单选题
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.
单选题
In the writer's opinion, people judge others by ______.