http://www.greenaudit.org/new_page_18.htm
Seven Myths About Work was published by Green Audit in 1996. The book was well received around the world and sold out within two years. A second, updated edition is available as an Acrobat file under the title Arbeit Macht Frei and Other Lies about Work.
The following is a selection from the first edition of Seven Myths About Work: the preface, contents page and first chapter, the ‘myth of the Jolly Worker’.
Preface
There is so much to say about work. What inspired me to pull together this short book was my belief that much of the unhappiness in modern society is caused by work, or more precisely by work as it has been arranged in the present industrial system.
We live on a beautiful planet whose oceans glint and gleam, whose countryside spreads around us, where there is food in abundance for all and enough land for us all to live and peace and fulfillment. Yet every day the people I pass in the street hurry by with sad, anxious faces. What is their hurry? I would venture that work is at the root of it. Yet work is part of what it is to be human. Findings ways of work that are useful and good is therefore an important challenge for all of us.
There is so much to say about work. I would have liked to write about fathers who only know their children for two weeks a year because of work. Or of children how, once adult, blame their fathers for never having been around, when work was the real villain. I would have liked to have written of the tragedy of workers whose lives revolve around their two weeks each year in the sun. So that 25/26 of their lives are spent in endurance for the remaining 1/26 that brings them joy.
I would have liked to write about what we gain from good work. A sense of confidence in our ability to complete the task. Our satisfaction in working together with others on an important project. The pleasure we find in our workmates.
But this is a short book, so I have restricted myself to considering seven of the many myths about work that colour our thinking. I have intended to present some facts about work culled from research in diverse fields. If we are to reorgnize work so that it works for us we need to see through the ideology of work that has grown up since the Industrial Revolution. The first step is to explode the myths that make up that ideology.
Contents
Hi Ho, Hi Ho: The Myth of the Jolly Worker
The Myth of Job Creation
Work is Good for You
The Myth of Women’s Work
Work Makes you Rich
A Job for Life
Working for Yourself
Conclusion: The Future of Work
Hi Ho, Hi Ho: The Myth of the Jolly Worker
The most striking thing about work in the twentieth century is just how much of it there seems to be. In spite of the several millions of unemployed people, who are required to ritually beat their breast in order to earn their dole payments, the rest of us spend most of our lives with our noses to various grind-stones, barely finding time even to talk to each other or appreciate our surroundings. The other extraordinary aspect is that so few people ever question why we should have to work so hard. When I first came upon the collection Why Work? published by the anarchist Freedom Press I was faintly scandalized. But the more I have thought about it the more it seems a question well worth asking. Why do so many people feel so unhappy in their work and yet never question why they should have to do it?
And what about alternative forms of societies that we like to think of as `primitive’? Surely without the benefits of technology and in the inhospitable conditions left to them after the world-wide spread of the white caucasian male they must be working night and day to survive? Anthropologists have found the reverse: long working hours seem to be the product of industrial society. Research has shown that in most hunter-gatherer societies people are not required to work hard.
For example, the Kung! bushmen in the Kalahari desert of Southwest Africa and the Hazda, in a dry rocky region of East Africa work only about 12-20 hours per week. . . The Kung youth do not work regularly until they marry (age 15-20 for women, 20-25 for men), and the aged, blind, and crippled are not only supported but are respected for their technical and ritual skills. Childhood, adolescence, and old age are carefree, at least economically. (p. 14).
The contrast between the intensity of work for a US worker and the more leisurely pace of life in a traditional society is also brought out by the following quotation:
While a fairly leisurely year for the United States workers (including a full month of summer vacation) involves about 221 working days, the comparable figure for the Kung! would be 121 days. This is enough to support not only the workers but the 40 per cent of the population that is non-productive.
Of course these bush people do not have the benefits of Western technology: they are sadly bereft of computer games and hamburger bars. But, according to the researchers, they do not live marginally, and starvation and malnutrition are uncommon, even during droughts.
So how can it be that with our superior intellects and our advanced technology we require so many more hours from each member of society per week to ensure our economic survival? Why do people in developed societies in the twentieth century work so hard? The answer to this is the ideology that tells us we must work, that makes the question `Why work?’ so difficult to ask. This is what I refer to as the myth of the jolly worker.
The Religious Origin of the Work Ethic
In modern Western society people work on average more hours than they ever have before. We read that the miners of Thuringia, Germany in the middle ages worked only 35 hours a week; life for a medieval peasant was probably similarly untaxing. Researchers have calculated that `slash-and-burn’ agriculture requires 10-30 hours per week; whereas plough-based agriculture, which was the means of survival of most people in Medieval Europe, requires 30-35 hours per week. While life in the middle ages may have been somewhat brutish and rather short, its nastiness seems likely to have been a post hoc construction of later ideologists. In Medieval times nearly half the days of the year were `holy days’ dedicated to some obscure saint or other as an excuse for getting drunk and not working.
In his classic The Making of the English Working Class (and in his paper specifically on the issue; 1967), the historian E. P. Thompson describes the difficulties faced by the early capitalists in persuading their employees to turn up for work every day at a set time. It took severe punishments to conquer the peasant’s or artisan’s attachment to `Saint Monday’: a day spent in bed to recover from the excesses of the weekend or perhaps to drink away the horrors of hell threatened in church on the preceding Sunday. According to Thompson, wool-combers did not work Tuesday or Wednesday either. They lit the stove on Monday (presumably still suffering from hangovers) and then returned on Thursday to think about getting down to work. This only left Friday, and possibly part of Saturday, before the weekend revelling started again.
According to Thompson an industrial work structure required a disciplined workforce. The fear of punishment or starvation was part of the processes of discipline, but for workers to be really effective they needed to feel committed to their work: this required the invention of the ideology of work, which originally had its roots in religion.
This is where the Protestant work ethic identified by the sociologist Max Weber enters the discussion. In the case of the weaving communities studied by Thompson the people were Methodists: it was Methodism, which stressed the value of discipline, hard work and frugality. Capitalists found it much more efficient to turn the labourer into his own slave-driver by inculcating in him an ideology of thankless, unrewarded toil in exchange for a place in heaven. `They weakened the poor from within, by adding to them the active ingredient of submission; and they fostered within the Methodist Church those elements most suited to make up the psychic component of the work-discipline of which the manufacturers stood most in need.’ (Thompson, 1963: 355).
Weber drew a distinction between the Catholic cultures of southern Europe which have a more relaxed attitude towards work, and the Protestant cultures of northern Europe, where work was viewed as a religious duty. He gave this as the reason why the economic system of capitalism developed in northern rather than southern Europe. The Protestant faiths stressed the importance of the `inner compulsion’ or `calling’. It was believed that labour was a punishment for the original sin of pride: God assigned to each person his or her place and that it was the duty of that person to spend all his or her life and energy working as well as possible in that station, atoning for sin and hopefully earning a place in heaven. The accumulation of wealth was actually viewed as a sign of God’s blessing. However, it was immoral to enjoy oneself with this wealth: one could only acquire more and then invest it in further industrial projects.
To illustrate the contrast in attitudes to work we can explore the example of the Irish worker, who shared the more relaxed Catholic attitude. The denigration of Irish workers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew no bounds. In spite of the fact that it was mainly Irish labourers who constructed much of the infrastructure to support the Industrial Revolution in England, they were despised and forced to live beyond the pale of Protestant civilization. Many towns and villages have an `Irish town’ nearby where the labourers lived. The viaducts, canals, and railway cuttings are testimony to their hard work, yet they were despised for drinking and enjoying themselves with the proceeds.
In Japan the work ethic is also closely tied to culture and religion. It has been a source of great interest that Japan has become more successfully capitalist than the European countries that invented the system, and much time has been spent trying to work out what it is about Japanese culture that makes it such fertile ground for industrial production and marketing systems. It appears that religion also plays an important role in Japan. According to the Japanese sociologist Sengoku Tomatsu the concept of Bushido or the way of the warrior is very like that of the Protestant `calling’ in the sense of being a religious dictate about how one should spend one’s life. It is interesting that Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, the apotheosis of ideas about self-improvement through hard work, sold more than a million copies when it was translated into Japanese in the late nineteenth century.
Japanese codes of honour and the particular morality of the Buddhist Shin sect created the perfect cultural support for capitalism in Japan. The sect valued loyalty and collectivism particularly highly, and scientific interests were also important. These religious ideas were transplanted into the workplace so that the Japanese worker can now be said to view his workplace as `a place for his soul to recreate itself, a place for self-improvement, and a place for spiritual training . . . [the worker] looks for the reason of his being or identity in hard work’, according to Tomatsu (Schwenkter, 1995).
So we can identify the source of the ideology of work which dominates modern industrialized economies in religious systems which claimed a divine right to control our behaviour and used fear of supernatural punishment to oblige us to work hard. The Protestant idea of vocation actually required a person to accept their calling with joy, as a God-given blessing, whether they were king or dustman. So workers should have accepted their positions and worked with smiles on their faces, contemplating their promised celestial throne. However, it seems unlikely that many of these workers were really very happy about it: for the source of the jolly worker we must look elsewhere.
US Culture and the Ideology of Work
In tracing the roots of the myth of the jolly worker we should remember that the miners who whistled `hi ho’ were not Thuringian miners but the dwarves in Walt Disney’s film of Snow White, once that fairy tale had been translated to US cartoon fantasyland. Because the Western culture of excessive work and the jolly worker can be traced to the influence of the United States on European culture.
The hard-working nature of North Americans, and in particular their systems of industrial production, has long been noted by their more relaxed European observers. As early as 1922 Weber identified the origins of modern work discipline:
No special proof is necessary to show that military discipline is the ideal model for the modern capitalist factory . . . With the help of appropriate methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production. On the basis of this calculation, the American system of `scientific management’ enjoys the greatest triumphs in the rational conditioning and training of work performances. The final consequences are drawn from the mechanization and discipline of the plant, and the psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world’. (from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1992, in Gerth and Wright Mills, 1948).
It may be significant in the formation of the culture of work in the US that so many of the early immigrants were Protestant extremists, exiled from their own countries because of their extreme religious beliefs. The clean-living, hard-working life-styles of those Protestant communities which survive--whether Amish or Mennonite--are renowned, and this must have been influential in establishing an attitude to work before the less noble aspiration to accumulate wealth arrived.
Although this may have provided a basis for the later development of attitudes to work, the general culture of the United States was created by the mixing of the cultures of all the immigrants who arrived there mainly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While these people had widely differing religious and cultural backgrounds what they all shared was the determination to succeed and the desperation that drives a person to leave all they know behind. For most, very hard work was simply necessary to ensure survival. But for many the American dream came true. They accumulated wealth and ended their days in comfort and security. This seemed to prove the equation that hard work and longs hours equal financial security that still drives the US today when so many people find that in their lives it is not true.
Of course, the real reason why most early immigrants to the USA became wealthy was because of the boundless wealth of the land available. While the frontier remained open anybody could claim a stake of this bounty, and millions became successful. They credited themselves with achieving this wealth through hard work and so work came to acquire an almost sacred status. The wealth they took from the land in producing the dust-bowl or sucking the oil from beneath the desert was misallocated as the fruit of their own labours. America, with its bounty and its emptiness (except, of course, for the native Americans, who were excluded from the fairy tale) enabled the amplification and strengthening of the Protestant work ethic. The United States became the apotheosis of industrial development, the only surviving superpower, and living proof of the rightness of the capitalist system of production. Its political and economic power has ensured that its culture has come to dominate patterns of thought throughout the world, and at the heart of that culture is the reinforced Protestant work ethic. What else do we mean by `the American Dream’ but the fact that hard work leads to wealth and happiness?
And what about the dwarves of Snow White, the archetypes for the jolly worker? Is it any coincidence that their invention in the fantasy-ridden mind of Walt Disney should have coincided with the Great Depression, the largest ever threat to the American Dream. The Great Depression was the end of the fairy tale: the bounty that nature had bestowed on the continent of America had all been used up. The Dustbowl--nature over-exploited and sucked dry--was a powerful and depressing image of the emptiness of the capitalist ideology for many in the USA. It was at this time that many US writers started to question the ideology of hard work they had grown up with, for example John Steinbeck with his portrayal of hard-working farmers destroyed in The Grapes of Wrath. The work of these writers who undermined the North American culture was black-listed out of Hollywood, leaving Walt Disney free to create his fantastical images of US life.
Do We Need the Work Ethic?
Although the compulsion to work hard has its roots in religion, it has now become pervasive in the cultures of most developed societies. Since the religion which underpinned this compulsion now has no importance for most of us it is certainly time that we also challenged the attitudes towards the work ethic that it gave rise to. However, we should not forget how many of our politicians, those men who are particularly driven by a `calling’ to organize our lives for us, still profess to a strong religious faith: Tony Blair is a prominent example. He cites his background in the Methodist Church as an important part of his vision. And Margaret Thatcher, who was won of the jolliest and hardest workers in living memory, has been a regular church attender all her life.
Much of the ideology of Thatcherism could have been drawn from the pages of Samuel Smiles: Norman Tebbitt’s comment about getting on your bike to look for work is a notable example. Norman Lamont’s equally tactless comment that `If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working’ could also give rise to much speculation about the meaning of work within a modern Tory ideology. And I am sure we are all equally tired of hearing how John Major’s father removed his circus tights and sequinned shorts and built up his own business through hard work: selling garden gnomes, was it?
So, in conclusion, what are we to make of the myth of the jolly worker. Should we imagine those Medieval Thuringians, throwing their picks and axes nonchalantly across their shoulders and whistling `Hi Ho, Hi Ho’ as off to work they went? This seems improbable. It seems more likely that the natural human condition was to avoid work as much as possible, to chat with friends and family, to make enough effort to subsist, and to only really crank up to full power when danger threatened. The compulsion we face today to do more than this, to spend most of our precious and short lives in working for somebody else is the product of an ideology. And, as we shall see in the following chapters, it is an ideology that does not serve us very well.
The myth of the jolly worker is the first of the myths about work and in a sense it underlies and supports all the other myths. If we all enjoy work so much why do so many of us play the National Lottery every week with a tiny glimmer of hope that we might have enough money never to have to work again? But ideology, it seems, is more important to us than money. How else do we explain the fact that many Lottery winners declare that their new-found millions will not change them, and that they will keep their jobs!
If you are still subject to the myth of the jolly worker ask yourself the question: if you could have enough money for all your material needs to be fulfilled, and you could use your time to develop your interests and to achieve any project you feel passionate about, would you carry on in your job? The myth of the jolly worker tells us that work makes us free, that it is the meaning of our lives. But this was the same message that was wrought in iron over the entrance to Hitler’s concentration camps: Arbeit macht frei. Imagine yourself on your deathbed and think which of your life’s achievements you will remember then: would you want to be surrounded by filing cabinets full of reports or rows of tables and chairs you have built or mended? Or would you want to have your family and friends around you, the people you had shared the joys and sadnesses of your life with? It is your life and it is your choice.
References
Eyer, J. and Sterling, P. (1978), `Stress-related Mortality and Social Organization’, Review of Radical Political Economy, 9: 1-16.
Gerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C. (1948), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Schwenkter, W. (1995), `Work and Culture in Early Modern Japan’, in P. Gouk (ed.), Wellsprings of Achievement (Aldershot: Gower).
Thompson, E. P. (1967), `Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, in Past and Present, 38.
(pun not intended)