I would like to give a brief blog post as a preamble to next week’s topic of works role in an egalitarian society and weather one should be guaranteed access to work. For me this issue is essential to an egalitarian society. Work has had a central role in the development and life of human beings since the dawn of our species. The opposing thumb is a physical expression as to our evolutionary tendency to labour. In this sense, work is as fundamental to being human as love and friendship and the desire to produce and develop is universal to mankind. We are both a social and a productive species. The right to work therefore for me is as close to a natural right as we can come across, not only on normative grounds, but also on the same biological grounds as establishes the right to food and shelter. To fully develop ourselves as rational agents we must have the right to work. Demonstrating this fact is the considerably higher rates of depression, suicide, and chemical dependency among the unemployed. It is clear that capitalism is unable to deliver on this right. That people actively seek employment in lieu of social welfare is demonstrated by the large amount of individuals who labour at minimum wages despite their weekly income barely justifying the work instead of sitting at home and collecting social welfare.
There is a concern however that the jobs provided by a bureaucratic state would not be socially useful and therefore would leave those in them still lacking in self esteem. However I believe this can be overcome by payment being linked to work for charitable, political, civil or not for profit organisations who would apply to the state to have certain jobs listed as state funded for the long term unemployed and for a higher wage then that of welfare payments. In this way the worker will know they are fulfilling a socially useful task not being provided by the state as simply “make-work” solution. What is more, if the work is carried out for not-for-profit organisations the private sector may have little basis for complaint as often the work is focussed around areas the market has no interest in, i.e animal welfare, litter, homeless organisations
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The right to work
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[Disclaimer: I haven’t read the material yet, this is just my uneducated response to the above, and I plan on writing a proper response once I’ve read the material.]
I’m unclear as to what a ‘right to work’ actually means in practical terms and I’m therefore also confused as to why it should be considered to be of fundamental importance.
My intuition is to think of labour as a means to an end; we labour so that we can produce something we believe to be of intrinsic or instrumental value. If those ends can be secured via some other means, then I’m not sure why we should think that work itself constitutes a fundamental right.
I could imagine that some people might possibly view certain kinds of labour as intrinsically valuable in themselves, but I’m not sure how you would express a right to this sort of thing in universal terms unless you expand the definition of ‘work’ to cover more general kinds of activities. On this view it wouldn’t be ‘work’ as such that humans have a right to, but to opportunities for production, communication and self-expression, whether this manifests itself in some particular kind of work as commonly understood, or some other activity.
It would seem however that there is some good intrinsical to work aside from the material goods pr payment by which you gain from it. Again I put this down to an evolutionary tendency to labour, something most social science acedemics run a mile from due to its biologically determinist implications. I believe that fundementally the good is the sense that one is "pulling ones weight"; society, or the market, has determined mine a socially useful job and I carry it out to the best of my ability. It is this sense of self esteem that cannot be bought through simple social welfare.
I fail to decide whether being part of a developed society provides a more advanced insight into this sort of issues or simply short-sightedness. I mean no hostility by my words, but the fact is that in the developing world the right to word is not about being provided with jobs and personal fulfilment, but rather humane conditions for labourers to carry out their job. Dignity, rest, shares in utilities in a comprehensive frame of labour ethics is the concern for people below the poverty line. It also begs the question: what happens to this overarching governance system and individual entrepreneurship? Will positive discrimination and lottery schemes be established for any activity as the theory progresses? Would this eventually imply the elimination of a private sector and yield to a super tabulated universally orchestrated economy? And even so, what happens in hypothetical scenarios of overpopulation, which is in fact not hypothetical at all...
Work is an evolutionary process indicative by how it has changed over time. Work has evolved from primitive activities such as hunting and gathering, necessary for human survival to the capitalist modernity that exists today. Work is no longer primitive and humans are no longer satisfied to exist in this fashion. Work, however, is important for more than consumerist reasons and proves to have positive effects on those that engage in it. Work is not only beneficial for the greater capitalist market but is also a necessity to societal growth and political organisation as well as for personal development and learning. I agree with Brian that work is a means to an end, i.e. that we work to produce things we deem valuable and worthwhile (even if the product we value has changed over time).
From an early age humans in the West are programmed to believe that the harder you work the more money you will receive. Media portrayal, etc, has led us to believe that the wealthiest among as are to be revered and if we work hard enough one day we may be entitled to a place among the wealthy elite that ultimately are in control of our societies. I believe that the selfish accumulation of excessive wealth is unegalitarian as it is unequal and deprives individuals in greater need of access to specific resources that are necessary for their survival.
Although the opportunity to work is egalitarian (to me anyway), a truly egalitarian society does not attribute esteem and status to certain professions. This, I believe, would allow individuals to select their professions based on their individual skill and talents rather than by monetary gain or the level of prestige associated with each profession.
I think the “work as a means to an end” means of thinking somewhat misses the intrinsic value that work has. Looking at it from a Marxist point of view we have become significantly alienated from our work in modern capitalist workplaces. The level of specialisation involved in modern jobs means the worker is largely divorced from the greater scheme of production. They rarely understand how their role links in with other aspects of the company or greater economy and often are stuck in repetitive and mundane tasks. We feel alienated from our work colleges, undervalued and often like we are working for technology rather than technology working for us. This leads to a situation we have today where life begins once we leave the workplace, during the weekend or in the pub and a scenario of Monday morning blues every week.
The evolutionary model of work practice again can be used to develop how an egalitarian society might organise workplaces. Work on an evolutionary basis was done in teams with very little specialisation and with a general understanding and appreciation of the role and its place in the overall scheme of production. It is this aspect that we should be looking to re-establish in the egalitarian society. This could mean, as was suggested in class, the rotation of roles so as to make for less specialisation or for greater workers participation in the production process so as to involve the worker to a greater degree in their occupation and within the broader scheme of the economy. While we are no longer hunter gatherer’s the role we have adopted of highly specialised ants all working as means to an end is not serving us well either I believe. If all that doesn’t sound too much like a “Brave New World” rehash!
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