in the first place. It brings a freedom into one’s life that working for others does not.

Winning the lottery also brings the possibility of a life of extended leisure. This ideal can be compromised by begging letters, pressure from relatives, friends and others for loans etc. Cases of personal unhappiness, divorce, drug abuse, show some of the underside of this flight from work.

The sociological literature does not document the above cases very well. However, cases where work is seen as negative in a variety of ways is much better documented. The experiences of work as boring, as physically and emotionally exhausting, as insecure or temporary, are good grounds for avoiding this sort of work. One of the interesting things about these types of work is that they are as old as the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Attempts to reduce the negative aspects of work are at least 100 years old. There are fewer metals bashing factories to day than before; but there is a growing number of out of town telephone call centres, where these negative aspects of work are reappearing. The old complaints of boredom and repetition are resurfacing in the latest high tech employment.

The case of enforced non-work, or unemployment, is also not clear-cut. There is a widespread belief that unemployment is the fault of the individual; that they are work shy, lazy, opposed to the work culture; and depending unnecessarily on state benefits. Against this there is much evidence to show that most of the unemployed actively wish to return to work. The reasons given for this wish are not just the need for money, but also their sense of themselves as full-time workers temporarily out of work (Coyle, 1984). This appears to be as true of women as it is of men.

This produces a situation where there are strong feelings both for and against work. What does this mean? One answer is that there is no universal demand for work, or non-work. Indeed protagonists for both sides universalise their positions. Everyone should work; is opposed by everyone should be free not to work if they wish, and should be subsidised by some form of living allowance. Some theorists have conceived of the possibility of permanently increasing productivity producing a situation where only a minority needs to work to supply the majority. This position has been most clearly advocated by the French polemicist André Gorz (Gorz, 72: 1982). He argued that less labour time is needed to reproduce society because machinery had become more productive. This produces more unemployment. However, an alternative to mass unemployment is for all those in work to work less, and have more free time. Those out of work could then have the work no longer being done by those already in work. The free time all workers would then have could be used for developing their talents and political interests.

This could work in a variety of possible ways. Gorz gives the following examples:

Work 2 hours per day, 5 days per week;

Work 10 hours per week, possibly over one day;

Work 15 weeks per year, at 33 hours per week;

Work 10 years in a lifetime, at about 40 hours per week.

This time commitment is closer to the hours worked in pre-industrial society, which has been estimated to be about 4 to 5 hours per day. The picture painted is one of a great leap in a civilised society, albeit a leap back into the past. This frankly utopian style of thinking has a long history. The standard objection applies. One is perhaps persuaded by the ideal near future, but not told practically how to get there. Another objection, more specifically related to Gorz is that his analysis is too Eurocentric. There are many other societies not yet so industrialised as to have the productivity gains of Europe. They still require full time skilled and unskilled workers. This may well change over time. A recent indication of rising skill levels in developing countries is that over half the world production of television sets takes place outside countries who belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Held et al., 265: 1999). The actual assembly part of production may be in one place, but various component parts may be sourced from producers with low wage economies. This is also true for the textiles and clothing industries; with North Africa supplying Europe, and the Caribbean and Latin America supplying North America.

What is not clear here is whether skill levels have changed very much relative to the work done before being employed by multi-national European or American firms. If the workers were largely employed in agriculture prior to factory work making components for export, what skills did they use in their previous work and how are these skills to be compared to their present work? What period of training, and what level of training did they receive? Is it not possible that there is actually less skill involved in stitching footballs together, than in ploughing straight lines in a field?

Another problem is that in industries like pharmaceuticals, research and development work, with perhaps the most skilled work being done by highly educated scientists, is concentrated in Europe and America. So there is little chance that workers outside these two areas of the world will acquire the highest skills! If the level of skill increase has been exaggerated for workers outside Europe and America, then Gorz has a point. Dramatic increases in productivity will remain in societies with high technology and highly trained workers for some time yet. Easy international transfer of technology and skill may be some time off in the future. Indeed Gorz has been rightly criticised for popularising the slogan “Work less, live more” as being universally applicable, when it is currently operating largely in Europe and North America.

Perhaps a better analysis of feelings about work should look at the position in the life cycle of the individual; the existence of inherited capital, or it’s expectation; the need for a family wage; the single parent family; the approach of early retirement etc. Work is not a universal need, but a varying requirement in peoples’ varying lifetimes.

The discussion, so far, has only looked at paid work. The normally unpaid work of domestic labour may become paid. Personal servants, who are paid from income from paid work or income from lottery winnings, can do it. Alternatively if domestic labour is still done unpaid by household members, it remains under householder’s control. So there is no need to manage others. Typically those managed are women domestic labourers. Although researchers have discovered cases of women managing, and criticising, men’s domestic labour[a2] (Hochschild, 1989).

Aspects of domestic labour, such as cooking and gardening, may be seen as more creative work than many forms of paid labour. However, domestic labour is also very repetitive, and can be boring. Again one needs to look at the individual’s experience of both paid and unpaid work to date. There is no universal commitment to, or against, domestic labour.

Recent analyses of paid work have stressed its negative aspects. In particular the long hours British workers put in to paid work have consequences for the necessary domestic labour. There is less time to do domestic work in. The growing number of single person households, and reconstituted families after divorce, point to the increasing importance of work in peoples lives. In the case of single person household there are no other people requiring your emotional energy, most of which will have been expended during the day at work. In the case of the reconstituted family, the draining emotional problems of the first family on the edge of divorce are not present. So there is more emotional energy for the workplace. This is not to assume that reconstituted families are without emotional strains. Indeed the two demands for emotional energies from both work and home can be seen as being in permanent conflict. This conflict will be examined in the chapter on emotion work.

Increasingly workers are beginning to see themselves as employees of some large organisation first, and as mothers, fathers, brothers second. This implies an answer to the question why work, because it is the most important thing in one’s life. Further, as the service sector becomes a bigger employer than manufacturing, the need for emotional work becomes greater in paid work. This again has consequences for emotional work still required within the family.

Paid emotional work is, simply put, keeping the customer satisfied. Less simply it is working on your own emotions as a service worker. This work takes the form of following some direct instructions. Do not show the anger you may feel. Do not talk to the cashier on the supermarket till next to yours. Always smile! This work is not only very tiring, it may get in the way of the emotional work that still needs to be done in the family. At an extreme the emotional work in the family may not be done well, or not at all.

Finally these negative aspects of recent analyses of work have gone hand in hand with a call for a reduction in working hours, and paternity leave. Management has also attempted to empower workers with more responsibly at a younger age, and more satisfaction in work. The negative analyses seem to be opposed by the positive attempts to make work more satisfying. One wants more work; the other less. The provision of crèches, and arriving early and leaving the workplace late, implies a desire for more work. The provision of maternity, and increasingly paternity, leave implies less work.

These are the current and perhaps mundane advantages and disadvantages of working life. There is no shortage of grander justifications for working. In sociology Max Weber's linking of capitalism and puritanical Christianity is the classic example. An historical analysis of this link produced a variety of justifications of capitalist enterprise. These included using your god-given talents to the full, putting god’s will to work in the world, showing your wealth as evidence of your closeness to god, and most importantly reinvesting your profits back into the firm as opposed to personal consumption. These were seen by Weber to have been important historically, but have less influence in the twentieth century. A lesser known example from this century comes from Japan.

The founder of Matsushita Electric, who died in 1989, argued that water is essential for life. But when it is in abundant supply nobody objects to a tramp drinking water from a roadside pump. Similarly if cars and electrical goods can be made abundant, meaning supplied at a low price through mass production, then this can help to reduce poverty. Exactly how this is to work is not spelled out. Mass employment to work in mass production is possible, but improvements in technology means fewer workers are needed to produce more. But this is not the point. The promise of the “power of religion is added to a paradise of material abundance” (Matsushita, 200: 1988) gives one a sense of another link between religion and capitalism that provides energy and justification (Matsushita, 1989).

More recent, and more secular, justifications include the idea of business process reengineering. Instead of having a set of functional departments within the organisation specialising in accounts production etc., there are a series of teams. Each team has one functional expert within it. So there is one accountant and one engineer etc. The number of teams is determined by the number of products or services the organisation offers. The advantage of this reorganisation is that when a customer wishes to enquire about an order they do not have to go from department to department. Further, as the team gets more experience of working together over time, each expert will learn more about the other’s expertise. Management consultants have led this change with an apocalyptic passion, well noted by theologians. The most aggressive enthusiasts describe the change as follows: “Fundamentally, reengineering is about reversing the Industrial Revolution. Reengineering rejects the assumptions inherent in Adam Smith’s industrial paradigm - the division of labour, economies of scale, hierarchical control, and all the other appurtenances of an early-stage developing economy. Reengineering is the search for new models of organising work. Tradition counts for nothing. Reengineering is a new beginning” (Hammer and Champy, 1993 cited in Knights and Willmott, 2000:116). Leaving aside a suspicion of exaggeration here, the point again is that this language not only describes an enthusiasm for change, but is itself producing enthusiasm in the reader.

The point of this introductory chapter has been to try to show that the nature of work is very changeable over a lifetime, and also over historical time. The view of manual work in classical Greece was that it was fit only for slaves as it was too close to the earth. The good life was to be spent in active politics and debating important questions about life, peace and war. In later periods work was related to religion and personal salvation, as in Max Weber.

Social historians have documented the way in which men moved away from the home and into an office or factory in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, thus making paid work essentially masculine. By the end of the 20^th century women have also entered paid work, bringing into question the maleness of work. The question of the maleness of paid work, and more broadly of male identity itself, has been analysed in a study called “Family Fortunes”. The authors write that

“Far from the blustering certainty of the late Victorian Paterfamilias, early 19^th century masculinity was fragile, still in the process of being forged, and always measured against the background of condescension from the gentry as well as the long tradition of artisan pride.”

In other words these men were placed uneasily between the aristocratic gentry above them, and the craft pride of the working artisans below them. They had not the leisure, nor the education, of the gentry as the older universities were closed to them. Their belief in the new sciences, and their application to business and agriculture, made the gentry suspicious that their lands would no longer be left for traditional sports, but turned over to improved farming. Their fear of the artisans was based on the influence of the radical ideas of the French Revolution, and a variety of violent disturbances that shook early 19^th century England. The emergence of male middle class workers occurred over a long period. One of the key features of this emergence was the separation of home and work. A measure of this separation was an analysis of records of the economic life of a family where home and work was not separated.

“Examination of account books shows that even when formal records were kept, items of income and expenditure were often muddled, while household and enterprise expenditures were seldom distinguished .…… From 1818 to 1833 an Essex farmer used an account book in which were entered purchases of food, school fees, rates, wages, horse medicine, and nails jumbled with incomings from sales of corn, rent from small property, as well as payment in kind.”

This splendid muddle shows many things. Firstly, how integrated the home and work were in this period. Secondly, the continuing existence of feudal barter (payment in kind), showed that the money economy did not affect all of the economic life of the family. Thirdly, the lack of a more formal accounting of profit and loss showed a greater concern for family respectability as the reason for work, rather than profit maximisation. Fourthly, the fact that this book was kept by the farmer and not his wife showed that the recording of the economic life, and probably it’s control, were already a masculine affair.

Looking at the changes in the lives of the Cadbury family in Birmingham showed the changes that followed this muddle.

“The married life of John and Candia was significantly different in one respect from that of their parents generation. Living as they did in Edgbaston, Candia had no direct relation to the business, and John left home each day to go to work, coming home in the evening. Suburban living meant an evening meal rather than a mid-day dinner.”

John’s parents had lived in the centre of Birmingham, next to their factory and shop. The closeness to their work mirrors the closeness of the Essex farmer to the fields around the house. The female members of the family at that time worked in the shop, just as the Essex farmer’s wife would have specific tasks in the farm. The authors argue that the underlying purpose of work for both families was to provide a proper moral and religious life for the family. The masculine concern for feminine virtue requires a move in the next generation out to the suburbs, where there was no need for women to work in the shop. The firm was doing well enough not to require this unpaid work in the shop. Further, there was a concern over the rowdiness in the streets of the city, and the need for securing the safety of female members of the family. So for John, the next generation, home and work became geographically and socially separate.