问答题 For most of us, work is the central, domination 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 follow citizens as well. 1 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 boredoms, frustrations 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 condition in which work is done, will continue to play a vital part in determining the satisfaction that life can offer. 2 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, like the one 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. By contrast, for most manual workers, and for a growing number of white-collar workers, work is a boring, monotonous, even painful experience. 3 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. 4 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.
Rising educational standards feed rising expectations, yet the amount of control which the worker has over his own work situation does not rise accordingly. 5 In many cases his control has been reduced. Symptoms of protest increase— rising sickness and absenteeism, high mover of employees, restrictions on output, and strikes, both unofficial and official. There is not much escape out and upwards. As management becomes more professional—in itself a good thing—the opportunity for promotion from the shop floor becomes less. The only escape is to another equally frustrating manual job: the only compensation is found not in the job but outside it, if there is a rising standard of living.