Work: paid and unpaid – Part 1
Most of my working life was spent teaching in a university. I consider myself to have been reasonably well paid for the work I did. And the superannuation scheme I paid into has yielded a reasonable pension. The same applied to my workplace contemporaries, fellow wage-slaves who started and finished their careers at more or less the same time as me. But, if I look at them, they’ve not a- p had identical reactions to ending their paid employment.
‘Bored out of my skull’
Some of them have carried on with a particular aspect of the work they did before – their academic research – but independently. And even though they’re no longer paid for it, they seem reasonably content. Others have been less happy. They’ve found themselves at a loose end with no teaching or associated work, and see no point in carrying on with any research given that it’s no longer connected to a day job. They see working in isolated fashion as no longer affording them the recognition and approbation of their colleagues and of their wider academic community. I found an example of this when I ran into a former colleague some time ago, several months after he’d retired in his early 60s. I asked him how things were going. He seemed pretty miserable and replied: ‘I’m bored out of my skull’. He sounded and looked angry and frustrated. I didn’t know what to do other than wish him well.
Volunteering
So these are a couple of the kind of reactions that workers in what was my own line of work may have in response to no longer doing paid work. But there’s also a third category – those who, having finished their paid employment, feel they’ve been set free, and this has made them decide to involve themselves in activities which are usually unpaid and often quite different from the paid work they did. Sometimes it’s a continuation of things they devoted a certain amount of time and energy to in their spare time before, such as looking after family members, for example grandchildren, or involvement in political or social activity such as campaigning or charity work, or participation in a voluntary group of some kind. In my own case, for instance, I agreed to be recruited to a committee of volunteers who run my local Community Centre. Once there, I found that two of my former work colleagues, now retired like me, were also active there and in the community more widely. One of them was heavily involved in helping to organise a local food bank of the kind that has sprung up in increasing numbers in recent times. A common factor in this kind of activity is the obvious personal satisfaction people who engage in it derive from their new unpaid, ‘non-professional’ work. And it is of course a form of work, in that it involves expending mental or physical energy, even if many people wouldn’t necessarily think of it as such, since there’s no suggestion of any financial recompense from it. But, however they regard it, the motivation, rather, is the perception that they’re doing something useful, experiencing a sense of community, and also enjoying the approbation, spoken or otherwise, of the people around them.
As well as this, two other activities have absorbed my own time and energies in a practical and satisfying way since retirement. The first has been increased activity in the trade union that, though retired from work, I’m still a member of. With the forbearance of my former employer, I’m still able to handle personal cases or pension matters for members, as I did when I was employed. And I have more time to do this than those colleagues who also volunteer for union work but still have paid jobs. The second has been playing an increased part in Socialist Party activity – helping to organise my local branch, giving talks, going to events to try and spread the socialist message, writing columns, articles and book reviews for this journal.
Hierarchical work
Some of the reviews have actually been of books on the subject of work in its various different aspects. This seems, in fact, to be an area in which there’s a good deal of interest at present – interest stimulated by the fact that, in recent times, say over the last 30-40 years, the face of employment has changed in a number of noteworthy ways. In particular, it has become increasingly what may be called ‘hierarchised’. The ‘flat structures’ in the workplace that were being talked about and to a certain extent practised in the 1960s and 70s and seen as the way of the future began to fall out of favour and to give way to more rigid, authoritarian line management systems, so that most workers effectively had someone ‘higher up’ breathing down their necks, assessing them, judging their work or productivity – and sometimes intimidating them.
I saw that in my own field of employment, where it was accompanied by the invention of various terms, such as ‘lean production’ or ‘agile working’, to try and give a benign, softening impression to a more rigid form of workplace organisation. Critics of this new form of work discipline gave it other names such as management by stress or managerial feudalism (or even managerial fascism). The way American mathematician and political activist Eric Schechter characterises it in his video ‘Only Revolution Can Save Life on Earth’ is brutally simple: ‘workplaces are dictatorships’. Certainly, in many cases, the process consists of workers’ performance being subjected to close surveillance, with their efficiency or productivity judged on a regular basis via performance targets, sometimes referred to as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). And this with the shadow of a possible ‘capability process’ hanging over them, which can potentially lead to dismissal.
An irony here of course is that the manager conducting the KPI operation is usually her or himself subject to the same process at the hands of the person who is their manager. It’s hard not to be reminded here of Oscar Wilde’s famous essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where he writes: ‘All authority is quite degrading (…) It degrades those who exercise it and degrades those over whom it is exercised’.
Ian Shaw and Marv Waterstone, authors of the book Wageless Life, are just as uncompromisingly critical. They describe work of whatever kind under capitalism as ‘a scramble to sell our energies under conditions of duress and unfreedom’, describing it as ‘a war of profit against life on earth’, in which workers are denied the ability to control how they work and so suffer a disconnection that ‘separates them from the material conditions that allow humans to flourish’. Capitalism, they go on to say, fosters ‘the utter worship of paid work’ and in so doing ‘thrives on producing docile subjects who are alienated from their surroundings’. One of their conclusions is: ‘We live in a world sculpted by money but populated by the moneyless.’ Very much akin to this, if expressed in milder language, is Martin Luther King’s well-known maxim: ‘profit forces people to be more concerned with making a living than making a life.’ A similar more recent characterisation says: ‘the greatest prison has no bars, just a paycheck, a routine and weekends off’.
Not all ‘bullshit jobs’
While we would broadly endorse such an analysis, it is also necessary to point to the fact that not all paid work is equally dispiriting, unsatisfying and alienating. So while it’s surely true, for example, that, if they didn’t need a wage to survive, no man or woman would willingly choose to sit at the entrance to a supermarket all day looking at a screen to check if anyone is stealing or looks as though they might steal, at the same time there’s no doubt that some paid work, even if accompanied by conditions of insecurity or duress, can give significant pleasure or satisfaction to those who carry it out. And while that supermarket guard job is one of the many millions that exist across the planet in the system we live under (so-called ‘bullshit jobs’), constituting a colossal waste of talents, energies and resources, in some cases even the rigid and unforgiving employment practices already mentioned can be offset to an extent by an individual’s passionate interest in the work they are engaged in – maybe for example as a naturalist, a scientist, a computer programmer, or as a gardener or a builder.
It’s only fair to point out too that some challenges have arisen to the hierarchy and intensification of employment practice in recent years, and from some quarters there have also emerged striking (sometimes revolutionary) ideas and recommendations concerning work organisation. These are the areas that Part 2 of this article next month will discuss before going on to look at ways in which work might be organised in the different, non-coercive, moneyless production for need society that socialists campaign to see established.
HKM