The Thought of Work

John W. Budd

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801462665
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones laborales e industriales

What is work? Is it simply a burden to be tolerated or something more meaningful to one's sense of identity and self-worth? And why does it matter? In a uniquely thought-provoking book, John W. Budd presents ten historical and contemporary views of work from across the social sciences and humanities. By uncovering the diverse ways in which we conceptualize work—such as a way to serve or care for others, a source of freedom, a source of income, a method of psychological fulfillment, or a social relation shaped by class, gender, race, and power— The Thought of Work reveals the wide-ranging nature of work and establishes its fundamental importance for the human experience. When we work, we experience our biological, psychological, economic, and social selves. Work locates us in the world, helps us and others make sense of who we are, and determines our access to material and social resources.

By integrating these distinct views, Budd replaces the usual fragmentary approaches to understanding the nature and meaning of work with a comprehensive approach that promotes a deep understanding of how work is understood, experienced, and analyzed. Concepts of work affect who and what is valued, perceptions of freedom and social integration, identity construction, evaluations of worker well-being, the legitimacy and design of human resource management practices, support for labor unions and labor standards, and relationships between religious faith and work ethics. By drawing explicit attention to diverse, implicit meanings of work, The Thought of Work allows us to better understand work, to value it, and to structure it in desirable ways that reflect its profound importance.

CHAPTER 1

Work as a Curse

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

—Mark Twain (1835–1910)

Work can be a four-letter word. It can be hard, hot, dangerous, and dull. Day after day, year after year, work can be physically, mentally, and emotionally draining. For centuries, then, work has been seen negatively as a burden. Contemplation and leisure are seen as the ideal human activities; work is “a necessary evil to be avoided.” In the words of Sigmund Freud, “The great majority work only when forced by necessity,” and in his characterization, this amounts to a “natural human aversion to work.”1 As revealed at various places in this book, some disagree that this aversion to work is natural, but there should be little argument that work can and has been conceptualized as a human burden. The burdensome nature of work is reinforced by the frequency with which work is used as punishment—from Zeus, in Greek mythology, sentencing Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a large boulder up a steep hill just to watch it roll back down, to the nineteenth-century British penal colonies in Australia, the twentieth-century Nazi system of forced labor, the twentieth-century Gulag system of penal labor in the Soviet Union, and the continued use of forced labor in the Chinese laogai system and of chain gangs in the United States. One of the French words for work, travail, comes from a Latin word for a torture device. All of these negative views of work are part of an enduring conceptualization of work—that is, as a curse.

God’s Curse

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This first sentence of the Bible, in which God works, cements the importance of work in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Humans were then created in the image of this working God and placed in the Garden of Eden to till, cultivate, or work it, depending on the translation used. Work is therefore seen as God’s will and as unavoidable. But then Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s order not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and were subsequently punished—Eve with painful childbirth and Adam with hard work. God’s reprimand to Adam that “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life” is seen in Judeo-Christian thought as making hard work “by the sweat of your brow” humankind’s punishment for human imperfection and weakness. Work is therefore popularly seen as a God-given curse, though some theological interpretations note that God technically curses the ground, not Adam, and this is taken to mean that work becomes burdensome but not cursed per se.2

This biblical story parallels Greco-Roman mythology. In Works and Days (circa 700 BCE), one of the earliest Greek poets, Hesiod, told stories in which humans originally did not have to work (at least not very hard), but a displeased god (an angry Zeus, for example, vengeful because Prometheus had given fire to man) punishes humans with toil. The Roman poet Virgil also told a Garden of Eden–like story in The Georgics in 29 BCE. Under Saturn’s reign, work was not required and “no settlers broke the fields with their plows” as “Earth herself gave everything more freely when no one made demands.” But when Jupiter overthrows Saturn, he does not tolerate human laziness and thereby makes it necessary for humans to labor to satisfy their excessive desires.3

Seeing hard work as a divine curse therefore has deep roots in Western thought and has been echoed for centuries. Saint Benedict and others who developed the Western monastic rules starting fifteen hundred years ago emphasized the obligation for monks to work, including manual work for up to eight hours a day depending on the season. The medieval Christian church saw work as penitential activity in which hard work was a way to seek redemption. At the end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII wrote that because of Adam and Eve’s original sin, “bodily labor” is no longer an individual’s “free choice” and “delight” but is instead “compulsory, and the painful expiation for his disobedience.” In 1981, Pope John Paul II likened each individual’s “enduring the toil of work” to Jesus’s “work of salvation [that] came about through suffering.”4

Preaching the acceptance of hard work is also a method for trying to prevent sinful activities that come from having too much free time because, as the old proverb says, “Idle hands are the devil’s tools.” An emphasis on work thus goes hand in hand with criticisms of laziness and idleness, as in biblical verses such as “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” and “The desire of the lazy man kills him, for his hands refuse to labor.” These biblical teachings are echoed in the Benedictine monastic rules: “Idleness is the enemy of the soul. For this reason the brethren should be occupied at certain times in manual labour, and at other times in sacred reading.” In the sixteenth century, John Calvin and his followers were “uncompromising” in their “attacks on laziness.” Such views would later come to be characterized as part of the Protestant or Puritan work ethic. Slothfulness or laziness continues today as one of the seven deadly or cardinal sins in the Roman Catholic Church. Islam, too, preaches the importance of work over idleness. A Buddhist saying simply states, “One day of no work, one day of no food.”5

It should be stressed that hard work as a curse is only one side of the religious beliefs about work. Many theologians believe that the Bible provides a dualistic view of work as both a burden and a blessing. Before God “cursed” Adam with hard work, he placed him “in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it,” an act commonly interpreted as providing “a strong affirmation of the nobility of human work.” From Saint Paul and early Benedictine monks to Luther and Calvin to today’s Christian theology, work is seen as a means of independence, for charity, and for serving God. Similar themes are found in Islamic thought. The key papal encyclicals on work dating back to Rerum Novarum (“On the Condition of Workers”) in 1891 and continuing through Centesimus Annus (“The Hundredth Year”) one hundred years later emphasize social justice and dignity for workers, not the burdens of toil:

And yet, in spite of all this toil—perhaps, in a sense, because of it—work is a good thing for man. Even though it bears the mark of a bonum arduum [difficult good], in the terminology of Saint Thomas, this does not take away the fact that, as such, it is a good thing for man. It is not only good in the sense that it is useful or something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy, that is to say, something that corresponds to man’s dignity, that expresses this dignity and increases it.

From a popular theological perspective, then, work is “an ambiguous reality: it is both a noble expression of human creation in the image of God and a painful testimony to human estrangement from God.”6 In this book, the noble side of this duality is reflected in other conceptualizations, such as work as freedom from the vagaries of nature (chapter 2) and work as service to the kingdom of God (chapter 10).

This dual nature of work is reflected in a Russian concept of work that is rooted in Christian theology. Russian peasants, in particular, saw their backbreaking toil as akin to the suffering that Jesus endured. But as this toil led to a harvest, and as Jesus’s suffering led to his resurrection, “the cyclical relation between the actual peasant experience and the ecclesiastical image nurtured and sustained the Russian peasant’s love-hate vision of his work as life-giving and life-taking.” The duality between work-as-suffering and work-as-salvation is further echoed in Russian literature as Tolstoy emphasized the salvation aspect of suffering while Chekhov challenged this view and “condemned [this suffering] as a curse.”7

In spite of a rich theology on the dignity of work in the service of God, issues of work are frequently absent from sermons and other aspects of individuals’ worship experiences. Ignoring work in this way signals that it is not a method for serving God or other spiritual goals: “Regardless of the bridges we build, the bodies we heal, the children we educate, the toilets we clean, the food we harvest, and the garments we mend, we amass no credit with the Almighty.”8 This allows the popular conceptualization that (hard) work is God’s curse to persist and endure.

The Curse of the Lowly and the Enslaved

Seeing work as the curse of toil that afflicts the human condition is a type of universal conceptualization of work. Alternatively, particular forms of work might be conceptualized as a curse that specific individuals must endure. In classical Greek thought, for example, a sharp division was drawn between proper and improper work. Individuals who worked for others—the precursors to today’s wage and salary workers—were seen essentially as slaves: “The artisan who sells his own products and the workman who hires out his services . . . both work to satisfy the needs of others, not their own. They depend upon others for their livelihood. For that reason they are no longer free.” Free men, to Plato and Aristotle, use things, they do not make them; using something is seen as part of a free, rational choice and can therefore promote flourishing or happiness, but making things is associated with necessity and therefore indicates a lack of freedom and flourishing.9

This view of work rejects an intense work ethic. Work is only good to the extent that it produces things to help you or your family to flourish. Flourishing, furthermore, is not a material ideal. Rather, Aristotle believed that the good life consisted of virtue, contemplation, the pursuit of knowledge, and participation in governance. “Work, as Aristotle sees it, gets in the way of the more proper pursuits of a citizen, not only wasting his time in inferior activities, but corrupting him and making his pursuit of virtue more difficult.” While perhaps because of concerns with preparing for war rather than seeking virtue, Sparta even prohibited citizens from working.10

The division between proper and improper, or honorable and dishonorable, forms of work persists in later eras. Like Aristotle before him, the Roman orator Cicero wrote about the laborers and craftsmen whose wage work amounted to slavery and vulgarity. This stemmed not only from Aristotelian views of freedom but also from a belief that physical labor (except agricultural work) degrades the body and mind and leaves one ill-equipped for advancing higher levels of human knowledge like philosophy or mathematics. The caste system in India has lasted for centuries and is even more explicit in crafting social hierarchies of occupations. The impoverished untouchables are the lowest caste because their occupations involve contact with “polluted” substances such as dead animals (including leather) or human waste, and this contact makes them, and their offspring, permanently impure. Contemporary Western society also attaches social stigmas to jobs that involve dirty work. Such jobs frequently involve the human body or its products—for example, hospital orderlies, personal care attendants, sex workers, or janitors. The word villain, furthermore, should continue to remind us about the extent to which manual laborers have been stigmatized through the ages, as this word comes from villein—a member of the serf class at the bottom of the medieval economic and social ladder who toiled the hardest.11

This is not to say that these workers do not take pride in or derive meaning from their work. Irrespective of the views of the Greco-Roman elites—which is what mostly survives in written form today—there is evidence that ancient artisans took pride in their work. Examples of ancient pottery proudly signed by their creator have been found; other pottery depicts scenes of people at work; and tombs of craftsmen have been discovered that proudly proclaim the deceased’s occupation. Slaves in all eras find ways to achieve some element of dignity, and contemporary workers in dirty jobs are able to construct positive self-identities.12 But elite segments of societies tend to see these lower forms of work as a curse to be avoided.

Specifically, lousy work can be conceptualized as a curse when it is assumed that God or nature requires some to engage in arduous or dirty work and that it is the natural place of the lowly classes to bear this burden. The creation story of the caste system in India involves a divinely created hierarchy. It is therefore the will of the gods that specific castes must endure lousy work. European colonial policies that dispossessed indigenous populations of their land and coerced them into growing cash crops and extracting natural resources were rationalized on an intellectual basis by a claimed superiority of Europeans. More recently, the controversial book The Bell Curve argues that contemporary America is stratified by intellectual ability that is largely genetic in origin.13 Such an argument implies that the lower classes occupy their natural place in the social and occupational hierarchy and demonstrates the persistence of this line of thinking. The marginalization in contemporary Western societies of some occupations as “women’s work” or fit only for minorities or immigrants can similarly reflect a belief in a natural social hierarchy.

Or consider slavery. Slavery and other systems of forced labor are invariably justified by the dominant elite by subscribing to some theory of natural or God-given superiority. Perhaps most famously, Aristotle reasoned that nature creates humans of varying intellectual abilities, and the intellectually inferior are naturally suited to be slaves. Such a view is implicitly echoed across time and culture in that the elites in all systems of slavery embrace a stereotype of slaves as lazy, irresponsible, and in need of masters. Proslavery writers in the nineteenth-century American South, for example, argued that “it is the order of nature and of God, that the being of superior faculties and knowledge, and therefore...