Reference no: EM131762997

Work as the defining condition of humanity

For Bertie Wooster – the kind-hearted but clueless aristocratic dandy (played by a young Hugh Laurie of House fame) in the 1980s BBC TV adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse’s classic Jeeves and Wooster novels – work is what other people do. However, except for a tiny minority of idle rich, or the leisure class,* 1 like him, work has been the defining condition of humanity throughout most of its history.

Until the nineteenth century, most people in today’s rich Western countries typically worked seventy to eighty hours a week, with some people working over 100 hours. Since they often (not always) had the Sunday morning off for church attendance, this meant that they were working at least eleven hours, and possibly up to sixteen hours, per day, except on Sundays.

Today, few work that long even in poor countries. The average working week ranges between thirty-five and fifty-five hours. Even so, the majority of the adult population spends around half of their waking hours at work (more, if we add the time for commuting), outside weekends and paid holidays.

The dog that didn’t bark: the curious absence of work in economics

Despite its overwhelming presence in our lives, work is a relatively minor subject in economics. The only major mention of work is, somewhat curiously, in terms of its absence – unemployment.

Insofar as work is discussed, it is basically treated as a means to get income. We are seen to value income or leisure, but not work in and of itself. In the dominant Neoclassical view, we put up with the disutility from work only because we can derive utility from things we can buy with the resulting income. In this framework, we work only up to the point where the disutility from an additional unit of work is equalized with the utility that we can derive from the additional income from it.

But for most people, work is a lot more than simply a means to earn income. When we spend so much time on it, what happens in the workplace affects our physiological and psychological well-being. It may even shape our very selves.

Many have worked – and are still working – with their basic human rights violated

For many people, work is about basic human rights – or, rather, the lack of them. For much of human history, huge numbers of people were deprived of the most basic human right of ‘self-ownership’ and were bought and sold as commodities – that is, as slaves.

After the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, around 1.5 million Indians, Chinese (the ‘coolies’) and even Japanese went overseas as indentured labourers to replace the slaves. People like V. S. Naipaul, the Indian-Trinidadian novelist who was the 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Yat-sen Chang, the Chinese-Cuban ballerino at the English National Ballet, and Vijay Singh, the Indian-Fijian golfer, are reminders of this history.

Indentured labour was not slavery, in the sense that the worker was not owned by the employer. But an indentured labourer had no freedom to change jobs and had only minimal rights during the contract period (three to ten years). In many cases, their working conditions were scarcely better than those of the slaves whom they came to replace; many were put in the exact same barracks that the slaves used to live in.

But we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking this is all in the past. There are still a lot of people whose work is founded upon the violation of their fundamental human rights. There may be few legal slaves, but still a lot of people are engaged in other forms of forced labour. Some of them would have been coerced into those jobs (that is, trafficked). Others may have voluntarily signed up for them initially, but they may be prevented from leaving their jobs, due to either violence (most common among domestic workers) or debts to the employer, artificially inflated by over-charging on their recruitment, travel, food or accommodation. Some international migrant workers toil under conditions similar to the indentured labourers of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

How work shapes us

Even when it does not involve violation of basic human rights, work can so fundamentally affect us that it really ‘forms’ us.

Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to child labour.* 2 When children work in adult jobs, their mental and physical developments are arrested. Thus, by working from a young age, individuals may not fulfil their potential to the full.

Work forms adults too. Adam Smith, while praising the positive productivity effects of the finer division of labour (see Chapter 2), was concerned that excessive division of labour might cripple the worker’s mental capacity. This point was later hilariously but poignantly depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s classic movie Modern Times, in which he plays a worker who, having been reduced to performing simple repetitive tasks at high speed, has a mental breakdown and runs amok.

Work can also form us positively. People who like their jobs often have a greater sense of self-fulfilment. It is well understood that factory work, compared to work in shops or even agricultural work, makes workers more politically aware and disciplined because of its very nature – a large number of people working in a closely connected and synchronized way in a confined and organized space.

Work affects our physical, intellectual and psychological well-being

Even when it does not affect us so deeply that it actually ‘forms’ us, work greatly affects our well-being in physical, intellectual and psychological terms.

Some jobs are more physically demanding, dangerous and harmful for health than others. Working longer makes people more tired and harms their health in the long run.

There are jobs – crafts, arts, design, teaching, research, etc. – that are often considered more intellectually interesting, thanks to their higher creative contents.

The psychological dimension relates to the employer– employee relationship, rather than to the physical or intellectual nature of the work per se. Even if the job is identical, those who are provided with fewer breaks during work, put under excessive pressure to perform or made to feel insecure are less happy than their counterparts working for more decent employers.

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