Modern Work
posted by Frank Pasquale
I recommend the Stanford podcast “Doing Good Work” (available on iTunes) for anyone thinking about work/life balance. Joanne B. Ciulla, author of The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, gave a particularly polished presentation. She questioned the gap between “forced leisure” for many at the bottom of the income scale and nonstop work for some at the top. Francis Green’s Demanding Work: The Paradox of Job Quality in the Affluent Economy documents some of these trends:
In most affluent countries average pay levels have risen along with economic growth, a major exception being the United States. Skill requirements have increased, potentially meaning a more fulfilling time at work. Set against these beneficial trends, however, are increases in inequality, a strong intensification of work effort, diminished job satisfaction, and less employee influence over daily work tasks.
Ciulla doubts that modern employers can do much to improve employee loyalty, at least among cynical GenX’ers and GenY’ers. She questions efforts to develop a “civil society” of affinity groups within the workplace, claiming that in today’s economic climate workers should be focusing on cultivating professional contacts outside their firm who can provide job leads when the almost inevitable “downsizing” or “reorg” arrives. She claims that the most important part of work life remains the maintenance of mutual respect–a theme Richard Sennett develops gracefully in his Respect in a World of Inequality.
Here’s a taste of Sennett’s ideas, from a review by Scott McLemee:
[F]or Sennett, the familiar American tendency to honor upward mobility . . . is precisely the corrosive force undermining respect as the acknowledgment of an essential humanity that everyone possesses, regardless of immediate circumstances. We have inherited a set of values that began to emerge with the overthrow of feudalism: the notion that people do not inherit dignity just because they are born into an elite, but rather that there is a kind of nobility available to anyone who works hard to claim it. A bright and inspiring thought. Or it would be, were it not coupled with the fiction that everyone has, somewhere inside him or her, the ability to climb that ladder, and the obligation to do so. Those failing to ascend become contemptible, even (perhaps especially) in their own eyes.
Sennett’s own words (in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism) put the point even more sharply:
‘Who needs me?’ is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between risk and reward. . . . . And it does so through reingeneering of institutions in which people are treated as disposable.
Of course, most individuals find meaning to the “Who needs me’ question in the realm of family life, and we should not be surprised that “family values” have become such a hot political topic in the age of the “disposable american.” As Alasdair MacIntyre’s work suggests, a central way of dealing with the new vulnerability is to begin to value the occasion of dependency–both as care-giver and care-taker:
[A]n important feature of our animal nature . . . has not, in [MacIntyre's] view, received the philosophical attention it deserves: the disability and vulnerability that mark every period of human life, especially early childhood and old age. . . .To take disability seriously as a natural fact of life means not to exempt any of us from it. MacIntyre wants us to remember that “there is a scale of disability on which we all find ourselves. Disability is a matter of more or less. . . . And at different periods of our lives we find ourselves, often unpredictably, at very different points on that scale.”
My hope is that we can extend this type of “affirmation of ordinary life” to a politics that recognizes how easily any one of us can become dependent. Consensus around a basic set of entitlements to health care and food could prove the saving grace of ever-more-volatile income and work lives. Care reflecting family values–be it for a sick child, an ailing parent, or other relations–should not lead to bankruptcy.
PS: For a good philosophical take on meaningful work, see Russ Muirhead’s Just Work. Pope John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens should also be of great interest both to Catholics and to those of any (or no) faith. For example:
Besides wages, various social benefits intended to ensure the life and health of workers and their families play a part here. The expenses involved in health care, especially in the case of accidents at work, demand that medical assistance should be easily available for workers, and that as far as possible it should be cheap or even free of charge. Another sector regarding benefits is the sector associated with the right to rest. In the first place this involves a regular weekly rest comprising at least Sunday, and also a longer period of rest, namely the holiday or vacation taken once a year or possibly in several shorter periods during the year. A third sector concerns the right to a pension and to insurance for old age and in case of accidents at work.
The exploration of the “error of economism” earlier in the document is also particularly illuminating.
Photo Credit: The French version of The Office (Le Bureau), from Wikipedia.
August 26, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Posted in: Law Practice
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Responses (1)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 27, 2007 at 10:40 am
Yet once again, wonderful stuff Frank. I also still like Juliet B. Schor’s book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
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