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ECONOMICS

The gift of work

  • 13 August 2020
Amid the disruption of predictable life wrought by the coronavirus, governments have focused on jobs. Jobs lost in the response to the virus, and jobs created as we emerge from the crisis. The focus is worthy — behind each job lost is a person whose life has become anxious and uncertain. The language, however, is concerning. Defining the challenge as one of creating jobs expresses an understanding of work, the inadequacy of which the coronavirus has laid bare. It has deep roots in a long cultural history.

Within the Christian strand of Western culture work was seen as a punishment that followed the Fall. In Paradise people would not have had to work. When driven into the world as we know it, however, they had to earn their bread by sweat and tears. In many societies heavy work was done by slaves, while their wealthy owners could dedicate themselves to higher activities. In Athens citizens could participate in the public life and rich culture of Athens because they possessed slaves to undertake manual labour. Among educated Romans the ideal human condition was one of leisure in which they could devote oneself to the life of the mind. This demanded independent wealth or patronage.

The simultaneous devaluing of manual labour as punishment and the reliance on it to build the prosperity that enabled emancipation from toil shaped an attitude that has endured. People in government see no contradiction between making the conditions of ordinary workers as unpleasant as possible and punishing and shaming those who cannot find work.

In agricultural societies work was often set within a pattern of stable relationships between landowners and workers that expressed mutual responsibilities. As these relationships became fragmented by the privatisation of public lands, however, those relationships were eroded and became one-sided as wage-slavery in the Industrial Revolution. Into this world of changing relationships the word ‘job’ first appeared. It referred to short term work undertaken for personal gain. Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary is a mine of moral judgments based on traditional social relationships, defined a job as ‘a low, mean, lucrative busy affair.’ Every word of the definition expressed distaste.

Jobs were unsocial, and often antisocial, affairs that traded security for short-term financial gain, and did the dirty work of an unjust social order. The distaste was expressed also in the use of ‘job’ to describe public positions awarded on the basis of whom you knew and not

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