If
all the year were playing holidays
To sport would be as tedious as to work...
William
Shakespeare, Henry IV part I, act I, scene ii
Who
first invented Work - and tied the free
And holy-day rejoicing spirit down?
Charles
Lamb, letter to Bernard Barton (1822)
Yet
that work [of
Adam, before the fall] was not laborious but joyful, being the exercise of
his natural powers.
St
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part I, question 102, art. 3
Labour
becomes attractive work, the individual's self-realisation, which in no way means
that it becomes mere fun...
Karl
Marx, Grundrisse, notebook VI (1858), tr. Martin Nicholas (Penguin, London
1973), p 611
If
any would not work, neither should he eat.
St
Paul, Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, chap. iii, v. 10
Refrain
from much business, and you will never sin.
Hermas
(1), The Shepherd, fourth similitude
The
obligation to earn one's bread by the sweat of one's brow also presumes the right
to do so.
Pope
John-Paul II, Centesimus Annus (1991), #43
If
the world cannot hope to be be happy in its work, it must relinquish the hope
of happiness altogether..
William
Morris, Art and its Producers (Morris, Collected Works, ed. May Morris;
Longmans, London 1910 - 1915), vol. xx, p 353
Produce!
Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce
it, in God's name!
Thomas
Carlyle (1795 - 1881), Sartor Resartus (1834), bk ii, chap. 9
The
idea of an eternity of rest vexed and troubled many nineteenth-century American
Protestants.
Daniel
T Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America (University of Chicage
Press, 1978), p 7
Work,
work, work! It would be glorious to see mankind at rest for once!
Henry
David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Reform Papers (1866), ed. Wendell Glick
(Princeton University Press, 1973), p 156
Work
is the curse of the drinking classes.
Oscar
Wilde, see H Pearson, Life of Oscar Wilde (1946), chap. xii
Why
should I let that toad, WORK
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And
drive the brute off?
Philip
Larkin (1922 - 1985), Toads
In
reality, work is done in order to satisfy the producer's need to produce as well
as the consumer's need to consume.
A
medley of opinions on work
It seems that
there are almost as many attitudes to work as there are people who do it - or
who don't do it, as the case may be. I could easily fill the whole space of this
article with pithy quotes about work. But then I might be accused of idleness,
of being unwilling to get down to the work of doing a bit of writing of my own.
Somewhere in Yorkshire, England, there is a village charmingly named Idle,
with a building bearing the sign Idle
Working Men's Club. Of which I, though Yorkshire born, am not a member.
Attitudes
to work have changed and developed over the course of history. Classical Greek
civilisation was dominated by aristocrats who regarded work as a necessary evil,
fit only for slaves, and considered 'leisure' to be the only way of life for a
civilised person. According to Homer (2), the
gods hate men and for that reason oblige them to work. But then, the
Greek concept of work was narrow; it comprised mainly manual labour. Strange as
it may seem, in a society of great sculptors, even their work fell into the category
of ignoble toil. The Greek historian Plutarch wrote (3) that no
well-born young man would have wished to be a Phidias or a Polyclete.
Aristotle wrote (4) that in a well-ordered
state the citizens should have leisure and not have to provide for their daily
wants, but also that the
citizen's special characteristic is that he shares in the administration of justice,
and in the government of the state.
Thus,
some tasks were considered respectable, even noble, such as those of the judge
or the governor, or indeed of the philosopher; other kinds of work were definitely
not so. The same notion persists today in other forms. For example, certain economists
argue, in effect, that it is the the
work of the entrepreneur that has real economic and social value, while
the toil of mere private-sector employees is worth little; as for most government
employees, the value of their work is zero or negative! We might call this inverted
Aristotelianism. But such nonsense hardly deserves a grand title.
The
Judaeo-Christian tradition
The Jewish tradition
sets a high value on work and indeed describes God Himself as a worker (5):
the everlasting God, the Lord, the
Creator of the ends of the world, fainteth not, neither is weary. The
book of Genesis explains that Adam's work in the garden of Eden was part of God's
plan, not a consequence of Adam's disobedience (6): the
Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to till it and care
for it.
Christian theology has continued
and developed this tradition. The fifth-century philosopher Boethius looked forward
to working (7) in that heavenly
city where...will be everlasting joy, delight, food, labour, and unending praise
of the Creator. A
little later, St Benedict propounded a famous principle: to
work is to pray. In the thirteenth
century, St Thomas Aquinas gave us the positive view quoted at the head of this
article, an ideal of work
as joyful self-fulfilment.
However,
mediaeval thinkers saw the practical work of the
world as lower in status than the monastic duties of prayer and contemplation.
St Thomas classified worldly work (8) in a hierarchy of worthiness: agriculture
ranked highest, followed by handicrafts, while commerce was disparaged (9): trading,
considered in itself, has a certain debasement attaching thereto.
After
the Reformation
The Reformation brought
radical changes in attitudes to work. Martin Luther, a friar who became disillusioned
with the cloister, turned mediaeval thinking upside down: he argued that the monastic
life was inferior in value to the work of the secular world. But he retained a
mediaeval distaste for commerce. It was John Calvin, the puritanical Genevan Protestant,
who introduced the view that profitable business could be a virtuous Christian
calling.
The Italian historian Adriano Tilgher,
writing in the 1920s, vividly summarised (10) this aspect of Calvinist doctrine:
Gain is the sure sign that one's
occupation is pleasing to God; the greater the gain, the more one is certain that
one is serving God through one's work....Work, earn, enrich yourself; do these
things that the world may reflect the glory of God and of his saints: there lies
the foundation of the modern world with its cult of work for its own sake, its
religion of accumulation and wealth, its horror of rest and pleasure.
One
readily sees how Carlyle in the nineteenth century echoed Calvin in the sixteenth,
and how their thoughts resonate today in the world of American evangelical capitalism.
Whether all this is truly Christian, or for that matter Jewish, is an interesting
question. If riches increase, set
not your heart upon them, thus sings (11) the psalmist;
is bible-thumping America listening?
The
Industrial Revolution
In the nineteenth
century we see various interweaving trends. The growth of capitalist industry
led to the dehumanisation of work, as traditional handicrafts were replaced by
mechanical processes and former craftsmen became mere machine-minders. Work moved
further away from the ideal of psychologically satisfying activity, St Thomas's
'joyful exercise of natural powers'.
Marx
complained that workers were being 'alienated' from their own labour, meaning
that they no longer worked with their own tools and materials in their own time,
but instead were totally under the control of their employers; they had become
'wage slaves' rather than independent artisans. Radical 'arts and crafts' enthusiasts,
led by William Morris and John Ruskin, called for a return to craftmanship. Trade
unions accepted the concept of factory work, but strove to make it more acceptable
by demanding better pay, healthier conditions, shorter hours and greater security.
The leisured classes
In
the twentieth century, democratic societies came to take a dim view of idle toffs.
In nineteenth-century Britain, there was a quite numerous class of young and middle-aged
ladies and gentlemen who were rich enough to live without working, and who jolly
well did so. Many London concerts took place on weekday afternoons, because the
concert-goers belonged largely to this class and were therefore free to listen
to music in the afternoon. This would seem strange, even unacceptable, today.
Yet
modern societies find it normal that older people of all classes should spend
two or three decades doing no remunerative work. That did not happen in Jane Austen's
day. Until the mid-twentieth century, retirement generally meant the last few
years of one's life. The first British state pension, the 'Lloyd George' pension
of 1909, was payable from age 70. At that time, mortality rates were such that
only about 30% of new-born boys could expect (12) to live to the age of 70, and
those who reached that age could expect, on average, to survive another 8 years.
Today (13), more than 80% can expect to reach
the state pension age of 65, and their life expectancy is then 16 years. At 60
it is 20 years; at 55, it is 24 years. Even longer for women; the fair sex is
more durable, but retires sooner.
Premature
retirement
People are living far longer,
yet retiring far earlier. Not because we all want to retire in our fifties (personally,
I kept at it to the age of 62), but because the modern economy tends to impose
early retirement. Our obsession with competition and productivity means that employers
are obliged continually to cut their payrolls to the bone. And it is generally
the oldest employees who have to go, partly because they are the most expensive.
But there is another reason. The idea that
people with abundant experience are valuable is ridiculed in a world where everything
is supposed to change at a breakneck pace. Instead of valuing older workers for
their maturity and knowledge, business today rejects them because they are deemed
to be less willing or able to change their ways. And long experience is of limited
use if today's business world is quite different from that of ten years ago.
Earlier
retirement and increasing lifespan combine to make the cost of adequate pensions,
whether state or private, ever more prohibitive. It seems that the economy is
changing so fast that we have to retire so early that our pensions are becoming
unaffordable.
Too rapid change
What
conclusion should one draw? Common sense would suggest that the pace of change
is simply too rapid. But common sense cuts no ice with libertarian economists,
who argue that the pace of change is dictated by the market, and you can no more
argue with the market than with the tides. At least we are entitled to protect
ourselves against the ravages of high tides. Protect ourselves against the destructive
effects of the market? That is inadmissible.
So,
what of our contemporary attitudes to work? As in earlier times, they are confused.
Basically, we need to work for two quite distinct reasons. Primo,
we need the results of work. We need the results that we produce for ourselves
by unpaid work, primarily at home; we need the earnings of paid work, so that
we can buy the results of other people's work. Secundo,
we need the satisfaction of "exercising our natural
powers" or "achieving self-realisation" through work. In practice,
not through work alone, but also through the social life that normally accompanies
work in any organisation. Employment, after all, is not just doing a task and
earning an income; it is also being part of a working community.
Free-marketeers
disagree. They argue that the only purpose of paid work is to produce what consumers
want to buy, in other words to satisfy the demands of the market. In Adam Smith's
words (14), consumption is
the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought
to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the
consumers.
Slaves of the Market?
This
view is too narrow. If work has no purpose except to serve the market, then there
can be no objection to the instant extinction of employment at the whim of the
market. It is this principle that leads to the excessive precariousness of work
in the modern free-market economy. Supporters of Smith's principle refuse to accept
that, in reality, work is done in order to satisfy the producer's need to produce
as well as the consumer's need to consume.
Readers
who are abreast of free-market fashion will, of course, retort that I am talking
nonsense. How can one keep jobs in existence merely because their holders want
them, if the market does not want their output? In our fast-changing world, we
just have to accept that practically all employments are transitory. The market
says so, and that's that.
Yet,
only a generation ago, employment was considerably more stable. It was not unusual
to work for decades, even for the whole of one's working life, with one employer.
How was this possible? The answer lies in the
pace of economic change. In those days, the pace was slower and more
in tune with the human life-span. The world changed, as it has always done and
always will; but it changed at a more tolerable pace.
One
may well argue that today, when people are living longer and therefore need to
work longer, the pace of change needs to be a little slower than before. Instead,
it is a good deal faster. The main reason is that we human beings, within our
own countries and throughout the world, have deregulated the markets and left
ourselves more exposed to their vagaries. We have done this of our own choice,
under the baleful influence of misguided libertarian theorists. We have only ourselves
to blame for the consequences.
*
* * * *
References
*Work,
for the night is coming is the first line of a hymn by Anna Coghill (1836
- 1907), an earnest young English lady who wrote it at the age of 18. The usual
tune is by Lowell Mason (1792 - 1872), a prolific American composer of church
music.
1
The 'Shepherd of Hermas' is a collection of texts written around the year 150
by Hermas, said to have been a brother of Pope Pius I. These texts were widely
read by early Christians and were even considered for inclusion in the canon of
Holy Scripture.
2
See Adriano Tilgher, Homo Faber (Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, Roma, 1929),
chap. I
3 Plutarch,
Life of Pericles, sect. ii. Phidias and Polyclete were famous sculptors.
4
Aristotle, Politics, tr Benjamin Jowett, bk II part ix and bk III part
ii
5 Isaiah,
King James version, chap. 40, v.28
6
Genesis, New English Bible, chap.2, v. 15
7
Boethius, De fide catholica, conclusion
8
St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Politics, bk. I, vi to ix
9
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part II/II, question
77, art. 4
10
Adriano Tilgher, loc. cit. supra, chap. IX
11
Psalm 62, King James version, v. 10
12
Institute of Actuaries, English Life Table no. 7 (males), based
on deaths registered 1900/1910
13
Government Actuary's Department, Interim Life Tables for UK males, based
on deaths registered 2001/2003
14
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), bk IV, chap viii