The Truth Of Jobs: The Improbable Dream

THE TRUTH OF JOBS: THE IMPROBABLE DREAM

"What do you want to be when you grow up?'.

This is a familiar question, one asked of most people. But is it a reasonable one to ask? In this series, I am going to argue that it is not all that reasonable, because it is actually pretty misleading.

At this point some of you may be wondering, 'how is it misleading?'. The reason why is because it portrays a concept of jobs that is mostly contrary to the nature of employment within the capitalist system. The way the question is put leads one to suppose that achieving success in one's life as an employee is to be expected, when in fact it is the exception. What most of us can actually expect is to fail to secure rewarding work, because capitalism depends much more on people failing to find such work than on their succeeding.

We can see that people are mostly failing to secure rewarding jobs by looking at the results of surveys like this one from Gallup. As you can see, in 2011 a mere 13 percent of employees around the world were engaged in their job. The largest percentage are described as 'not engaged' and 24 percent are 'actively disengaged', which is to say they hate their job. According to this poll, then, close to 90 percent of employees fail to find jobs that are actually rewarding.

What makes a job rewarding? People find work rewarding when it provides the following: Engagement, challenge, autonomy, mastery, social engagement and meaning. In other words, work is rewarding when it provides one with autonomy, the ability to act on one's own initiative; when it provides the opportunity to exercise the imagination; when it provides scope to develop one's abilities to their maximum potential, and when doing such work is contributing something positive to society.

We could probably condense those six terms into just two and say a job is rewarding when it provides scope to be creative or caring; doing work that exercises one's imagination and problem-solving skills and/ or allows one to look after those who need assistance.

So what's the problem with providing enough work of this kind to give more people satisfying employment? The answer is: The driving force of capitalism. A person with a high degree of autonomy and mastery, equipped to tackle novel and challenging work, would very likely be pretty individualistic and not all that easy to replace. As such, they would oppose one of the fundamental drives of capitalism, that being the push to commodify everything.

We see this commodification in effect whenever people describe their job not just in terms of what they do, but who they are. "I am an accountant", as if this individual were a machine designed for this purpose alone. But the commodification of labour power goes further. Where possible, the capitalist drive seeks to reduce the challenge, creativity, autonomy and mastery required of the employee, because the more such things are reduced the less unique the employer needs to be. Put another way, the more such qualities of work can be reduced, the more workers become more like interchangeable components who can be more easily replaced. The effect this has on the employee is to reduce their bargaining power, for who would raise objections over pay or working conditions when one's wages are dependent on wage labour that is rife with insecurity and one may be replaced at as short a notice as possible?

By taking away challenge, creativity, autonomy and mastery from individual employees (the overall system may churn out products with a high degree of creativity but the human 'cogs' in such a system only get to contribute a minimal amount of that overall creative process) owners are able to put themselves in a position where they can extract more value out of the commodity of labour power. In other words, they get to make employers do more work for less reward, which translates as more profit for them.

This does not always happen because not all work can have challenge, autonomy, creativity and mastery eliminated. Also, experience can count for a lot so it's not always possible to produce totally commodified workers who can be swapped out for replacements at a moment's notice. Since there are professions where employees who have such attributes as creativity and autonomy are needed, it is not strictly speaking a lie to claim that you can find such work. It does exist. But it is definitely an exaggeration to suggest that the normal run of things is to secure such employment.

Rather, the opposite is true, because, while there are indeed some professions where people with such skills are needed, they are relatively and are certainly not wanted. What I mean is, from the capitalist perspective such workers are an unfortunate necessity which, In the ideal world of employers, would never be necessary; only lower-skilled, more exploitable labourers would be required. And there are always people looking to reduce or eliminate highly-skilled, more rewarded employers through technological innovation or workplace reconfiguration or whatever other option comes to mind. In other words, there are always people working to make that ideal a reality. Such people have always been doggedly at work, helping to further commodify labour, make it cheaper, and therefore less rewarding for wage-earners and more lucrative for owners. There is every reason to suppose that such people will not rest until there is no rewarding work left and all wage-earners are jobbing in conditions that offer no engagement whatsoever and rewards that barely keep up with the cost of living. Probably, such an extreme outcome will never be realised and there will always be careers that resist this drive to reduce reward as much as possible. But it will and indeed does happen often enough to make it normality to be in an unrewarding job.

OK, so the capitalist drive seeks to reduce the qualities of work that make it worthwhile for the person who actually does it, because it is driven to pursue the cheapest, most effective commodities and that drive will lead to a preference for work that is as unrewarding as possible for wage-labourers, thereby leaving more profit to be extracted by owners. But what about caring work? How is that negatively affected by capitalism? That's a question to answer next time.

REFERENCES

'Why we work' by Barry Schwartz

'The Corruption Of Capitalism' by Guy Standing

'Austerity' by Kerry-Ann Mendoza