The work we get is not the work we ought to have
The government of Ontario, asking us to gamble responsibly, suggests we buy its Lotto 649 tickets as the prizes are enormous. ”Imagine the Freedom” the government yells at us. If we win, we will be able to loll about on luxurious yachts, visit golden beaches and have drinks served to us on a golden platter by uniformed and obsequious waiters. We will be free. Others will work. We will be freed from work. Work is a four letter word.
Yet, our families, our churches and temples, our clergy, our holy books, our teachers, our business leaders, our ethicists , our philosophers, all tell us that we should love work. My high school motto was ”Honour the Work”. Pope Francis, in his 2013 Evangelii Gaudium, wrote that it is only “through free, creative, participatory and mutually supportive work that human beings express and enhance the dignity of life”. But the government of Ontario believes that we want to be liberated from having to do work. It clearly thinks that work is not ennobling, that is does not give us the dignity we crave.
Unconsciously, the government of Ontario is acknowledging that ours is a capitalist society and that capitalism degrades work, thereby robbing us of the dignity it might bestow. This is how it does this.
Capitalists are given the power to take what workers make
The political scientist Michael Parenti once quipped that, throughout history, the ruling class has only ever wanted one thing: everything. In Canada, 86 people, that is, 0.002% of the population, have more wealth than the poorest 11.4 million Canadians; the bottom 20% of families had more debt than assets. Yet, the ruling class wants more. There is a ceaseless drive for more. The satisfaction of greed by the private accumulation of collectively produced wealth lies at the core of the capitalist project. A central idea is that those with wealth, the very few, should get others, the many, to produce wealth and then to pay them less than the value of the goods or services they produce. This is what makes investment by the rich of their disposable wealth profitable; this is how collectivized production by workers is used by them to add to their private wealth. To help them in this project, our laws provide that, when workers produce something that has value in the markets for goods or services, this product becomes the property of the employer to do with it as it sees fit. The workers who have produced the goods and services have no legal interest or control, none, over that which their intelligence and physical effort produced. This is one powerful reason why the idea that a job well done brings its own reward is just a hollow slogan for the majority of people. This disappointment is deepened by other features of capitalism.
Capitalists force workers to compete and to give up control over their work
It helps would-be employers if they can force workers to compete with each other for the jobs on offer. The workers, who become workers precisely because they have no wealth which allows them to eat, to be sheltered and clothed or to provide their children with schooling, etc., unless they can find someone to provide them with an income, are forced to get owners of wealth to employ them. They are at an economic disadvantage when forced to look for jobs, especially if there are more job-seekers than jobs. This vulnerability is exploited to the nth degree by red-blooded capitalists. The more qualified workers there are for any one job, the better it is for the owners of wealth. Employers have a stake in deskilling work, that is, to give workers less discretion on how to do job, robbing it of any intrinsic interest it might have. The wealthy have an interest in developing technologies that reduce the need for human workers and that reduces more of their tasks to simple-minded ones. They have a stake in keeping would-be workers, that is, wealth-less people, desperate. Work in this setting is not about winning dignity but about survival.
Capitalists attack safety nets that workers need to retain their dignity and self-respect
Would-be employers oppose unions formed to reduce competition among workers; they angrily denounce legislation that ensures that workers get a livable minimum wage, or that puts a limit on the hours they can be forced to work; they push for rules that permit them to widen the pool of available labour by taking their productive enterprises to jurisdictions where the social and political conditions make workers even cheaper than they are here. They prefer an intimidated work force to a militant one and, therefore, promote special visa workers who are in a poor position to complain about bad conditions, even illegal conditions. Would-be employers foster casual employment relations that undermine the benefits won by workers through unions and favourable legislation over time.
In short, the owners of wealth, the employing class, wage a war on the majority of the population, people with no wealth to invest. All they can invest is their intelligence and physical capacities. They are forced to sell parts of themselves, the very things that make them the individuals they are. This is the essence of capitalism. There is little dignity in this kind of work.
Of course, there are some exceptions and readers may think that the argument being made is overstated. But it is not. Consider some indisputable and, what should be, mind-boggling outcomes of the system: Canada is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet yet child poverty rates are alarmingly high. The Divided City Report tells us that 26.8% of Toronto’s, 25 % of Montreal’s, 24.1% of Winnipeg’s, 20.6 % of Hamilton’s children live in poverty; close to 1 million people are forced to rely on foodbanks; indigenous people live not in 3rd world or 4th world, but in 5th world conditions; the amount of precarious work (a phrase describing irregular, insecure jobs that do not pay a living wage) is increasing at an exponential rate, leaving these workers to stitch together a living by running from bad job to bad job and abandoning any kind of nurturing family life; unions are disappearing more quickly than snow in spring and governments cut programmes as fast as they can. Access to health and education, which provide a large proportion of the necessities for life to the working class, are under attack. Simultaneously, governments are reducing taxes on the rich enabling them to retain more of the wealth produced by the workers. This is why we have those yawning wealth and income gaps that characterize modern capitalist nations such as Canada.
In sum, the working class is coerced into accepting conditions of work that are a long way distant from the romantic notion that work is a means to help them fulfill their aspirations as human beings. They are forced to beg for jobs that diminish them, rather than nourish them. Here it is important to point to a key feature of the work-for-wages contractual regime in modern capitalism.
Capitalist law treats money with as much respect as it does human beings
When a person with disposable wealth invests in a profit-seeking activity and hires workers, the would-be employer invests its resources. These resources are money and other inorganic, non-human resources. The workers who agree to participate in the profit-seeking undertaking, invest the only asset they have: themselves. They bring their talents, skills, intelligence, dexterity, stamina, imagination. They sell their very being. There is no equivalence: one party risks losing things, the other herself.
Capitalist law allows employers to treat workers as inferiors whom they may punish
Precisely because the employer purchases the intangible traits of workers, it cannot be certain how easy it will be to translate those human capacities into value-producing effort. Here the existence of a pool of workers who can replace existing workers helps them exert power over the workers. More: law gives them a hand. Every employment relationship is read as if it contained a series of duties owed by workers to their employer. These duties are the duty to exercise all reasonable skill, to act in good faith and with loyalty to the employer and to obey all reasonable employer orders. Violations of these duties allow the employer to discipline and punish a worker. The employer is given the legal power to punish and correct and mould other human beings. This so even when workers are protected by a union. This greatly assists employers who have to force workers to use all of their capacities. In a capitalist economy, law acknowledges that employers are entitled to act as workers’ superiors. Respect, self-respect and dignity are not integral features of work when it is done in a for-profit setting.
This should clarify the hypocrisy of the oft-heard claims made by employers and human resource departments (note the telling name!) that workers are highly valued and beloved members of an enterprise.
In sum: in capitalism, work cannot deliver on the Pope’s nostrum; it cannot meet any of the aspirations of human beings. Non-capitalists are forced to take on work that puts them under the control of others; they are denied democratic participation, indeed, are subjected to authoritarian rule; far from work fulfilling them, it is a cross they have to bear in order to have any life as human beings at all. Work can only be life-enriching, only give personal satisfaction for a job well done and for giving service to others if it is done outside the confining box created by capitalism. It will only be fulfilling if it sets out to meet Karl Marx’s notion :
”From each according to their ability to each according to their need’.
Work will never allow us to be what we might be if we persist with the capitalist notion:
“ From each according to their vulnerability to each according to their greed”.