Do we work to live or live to work? TIM WATKIN looks at the modern face of an old dilemma.
It was the pressure of a successful career in local government management that made Nasir Murphy decide that the work ethic dominating his life made no sense.
"It was very intense. I didn't think that was a very healthy way to live my life," he recalls.
Murphy's talking on the phone from the Mana Retreat Centre in Coromandel, where those buckled by work and the pressures of modern life go to get a different shape to their lives. For nearly four years he's been part of a management team of three who are "aspiring to turn the work ethic inside-out so that the spiritual and personal practices come first and the work comes second."
"I think the current work ethic has got it wrong. If you treat people merely as production units, then you have totally overturned the true nature of people. Work is a means to an end, not an end in itself."
Yet for many New Zealanders, that is not the order of priorities. Everything must fit around work; takeaways must be bought, wardrobe advisers hired and holidays foregone. Relaxation is a way of fitting yourself for work.
Daring to challenge the work ethic is almost a sacrilege. "It's an assumed, irrefutable moral good," says Dr Catherine Casey, a senior lecturer in organisational analysis at the University of Auckland. "The idea of a singular work ethic has become enshrined and people still refer to it as though it is sacred."
Leaders such as Employers of America president Jim Collison say the biggest challenge for bosses today is "work ethic deficit syndrome." The New Zealand Government's recent Workforce 2010 strategy paper begins, "Work and employment is a central feature of life for us all. Ensuring that New Zealanders have access to meaningful and rewarding employment benefits us as individuals and as a whole."
These days it can seem quaint to think that it's enough to do a 40-hour week. Many of us are now working longer and harder than our parents or grandparents, either to make ends meet or to meet the standards of the performance culture.
In a figure typical of developed countries, the average full-time worker in the United States in the early 1990s was working 140-163 more hours each year than in the 1970s. That's an extra month a year, not including the extra day a year they spend commuting. In Japan, studies estimate that 10,000 people a year die from overwork, while an Australian Government survey in 1997 concluded that Australians "endure more stress, work faster and more intensively, and put more effort into their jobs than they used to."
"I think that people are feeling at an intuitive level that things aren't right," says Dr Sharon Beder, an associate professor of science, technology and society at the University of Wollongong. "People are thinking that this is crazy, I am working too hard, everybody's too busy for everything. But at a political level it's not happening because there's still a business push to maintain the work ethic." Beder, Casey and others have identified a new work ethic where employers are reaching into workers' life outside work in the name of personal growth and employee empowerment. There's an escalating expectation that work must be our passion and our life's purpose. The message is pushed by theorists such as Australian author Charles Kovess, whose first book was titled Passionate People Produce. He says that while employers must allow workers to make skill mistakes in order to learn, attitude mistakes are unacceptable because they show "a lack of passion for the task."
A recent article in American magazine City Journal describes the new youth culture, among young professionals at least, as "ecstatic capitalism." Youth today want jobs with "soulfulness." Work in the new economy, complete with long hours and a blurring between business and pleasure, is the place to find individual meaning and recovered community in a fragmented world. As online magazine Ecompany puts it, the modern workplace is "not just a place to work, it's a place to live."
Casey says the corporate obsession with team-building, for example, is an attempt to patch over the reality of declining job security and increasing workloads.
"It's a way of tapping into yet another human resource. That term signifies that the whole of the human is supposed to be a resource for the corporation."
Somewhere along the line, the idea of working to earn a living has been overrun. We don't have jobs; jobs have us.
Not since the work ethic was born out of the reformation in the 15th century has so much meaning been invested in work. Thanks to John Calvin's idea of predestination - that God had already decided who would be blessed with eternal life - it was then believed that success at work was a sign that a person was amongst God's elect.
As sociologist Max Weber explained it in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904, work had become a way of worshipping God.
"In exchange for being diligent and hard-working, we got a sense of spiritual satisfaction, a kind of salvation," Casey explains. "That ethic has been undermined because people are no longer getting the satisfaction of that cultural side of the bargain, whether it's spiritual or about community. We're now just getting consumerism."
Beder traces the trend for mass, non-essential consumption back to the 1920s. Between 1860 and 1920 production increased 12 to 14 times in the US, while the population increased only three times. With US markets reaching saturation, there was debate over whether to cut work hours and so reduce production.
"Employers didn't like that idea and actually argued for ways to persuade people to buy more in order to keep work central to people's lives," she says. In her most recent book, Selling the Work Ethic, Beder dares to challenge this most sacred cow. "Work is clearly not healthy for individuals and the products it produces are no longer healthy for the planet ... [yet] despite the dysfunctionality of the work ethic it continues to be promoted and praised, accepted and acquiesced to ... "
She told the Weekend Herald that such thinking is out of date and the ethic out of control.
"We have a situation today in most English-speaking countries where the people who have work are working more hours than they have in decades. People who don't have work are stigmatised and denigrated, and people who have low-paying jobs, even though they're working really hard, aren't earning enough to make a decent living. So you've got increasing stress, suicides and the planet just can't take this ever-increasing production." International evidence agrees that all this work is making us unhappy - and unhealthy. A Cornell University study has found that about 10 per cent of subjects working at least 50 hours a week reported conflict at home. For those working 60 or more hours a week the reports of conflict reached 30 per cent.
Longer hours and job insecurity have also been linked to health problems, while the World Health Organisation predicts that by 2020 stress will account for fully half of the world's 10 biggest medical problems.
Anne-Marie Feyer, director of the New Zealand Occupational and Environmental Health Research Centre in Dunedin, says "there's no question that one should be concerned" that the dominance of work is damaging many people's health even though little research has been done on the subject in this country.
"There's a whole swag of European and even North American studies that suggest that when you have increased pace, increased insecurity, all the sorts of things that are now characteristic of the flexibility we've been introducing into the labour market, that it can be hazardous to health."
Yet many still wear their workaholism as a badge of honour. University of Auckland economist Susan St John says an attitude shift is needed. "We used to think it was quite fun for people to get drunk a lot. We now no longer think that kind of behaviour is acceptable at all. If we really thought that workaholism was really unacceptable and sick like alcoholism, rather than worthy of applause, we might get a healthier perspective on work."
Just how out of kilter our view of work has become can be seen in our changing attitudes to childhood. Having escaped the mines over a century ago, increasing numbers of children are now being subtly recruited into the world of work. In the US, many school districts have dropped gym class and even playtimes. "No Time for Napping in Today's Kindergarten" a recent New York Times article proclaimed. There are after-school centres and summer camps for computer training and language immersion, and an emerging genre of child business books such as Making Cents: Every Kid's Guide to Money.
While the talk in the books, magazines and playgroups might be about providing a good start in life, the subtext is often about how your child can get a headstart into a successful career.
Beder sees the move of businesses to sponsor schools and curriculum development in the same light.
"In Victoria, kids can do one of their subjects working for McDonalds. They go and learn how to be a person serving burgers and get credit in their leaving certificate for this. There are all sorts of ways employers are coming into the schools and getting kids to learn specific vocational skills, things that aren't general life skills."
An obsession with work is no kind of legacy to leave for our children, she argues. If we continue to adhere to the work ethic she believes there only two possible outcomes: We must either increase production to create more jobs, degrading the planet. Or, we must accept more temporary and unemployed workers and the stress and alienation that forces on many.
"The only way out of those futures is to have another look at the work ethic and how central work is in our lives. We need to look for other values."
After five centuries, maybe it is time to reconsider. Because despite our assumption that work is as inevitable as birth, death and taxes, it wasn't always so.
"Modern capitalist societies tend to imbue work with a moral value that other societies would find strange," Beder writes. In ancient Roman and Greek society, work was seen as degrading and in medieval times, work still held no intrinsic value. It was done when necessary and ceased when food and shelter was provided. As late as 1694 one Josiah Child complained: "In a cheap year they will not work above two days in a week."
So now that we are better educated and wealthier than the 1600s, and largely free of the bind of predestination, why do we continue to invest so much time and energy in our work?
Status.
"Currently we judge each other on what our jobs are and what our income is, so we spend our time getting as much income as possible and working hard," Beder says. If we judged each other according to other standards, say wisdom or our contributions as citizens, we could create new ethics which don't place work above all else.
"We're not anti-work," Casey stresses. "Citizens still have to be socially responsible, related and contributory. But we need to do it in ways that aren't singularly shaped by participation in paid work."
St John says if we're prepared to rethink our fear of public spending there are many ways we could rejig our work culture. Increased student allowances so students aren't competing for low-skilled work, modestly paid sabbaticals for people wanting to take time out for personal projects, a citizens' salary for people running clubs or caring for extended family, are just a few ideas.
There's no quick and easy alternative system waiting in the wings, but Beder believes our survival depends upon putting work back in its place.
"Cultures can change, and we need to recognise that industrial culture has become dysfunctional and is in need of a major overhaul."
Owned by the job or disowned by the work culture
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