| For most of us, work is the central,
dominating fact of life. We spend more than half our conscious hours at work,
preparing for work, traveling to and from work. What we do there largely
determines our standard of living and to a considerable extent the status we are
accorded by our fellow citizens as well. It is sometimes said that because
leisure has become more important the indignities and injustices of work can be
pushed into a comer, that because most work is pretty intolerable, the people
who do it should compensate for its boredom, frustration and humiliations by
concentrating their hopes on the other parts of their lives. I reject that as a
counsel of despair. For the foreseeable future the material and psychological
rewards which work can provide, and the conditions in which work is done, will
continue to play a vital part in determining the satisfaction that life can
offer. Yet only a small minority can control the pace at which they work or the
conditions in which their work is done; only for a small minority does work
offer scope for creativity, imagination, or initiative. Inequality at work and in work is still one of the cruelest and most glaring forms of inequality in our society. We cannot hope to solve the more obvious problems of industrial life, many of which arise directly or indirectly from the frustrations created by inequality at work, unless we tackle it head-on. Still less can we hope to create a decent and humane society. The most glaring inequality is that between managers and the rest. For most managers, work is an opportunity and a challenge. Their jobs engage their interest and allow them to develop their abilities. They are constantly learning; they are able to exercise responsibility; they have a considerable degree of control over their own and others' working lives. Most important of all, they have opportunity to initiate. By contrast, for most manual workers, and for a growing number of white-collar workers, work is a boring, dull, even painful experience. They spend all their working lives in conditions which would be regarded as intolerable--for themselves--by those who take the decisions which let such conditions continue. The majority have little control over their work; it provides them with no opportunity for personal development. Often production is so designed that workers are simply part of the technology. In offices, many jobs are so routine that workers justifiably feel themselves to be mere cogs in the bureaucratic machine. As a direct consequence of their work experience, many workers feel alienated from their work and their firm, whether it is in public or in private ownership. |