| 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 corner; that because work is intolerable, the people who do it
should compensate for its boredoms and frustrations by concentrating their hopes
on the other part of. their lives. I reject that as a counsel of despair. For
the foreseeable future the material and psychological rewards which work can
provide 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 still is one of the cruelest and most glaring forms of inequality in our society. We can not hope to solve the more obvious problems of industrial life, many of which arise directly or indirectly from the inequality at work. 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 able to exercise responsibility; they have a considerable degree of control over their own and the others' working lives. Most important of all, they have the opportunity to initiate. By contrast, for most manual workers, work is a boring, monotonous, 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 simple 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. |