Shaping Work Culture (2 May 2023, Global)
@Andreas Klassen
Shaping Work Culture
Modern society is based on the interaction of workers who want to rationally shape nature, including our social nature. In fact, work, which involves today, more than in the past, an expenditure of personal energy aimed at modifying, according to an instrumental rationality, the physical or social environment. At the same time it transforms not only the worker, physically, mentally and spiritually, but also society. The relationship between services and powers is reversed.
This article presents the relationship today between human beings and their work environment in terms of physiological constraints, mental adaptation and inclusion in society. The second part of this study, to be published in a future issue, will focus on the spiritual dimension of work.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in the year 2020, Pope Francis promoted the establishment of a reflection group on the human dimension of work. The group is a collaboration of various offices of the Holy See, their international networks and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. The two principles on which these reflections were based – at the crossroads between the “decent work” agenda, a long-term project developed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, and the “integral ecology” promoted by the encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015) – can be summed up in the evocative formula “Care is work, work is care,” a care that is as attentive to the worker as it is to the planet.[1]
The report produced by this think tank clearly defines the scenario, identifying, in addition to the psychosomatic experience of work, four specific dimensions: work may be seen as an economic, ecological, social and spiritual reality. Here we will discuss the first three aspects; the fourth, the spiritual dimension of work, will be the subject of another essay.
Working like a human machine
Even before it is thought of in its economic, ecological and social context, work is perceived by some as drudgery, which is sometimes easy to overcome. Sometimes it is experienced as pleasant, or even rewarding when a reasonable justification for it can be found, but sometimes it is extremely painful. In the latter case, in the absence of a rational justification, one may refer either to the absurdity of the world, or the wisdom of Qoheleth when he speaks of the human being in these terms: “All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest” (Qo 2:23), or again what is found in the book of Genesis, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food” (Gen 3:19).
Most of the time, work is experienced as a constraint, which is more or less painful. There is no need to refer to the mythical connection of the word “work,” with the tripalium, the torture instrument built with three poles. It is enough to note that an activity, even if easy, but devoid of meaning, is in any case painful. A new word has been coined to designate this spiritual-type disease: bore-out (which could be translated as the result of “exhausting toil” or, better yet, “alienation through lack of interest”). That is why today the simplest form of dehumanizing work is that which is as mechanical as it is unnecessary, or at any rate seems pointless to the worker. This often happens when the production process is reduced to a series of piecemeal activities, as if one were part of a machine specializing in a single operation.
At the dawn of modernity, work-related risk – that is, the correlate of that anticipated goal that one wants to achieve by dint of work – was seen as involving the possibility of harm, and first of all of pain, offset by the hope of gain. Today – with all the safety regulations in place – the hope of gain is clouded by the possibility of harm that must be reduced at all costs.[2] Hence there is the multiplication, in the name of caution, of production environments supposedly guarantors of safety, which impose many procedural constraints on operators, collaborators, researchers and consultants. Verification by constant reporting, coupled with task empowerment, transforms each person into a kind of mechanism enslaved to alienating protocols. The leaden mantle of bureaucracy is imposed under the guise of “compliance,” which imposes certain standards on every worker.
Managers themselves are not exempt. At best, they demand guidelines and standards from public authorities to have the sheer satisfaction of observing them and living up to them, all the more so when their company is financially stronger than that of competitors. At worst, managers reduce their role to looking for names of employees to put on the company’s organizational chart, without worrying too much about the fit between employee and function.
For the worker, remuneration then becomes not the payment for a worthwhile effort to benefit their family or society, but simply the result of obedience to rules complied with as a work “ritual.” Such rules are a function of status. This is the first task imposed on the worker on assuming a role: to know the procedures and rules he or she will have to follow. Socioeconomic status and norms are linked. In the past it was imperative to “be in the right place” and to know how to “stay in one’s place.” Today one must apply the rules appropriate to one’s socio-economic function. These rules are imposed in the name of the values mentioned above: rationality and security. To these two values is often added that of efficiency, without asking for whom and when? And who will pay the price?
The comparison with robots is appropriate here, since robots – industrial or domestic – are always presented as doing work by implementing the many algorithms that are appropriate to the machine. They are even able to manufacture objects or perform tasks impossible for humans. But their growing power is frightening. A recent European Parliament resolution provides evidence of this. The assumption was that the development of robots would lead to their autonomy and their potential rebellion against the humanity that created them. It was therefore necessary to neutralize their irrational initiatives, in the same way that the scientific organization of labor in the past claimed to eliminate workers’ insubordination by rationalizing processes and making us servants of the machine.
The work will not end
To begin with, we will dispel two widely held illusions. It is said that, in response to low interest in work, Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), compared to Generation Y (which includes young people born between 1980 and 1996), would be undisciplined, eclectic, and more inclined toward entertainment than work. Most psycho-sociological surveys, however, show that this idea is completely false.
Another illusion is that working-class jobs are disappearing. In reality, manufacturing labor is proliferating and moves according to the opportunities and needs of capital.[3] Robotization has not yet taken over the entire field of production; Services, however, which require the cooperation of users, involve first and foremost the participation of workers. Given this intertwining of producer and labor, “exchange platforms” now engage an increasing number of employees and consumers.
In one publication, an Oxford professor uses advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to herald the demise of work.[4] In contrast to the “scientific and technical progress” of the past, AI would introduce the novelty of undermining not material production and its logistics, but the service sector, which, in the West, occupies most of the necessary jobs. Thus, the jobs of train, bus and cab drivers will not be the only ones affected. Secretaries and archivists of all kinds, doctors, journalists and lawyers will also be affected.
In fact, by tapping into the Web, an AI can gather in a matter of moments targeted information that the most experienced practitioner would take long hours, even weeks, to obtain. The icing on the cake is that the AI can present the fruits of its research in “acceptable” forms because they are based on the most numerous formulations gleaned from the Internet. Admittedly, ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence software produced by OpenAI, still has many shortcomings that professors and Internet users have enjoyed pointing out, but a rapid improvement of the system is foreseeable.
Whatever the development of these tools may be, they certainly can only make some tertiary positions, including the more specialized ones, redundant. In fact, however, this reduction in jobs does not herald the end of work. The reason is not that the jobs eliminated will be replaced by engineers, programmers and computer technicians. Certainly, there will be some, perhaps in the peripheries of the digital world, in the Internet sector that has seen the flourishing of YouTube channels, influencers, and other new media that are making their promoters happy, if not rich. But these new requirements for maintenance and development of digital systems will not be enough to avoid unemployment. The reason why AI does not herald the end of work is as follows: just like the scientific and technical progress of yesteryear, AI increases the overall productivity of labor, a global productivity that indirectly generates paid jobs in sectors even further removed from digitization. Examples include security services, personal care, ecological transition, entertainment, luxury, social control.
It is fashionable, in a static view of the economy and society, to conjure up the “the quantity of available labor” and falsely reason about the myth of “work to be shared,” understood in the way one shares a cake, a cake that, one fears, is shrinking because of current technologies. Assuming that the premise regarding a given amount of work is true, this sharing could work only if one agreed to share, in the same movement, their income, , something that no politician defending the 35 hour, the 32 or even the 24 hour week has ever proposed. In fact, labor treated as an object is an aspect of crass materialism. To treat work as an identifiable object, a thing circumscribed in a certain space at a given time, is to have only a partial and static view of a society that, like ours, is in permanent flux.
Hidden labor in services and entertainment
Contemporary times are no longer the ones when one can reason by distinguishing (without being able to do so in practice) between productive labor, the surplus value generated through the exploitation of the proletariat, and unproductive labor, such as the construction of temples and cathedrals. Also involved is the whole institutional, legal and religious “superstructure” of society, down to the administrative, financial or commercial services rendered to industries and individuals. Although, perhaps, it is possible to distinguish useful labor (for whom and when?) from non-useful labor, one can no longer differentiate productive from unproductive labor, because now everything contributes to the construction of society, including entertainment. Any service thus mobilizes not only the labor of the person performing it, but also that of the recipient. It is the whole society working for its own reproduction.
In effect, one works either for others, whether or not they are paying consumers, or for oneself, but always with the idea of meeting the needs of an expected beneficiary. This is true not only of services in which the consumer must participate in some way in the realization of the service itself (such as transportation, insurance, information services, or personal care), but also of more tangible products. It is not simply a matter of individuals who, in order to obtain a rail ticket and fulfill a commercial or administrative obligation, must use IT tools themselves, work that used to be done by railway employees or civil servants. The participation of the final recipient of goods or services is conceived as the main element of, for example, the car or washing machine they purchase. They must feel “at home,” as in their own room. For a long time, the price to be paid for tires was calculated on the basis of the kilometers driven, and thus how much use the driver made of them. The development of “leasing,” which substitutes the purchase of a product for its rental, proceeds along the same lines as that which makes the user a contributor to the social work of the manufacturer.
The user’s work does not appear in a better light in entertainment activities. Beyond the “entertainment industry” – which includes a wide range of different activities, from sports aimed at relaxation, fitness, museums, and the various hotel and entertainment industries – people enjoy working to match their desires with the means offered by the market or government. Moreover, the distinction between work time and leisure time is now more blurred, as everyone seeks the same “self-actualization” in work that they pursue in leisure time.
Personnel managers are not mistaken. In the end, it is the whole of society that takes on the figure of the individual in the workshop of yesteryear, in the service of possible individual fulfillment.
Since any activity – of production or consumption, salaried or not, monetized or not – can be considered as a form of labor, we can say with equal certainty that all aspects of society and all cultural and social relations become capital, since they are already labor. Each person finds in it something to be “realized” in a future he or she imagines promising, judging the present value of everything by the criteria of the future income or the gratification it will generate, which is then considered the definition of capital.
That is why the world of entertainment, although based on objective and measurable observation of the expansion of leisure time, is somewhat illusory. It is true that the trend is toward a decrease in the hours of compulsory work. Half a century ago, the average annual working time in industrialized (OECD) countries ranged from 1,800 to 2,000 hours, and although it is still close to 2,000 hours in Greece, today it is just 1,720 hours in Italy, 1,700 in Spain, 1,520 in France and 1,350 in Germany. The average for OECD countries is 1,734 hours. This average hides many disparities because it depends on the status and economic power of each country. But this data should be weighted by considering years of initial training and time spent on continuing education, as well as the amount of travel required to get to work or “in-person” meetings.
The decrease in the time spent on the “workday” – as it used to be called to exclude Sunday work – has gone hand in hand with a general increase in living standards and a widening gap in incomes and wealth. This is due to the investment in training, tools and organization, which has allowed, along with a very marked increase in productivity, a dehumanization of work, compounded by the widening gap in income and – above all – wealth. As a result, non-graduates are increasingly excluded from the world of work; “employment” is replacing work, not to mention part-time and temporary work. Professional impulsiveness fuels lack of respect for workers, even in their own eyes, as well as in the eyes of those around them.
The political dimensions of work
In order to seriously examine the responses of today’s society, it is necessary to keep in mind the basic political facts that place work among current concerns. Indeed, work, in addition to being part of the workers’ mindset, is also an economic, ecological and social reality.
Labor is first and foremost an economic reality because it creates value, not only in a moral sense when it meets the needs of society, especially that of the most vulnerable, but also in a strictly economic sense. In the latter respect, value is what gives meaning to a cost. That which produces labor – a useful object (for whom and when?), an indispensable service (in whose eyes?) – compensates for the toil, the effort, the genius of the engineer, the artist, the laborer, the administrative worker, the manager, the user or the final consumer.
For economists, labor is both a cost and a resource. The cost is measurable; its counterpart, for the payer, is a resource, the “human resource,” as we say today. A sign of rationalist times, the phrase “human resources” is increasingly supplanting the notion of “personnel.” This shift reflects the influence of materialist culture on economics. The idea of “personnel” used to involve the person, that social figure defined by a role or responsibility in the work community; the human resource, on the other hand, is based on the profitability of the investment made in people, in the form of capital from which a future return is expected.
The instrumental aspect of economics has always derived from the financial aspect that measures the present value of a good, a service, a business relationship, or even a friendship, against future gain, whether monetary or any other form of gratification. This pervasiveness of financial assessment in all work is such today that, even in everyday language, everything becomes capital. We enjoy health capital, skills capital, relational capital, emotional capital, family capital, social capital, aesthetic capital, religious capital, even the capital of knowledge, wisdom or morality. Financial logic leads, by a kind of implicit process, to evaluate any present activity in terms of what it will bring in the future. Every active person, whether producer or consumer, becomes, to some degree, homo financiarius, whose activity is speculation that involves planning constantly, and managing risk with the aim of maximizing monetary gain while limiting losses.[5]
In the mid-17th century, which opened the rationalist path to Western modernity, Blaise Pascal foresaw the anthropological consequences. He wrote that the present “is never our end: the past and the present are our means, only the future is our end. In this way we never live, but hope to live; and, disposing ourselves always to be happy, it is inevitable that we never are.”[6]
The transformation of the natural and social environment
Labor is as much an economic reality as it is an ecological one. Indeed, the pursuit of labor productivity and its financial aspect have led to ways of activity and consumption ways of using tools, machines, factories and means of transportation that, to this day, have plundered the planet’s energy and mineral resources. Water itself – a potent symbol of life – is becoming a scarce resource in ever larger areas.[7]
Of course, it is fashionable in courtrooms, newspapers and public debates to report arguments among experts regarding the use of “science” in the service of particular beliefs. Moreover, the Internet has intruded into people’s minds a relativism that opens a wide avenue for fake news (deliberately obfuscated or distorted news). But as far as climate is concerned, hesitation is no longer excusable. Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ clearly explains what is at stake from the ecological point of view, and here it is not necessary to go into the details of its now well-known formulations.
Labor is of course also a social reality. The Church’s social doctrine has insisted on this point since Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). A pertinent analysis recognizes labor at the center of the Church’s social doctrine: “The encyclical Rerum Novarum, a pillar of the Church’s social discourse, has the working-class condition as its object, but it devotes a lengthy treatment to labor itself. It is to this fundamental text that all subsequent encyclicals refer, including Laborem Exercens [by Pope John Paul II in 1981, ninety years later.”[8]
The Christian tradition cannot help but oppose the idea that the worker is only a free individual who can sell his labor. The modern organization of labor and the economy, it is true, tends to isolate the worker and separate him from his fellow workers, his family and his homeland. Hence the emphasis on “society” rather than on “community.”[9] In addition, there are many other values that are undermined by the international division of labor: the region in which the worker operates, the region in which he or she lives, the employment sector in which he or she is located, and, more generally, the obligations that bind him or her to the legal, economic, national and international geopolitical context. Smart working fostered by the Covid-19 pandemic has strongly encouraged the isolation of work, making it increasingly virtual. Moreover, by greatly increasing the sense of autonomy, it has fostered isolation in an increasingly dispersed work community. Think, for example, of companies that work only with subcontractors – such as Flixbus, which does not own any buses in Europe – or, increasingly, large automotive brands: they often have as their only management reality software for coordinating and adjusting processes or task distribution. This explains why they manage to increase their profits in a depressed market; it is the subcontractors who bear the brunt of the depression.
Despite the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic has accentuated these trends, in contemporary society work remains the main mode of self-actualization, integrating us into a social system where the important thing is not to do something objectively useful for oneself, one’s family or others, but something that is recognized, with a salary, honorarium or prestige. Thus, work will not disappear, at least if it remains the main vector of individual identity, that is, a means of integration into society. This identity through work certainly does not have the absolute value attributed to it by psycho-sociologists. In fact, this approach to identity destroys the worker’s sense of self. The worker is reduced to his or her social utility, or function. In today’s anthropological context, identity cannot account for the spiritual dimension of work, but we will deal with this in my second and subsequent article.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32009/22072446.0523.4
[1]. Cf. International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), Care is work, work is care (www.icmc.net).
[2]. Cf. U. Beck, La società del rischio. Verso una seconda modernità, Rome, Carocci, 2013.
[3]. Cf. J.S. Carbonell, The Future of Work, Amsterdam, Amsterdam Publishing, 2022.
[4]. Cf. D. Susskind, Un mondo senza lavoro. Come rispondere alla disoccupazione tecnologica, Milan, Bompiani, 2022.
[5]. Cfr G. Giraud – E. G. Ruiz Lara, “The real obstacles to the ecological transition”, in Civ. Catt. En., March 2023 https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/the-real-obstacles-to-ecological-transition/
[6]. B. Pascal, Pensieri, Milan, Rizzoli, 2013, No. 42, 62.
[7]. Cf. É. Perrot, “Water, a Topical Issue”, in Civ. Catt. En., July 2022 https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/water-a-topical-issue/
[8]. F. Salmon, 2012, in Ceras-Project.org, Social Doctrine of the Church, under the heading “Labor.“
[9]. Cf. É. Perrot, “Business, Society and the Human Community”, in Civ. Catt. En., December 2022 https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/business-society-and-the-human-community/
This article was published at the website of La Civilta Cattolica:
Shaping Work Culture – LA CIVILTÀ CATTOLICA (laciviltacattolica.com)