Here is an essay I found about work that I wrote 3 years ago for an English philosophy class. This is a feeble attempt to keep this blog going as I've been extremely buys with work, ironically.
Do we really need to work this much?
This essay will study today’s work habits in the society and ask if it is truly necessary to work as much as we do. We have worked 8 hours a day since 1886 and one must ask if that is normal. This is not the first time in history that social critics question our work habits. There have been written innumerable papers and articles on this subject and we are all mostly aware that too much work can have negative effects on the society, and we know that work is one of the driving forces behind capitalism and materialism. This essay will touch lightly on capitalism and materialism because it is necessary for this debate, but will focus more on how work ethic has developed in the western societies. I will try to find the answer to the question of “how much work do we really have to put in?” Of course we would not like to degrade that much that we are not able to provide ourselves with basic needs, nor do we seek the opposite; that we overproduce this earth to destruction and work ourselves to death. More specifically, this essay will try and answer the question on how we should work?
Work is virtuous – to a fault.
“Ah yes, he is a hard working man”. One of the best compliments you can get in the western world. It is ranked up there next to honesty and trustworthiness.
In our society today, working is considered as being virtuous. There is a social more which encourages work and discourages leisure. Being unemployed is generally considered as something negative and almost everything possible is done to fill up the past-time of the unemployed by various free trainings and other constructive activity. Most governments truly believe that it is bad for the unemployed to go idle and seek all means to escape that.
In every aspect of our society we find some form of encouragement for work. One can see how religions rally for work; you will find it in many places within the Judeo-Christian religion, the most obvious one being that sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, so you better work. In Prophet Mohammed’s traditions it states that: “Whoever finds himself at the nightfall tired of his work, God will forgive his sins”1.
Politicians throughout the spectre of politics also encourage a lot of work. The left demands work for everyone and the right needs workers constantly to work for them. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers, had his own list of thirteen moral virtues and ranking at the 6th place was: “Industry. Lose no Time. Be always employ'd in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary Actions.”2 Furthermore, working is considered as a basic human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in their 23rd article section (1): “Everyone has the right to work, [...] and [...] protection against unemployment.”3
The importance of work even found its way into children’s literature. We all know how it went for the animals on the farm that wouldn’t help the Little Red Hen with the harvest, threshing, milling of the wheat into flour, and baking the flour into bread? They got no bread!
The list is endless.
It is needless to say that work plays a big role in our lives. Obviously, you have to have some sort of output to achieve some sort of input, if not you cannot live. In the simplest terms; you must pluck the apple from the tree in order to eat it. But it seems as though work has gone beyond its original intention. Not only does it provide a person with an income to tend to its basic needs for living, but it is almost like today we are born only to work, and leisure is very much frowned upon. Was it not, that when you were asked in your childhood what you wanted to become when you grew up, that the more prestigious the answer the better the reaction from the questioner. Already then the value of a human being is measured by their job title. Maybe it is an indulgence into childrens´ grandiose and limitless perspectives on the world, or it could be that the social pressure is already at work. A good job seems to be the answer to everything. And later in life when kids realise that being an astronaut or a doctor takes many years, a lot of funds and hard work, plainly a more simple job is the disappointing reality later demanded of them by society. Even though Karl Marx proposed that: “the writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money”4 we assume that leisure activity, like reading and painting, should not be done unless there is something to gain from it; students read to graduate and find a job, while painters sell their paintings to be able to continue to paint. There has to be a concrete contribution somewhere. Nothing is done for the sake of nothing.
A large part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, which saved the United States from that ongoing crisis in the 1930’s, was creating jobs. The jobs that were created were construction work like repairing or building roads, bridges, airports, schools, hospitals and the like, as well as farm work and even maintaining or restoring forests, beaches and parks.5 Through every means possible jobs, labour jobs, were created. The crisis subsided, America got back on her feet and Roosevelt was celebrated as a hero.
Roosevelt was one of many that encouraged the idea that more working hours is the answer, and if there is not enough work about, job-creating is the answer. In time of crisis people tend to think that the wheel needs to be spun faster, harder, more. Dig trenches and fill them up again, and dig them again if necessary. The first thing we hear in time of crisis where unemployment rises is: “must create more jobs” and a common political promise is: “vote for me and I will create x amount of new jobs!”
So we have established that work is perceived as of the good kind and the harder the work is and the more we work; the better we are, the more virtuous we are. The meaning of life is to work, no matter what. Yet at what point does work become ineffective and unproductive? Digging trenches and filling them up again just for the sake of work seems odd. Work is virtuous, but definitely to a fault.
The need for a second revolution.
Up until the industrial revolution in the 18th century work hours were long, and everyone worked, even children and old people. The French philosopher, Michel Foucault pointed out a very interesting idea in his book Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”6
Now, today with technology bringing us inventions into the society on a daily basis there are two options available as Bertrand Russell points put in his essay “In praise of Idleness”, with the pin factory analogy; that with new technology that increases production by half you would imagine that the logical reaction to that is to cut short the working hours for the workers by half and everything would continue as normal.7 That is not what happened. Instead, production was doubled, and fear set into people. Fear of losing jobs to machines and capitalism flared up, as it is the nature of capitalism. As soon as it gains a new field it goes wild. Time and again it has been shown that capitalism always goes wild until the structures fall down, and destroys itself. And in capitalism there is this great paradox; to pay the employees as little as possible, but make them spend as much as possible. Double the production means that you have to double the sales. How do you get more out of the worker than what you give him and how do you make him spend more than he earns? After the industrial revolution it seems, to concede with Foucault, that we became enslaved most vigorously to the capitalist cycle of overproduction and under consumption. When humans think that they are appreciated by the work they do it is not the quality of the man that is appreciated but the quality of the slave.
The shift in the society that has unfolded over the last 200 years, especially the last four decades, has expanded the social pressure beyond the need to hold just a job, as well as increased the capitalist pressure of consuming; we need double the amount of pins we have used so far. This has evolved into the need to own two cars in the garage, and have a summerhouse in the countryside, not to mention
owning the right kind of clothes and accessories. Could it be that this materialism stems from people's need to affirm with others that one holds a good job? If so, then we can see by your outside how good of a worker you are? Or it could be that consumer pressure has arisen over time; the demand of the society to have this and that and the constant dependence on purchasing goods, almost to the point that we can’t live without certain products? Whatever the anthropological social answer could be for this change, it is certain that the need for basic things as the driving force behind working has been replaced by consumption, and it´s no surprise that in the western society that consumption is excessive. But as this essay is neither about capitalism nor materialism, let us go back to the problem of whether or not we really need to work this much.
The harm done by too much work.
In order to keep our consumption up to par, we work long hours, even holding down more than one job or two, at times even three jobs. We take out loans, a subject to which a whole book could be dedicated. And the job is not confined to the 8 hours that we work per day. There´s commuting time, time spent thinking and developing ideas and work related projects and much more. Again we encounter a strange paradox: the curse of overproduction. Overproduction is what causes pollution, unhappiness, low salaries and then, ironically, worse living conditions. Overproduction is our biggest problem today. The main problem is not so much the surplus in production itself, but more how products and profits are distributed.
So we can safely establish that consuming less would be positive; pollution would subside, we would not spend so much money therefore we would need less of it. According to the basic economic law of supply and demand, when demand goes down supply becomes more valuable and wages should rise. Direct consequence of that would be that we may consider working less and therefore have more time for leisure which may increase happiness.
How should we work?
To answer this question let us have a clinical look at what work is, and how do we define this activity? An online dictionary definition says that work is: “Physical or mental effort or activity directed toward
the production or accomplishment of something.”8 Looking beyond rigid definitions we see that Bertrand Russell, in the same essay as mentioned above, characterises work in two ways: “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.” He goes on saying that “The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”9 There is an obvious variation in job tasks. The dictionary differentiates between physical or mental work and Russell speaks about how one job is pleasant while the other is not. We all recognise having had terrible jobs where time seems to take forever to pass and or the kind of jobs where we were more under the impression we were partying rather than labouring.This tells us that we would rather work less if the task does not inspire us, but we can spend long hours if it ignites our creativity. I would not mind working as a check-out girl, but 4 hours a day would do for me. On the other hand, I can paint for days at end.
The abolishment of slavery has been a very important feather in our society’s hat. We stand proud when we say that slavery is in the history books with colonialism and wars, but we cannot differentiate when we look how enslaved we are by work.
All agents that rally for less work do not fail to mention the old Greeks, how manual labour was something for slaves only, while men could participate in the governing of the state, play sport or create. While the slavery that aided the Greek society´s function is something that today one cannot agree with, the value that was attributed to creation, leisure and mental pursuits would be a noble priority for today´s society.
Referring back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”10. Benjamin Franklin’s moral virtue number. 9 preaches modesty and asks us to avoid extremes. In Lafargue’s essay on the “Right to be lazy” he points out how Christianity actually portrays the perfect idleness: “after six days of work, he rests for all eternity.”11 So where did we go off track?
There is this prevailing idea in the society about how we are measured by our jobs. People would be truly aghast if an individual were to answer the question “what´s your job?” with “nothing”. They immediately judge you to be of the lazy kind. We seem to be measured by our work and position, and people automatically feel ashamed or embarrassed if they “just” work as a waiter or part- time mechanic.
The social pressure is hard, but we have to stop measuring humans for what they produce and instead take them for what they are, as people who are literally killing themselves because of work. France Telecom, a communication company in France, lost 6 people to suicide in January 2010.12 This is an extreme case, but still true.
Nonetheless, it is crazy how much we work in today´s society and it is nothing but slavery in a suit. We should start working fewer hours and the work we do should be in a co-op fashion; we should be the owners of our company and the profit of the company should be split between the owners. Then the work will be done because we want to and not because we need to, and we will have the feeling of contributing something to our own lives rather than to some other unknown ones. People will shout: “but who is going do the work that no one likes to do, like taking the trash, and how do I go about paying all my bills and if I suddenly need a large sum of money etc?” These are minor adjustments in the social infrastructure. If the consumption is already down, the amount of trash should subside and if this would be labour work that got divided, people would be motivated to take care of their immediate environment. This is but one example of co-op living. There are many successful co-ops of all types today which have existed for years. One good example is a Maleny in Queensland, Australia, a little village with 7000 inhabitants with all their operations based on co-ops even their own bank.13
Radical thinking was going on in Paris in the beginning of 1998 at the University at Jussieu. What first started as a “simple” demonstration of the unemployed turned into an ongoing movement where people could meet several times a week and exchange ideas about how society should really work. One of their ideas was: “The best way to abolish unemployment is to abolish the work and the money that are linked with it.”14 These ideas are very radical and scary to most people, but it brings a little awareness to the question if you want to live for work or if you want to work to live?
Bibliography:
Texts:
Russell, Bertrand. In Praise of Idleness. 1932. http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Sites:
Muslim World League, Canadian Office. Traditions of the Prophet Muhammad pbuh. http://www.mwlcanada.org/publications/traditions.htm
Ben Franklin’s thirteen moral virtues. http://ploticus.sourceforge.net/stevepages/moralvirtues.html
United Nations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://secint50.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum. New Deal Achievements. http://www.fdrheritage.org/new_deal.htm
The Free Dictionary by Farlex. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/work
Why Work. We don’t want full employment, we want full lives! http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/knabb.html
