I have been thinking about work. I am aware that there are quite a lot of people of my age who do so, and decide it is no longer for them. It is partly because I recently saw a pension adviser that this issue has been more prominent for me of late. Well, that and the fact that I have sons looking for summer holiday employment in the time honoured student fashion. Both perspectives, and others, make me realise how difficult our relationship with work is.
Let's not avoid the fact that work is a necessity. If we define it as the tasks we must undertake to ensure our sufficient survival then almost everyone excepting the very young and those with the greatest disability have work that they can do.
Much will not be remunerated. That does not mean it is not work. For far too long this paid / unpaid divide has been used to deny the greater contribution that women make to overall work output, much of it usually grossly under-rewarded.
Much too will be unfulfilling. I know no one who can say all aspects of their work give them a buzz. Some tasks simply have to be done. Finding a balance is the best that can be hoped for.
Balance is hard to secure. That's not least because the world of work is so intensely rigid. As someone who has done his best to avoid full time employment by any singular organisation throughout the vast majority of my career (hence my need for a pension adviser to sort out the resulting mess now) I admit that I find it hard to comprehend the reality of working for just one organisation.
The fact that work is, very often, about full time employment means that many feel ensnared by it.
Others use the fact that working in this way requires an unusual, monogamous, commitment that many find hard as a mechanism for securing their own advancement. By identifying with their employer they are promoted when others, equally able, may not be.
Work is, then, about status. It occurs to me as I begin to see my generation retire that this loss of status is a big issue for many of them. Appending the word ‘retired' to whatever their former work role might have been appears a way of clinging to that status. That they might be liberated from it takes getting used to.
But suppose we could do that? Suppose we could identify ourselves beyond our work? Why can't we identify ourselves by our passions? That thought occurred to me when noting a young trainee doctor win The Sewing Bee this week. ‘Doctor' will remain her chosen identity, I am sure. ‘Phenomenally good sewer' will always be sidelined, I suspect. And yet in the hobbies I have I see people with skills that probably far surpass those that they take to their workplaces, so good are they at what they have chosen to do. Why can't we recognise that?
Why note all this when I am only too aware that I said to a potential funder last week that in my own case quite where the boundary between work and hobby might be is fairly hard to determine? Because that is, I think, something more need to enjoy.
We know that four day working weeks increase productivity whilst those enjoying them are at work. We know in that case that they are not as costly as the accountant applying a linear relationship between pay and output might think. And we know that those on four day weeks do enjoy better health. I strongly suspect that is because those enjoying them do better work in their own time to sustain themselves, without even recognising much of it as such.
Do we need to rethink work? Surely Covid has taught us that in a way few other disruptions might have? My sincere hope is that work will not go back to normal. Whilst wanting work for all who want it, work need not be the absolute that for too long it has been.
I am not suggesting I have all the answers on this. I don't, and nor am I saying my own experience is one to replicate as it clearly won't suit all. But nor does work as it is suit a great many people. For something so important we require better models than we have which can still be sufficient to maintain life as we want it.
Beating rentier capitalism is a necessary condition for better work. The yoke of debt burdens have to be reduced to make better work possible. But it's not a sufficient condition. The rest is down to us to reimagine the processes. Indeed, that task might come first so that we have a goal to achieve. It seems to me that this is critical to our path to a better future.
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I suspect we will need to rethink work for a variety of reasons. There are fewer young people and more fit and healthy older people. Not just in the UK: demographic transition is coming to China and Africa, for example. The AI robots are coming to professional services: maybe not this year or next year, but process automation will strip out some professional services in the way automation has ripped the heart out of most industrial work. By and large jobs with a single employer for life and final salary pensions are things of the past. Employers are much less loyal to their workers, and vice verse. Some are willing to make the work-life compromise, at least for a time, but many just don’t want to be a work slave in return for a high salary.
I suspect some sort of UBI (that is, pensions for all, more equitably sharing the fruits of the economy) is the best way forward but there is some way to go before we get there.
Either that or a sort of neofeudalism, with a gilded elite lording over a mass of poor unemployed. The m 0.01% accelerating away from the rest. Perhaps we are approaching that dystopic vision already.
Working for many years as a University Lecturer in a Department that had a ‘private’ policy of a 4 day week, knowing that we were far more efficient with a day ‘off’ to catch up on research development in fast moving subjects ( like my own 3D Computer Graphics).
As the Lecturers Union representative I knew that raising this with the University management as a policy would not be advisable. That will have changed dramatically with the current Covid reorganization but was always a surprising consequence of poor personnel management.
🙂
“Suppose we could identify ourselves beyond our work? Why can’t we identify ourselves by our passions? ”
To a large extent, that’s what I’ve tended to do – looking at my CV, I’m struck by how poor a reflection of my life it really is. Its just stuff I did to get money in order to finance my Real Life. Should I ever write my autobiography, jobs will be relegated to occasional footnotes.
In 1977, as a 16 year old freshly ejected from school into the world of employment, I read something in a punk fanzine that has stayed with me ever since : “someone has to do the crap jobs…. just try to make sure it’s not you”. Advice I’ve tried to follow ever since.
Also as that 16 year old, I was under pressure to get a job at the local large employer, a company with fingers in a number of engineering pies. It’s a job for life, I was assured. The prospect of my future for the next 50 years being already mapped out apalled me, and instead I opted for a “career” of largely short-contract jobs, ranging from potato picking, through tree planting to archaeology. It may not have been so lucretive, and certainly lacked in long-term job security, but I’ve never regretted it.
As for that solid job-for-life engineering route I might have taken… within 15 years that company no longer existed.
Now, at 60, unemployed and probably (within the the terms of the current job market) largely unemployable, I still “work” – I have an allotment which allows me in a very real way to enjoy the fruits of my labour, and I do a weekly internet radio show.
Neither “job” pays a wage in the conventional sense, of course, but they’re both far more satisfying than any of my “real jobs” have been. They’ll both get full chapters in my autobiography…
“each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman,”
Yet the good people of Shetland seem to have combined being herders and fishermen since the neolithic. Combining being a herdsman and a hunter was probably standard across much of Europe for millennia.
There are bigger criticisms to make of Communism, but misunderstandings about elementary features of human existence form rather a shoogly peg on which to hang a whole theory of economy and society.
Quite what this has to do with Communism is rather hard to work out
She seems to be enunciating a kind of dialectic materialism based on the Palaeolithic rather than the Industrial age. She may have a point for the future as industry declines.
As a cyclist the worst part of getting back to normal has been diesel fume clogged roads once again, and idiots who have forgotten how to drive properly.
As for work, dreams of UBI I think are just not feasible within the twisted logic of affluence we live under. It is the rich rentier class as well as pension funds pushing for labour savings via automation because they will be the net beneficiaries of it.
It’s a thoughtless drive for modernity.
Instead of UBI we will get debt slavery instead – I guarantee that the rich will love nothing more than to earn money from giving us credit money to live on. It’s perfectly set up for them. Heaven on earth to their ears. They’re special you see.
As I’ve said before, the push for driverless cars is a load of bollocks as far as I am concerned. I like driving when I have to. What did I want instead? A car that is self cleaning – that’s what I want. Is anyone listening?
I can’t imagine why anyone would want a self driving vehicle. Anyway, we’ve got them already – it’s called a bus or a train. The only people wanting self driving vehicles are those who will save money on labour.
The real growth area however is in the caring services – as you have mentioned before Richard – looking after people and getting paid well to do it.
And as I walk around so many towns and cities in this country, they are all blighted by a lack of work – the litter, the ran-down pubic places we have, the badly maintained infrastructure.
The thing is that there is loads of work to do to just put right years of neglect and being told that ‘we can’t afford it’. But will we be given the chance? I fear not.
Totally with you on the correct term for driverless car being bus or train, but those who spend large sums on cars as status symbols would naturally want to be conveyed separately in a driverless version that displayed their status. Am currently reading The Divide by Jason Hickel, in which he points out that peasants of yore would have had short hard lives in many ways, but did have secure habitation rights to use their land for subsistence farming and would only have needed to do enough work to provide for their needs, not having to work extra to provide tribute or debt interest to an overlord.
A quote by Stephen Hawking that has always resonated with me
“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
I have been working from home since last March and rather enjoyed it.
My employer is looking at basically all staff who can working from home from now on.
I’m late 50’s so it suits me fine
BUT what about the next generation in the workforce, and those starting with new employers, how will they be ‘socialised’ into the workplace, not just much learning the job but how to behave, whose who, the countless wrinkles that I am sure we all know in our craft
The worst thing about work is that at the moment too many people think communicating is ‘the work’; it’s not. You still cannot beat going out there and seeing for yourself what is going on. That way you make decisions and get things done. The extra email traffic generated by this lack of seeing with you own eyes is close to becoming chronic.
I see it all the time in my line of work and it is becoming a bad habit.
Clearly we need to rethink work.
Both because much work is unfairly considered not work. Who made Adam Smith’s dinner? The Invisible Hand of his mum.
But also because the big picture is that what we are doing as a species is mostly dumb and useless. We have clear challenges – manage our environment, colonise space, improve wellbeing. And how many of us are working on those challenges? A tiny few with some of us working directly against those challenges because of vested interests.
I sometimes find it helpful to picture politics as a game, some vast computer simulation where we can set our own goals and mobilise our resources to achieve them. In this game we’re a low achiever (collectively). And interesting some of the pieces (for a random example Anand Menon) are incredibly impactful and do a lot to advance rational goals while most pieces are barely utilised or working counter to our overall objective.
Adapting work to suit society and to further progress and to maximise wellbeing seems a reasonable move to make. Let’s work out what we, collectively, want and organise to achieve it.