About work

I’ve just spent another boring day at work.

That’s ok, it is in the nature of work, as properly understood, to be potentially boring a lot of the time.
The French for work “travail” (we need only think of its English etymological equivalent “travail”) comes from the Latin “trepalium”, an instrument of torture. Work, by antithesis, is not pleasure: it’s something you do for pay even if you don’t particularly enjoy it; because you have to, because you need the money, because that’s all you’ve found to do that pays. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible to take pleasure in your work some of the time, but almost by definition, not all of the time.

The whole point of work is that it forces us to overcome our natural laziness and disinclination to do something we can usefully do, but would prefer not to. Day after day (five days a week at any rate) we assert mind over body, knuckle down to it and get on with it, with a superficial appearance of professional readiness and a smile. It’s one of life’s many little miracles and surely a cause for some personal satisfaction that we manage to show up at all.

This victory over our less attractive selves is fundamental to our social side. Notwithstanding his innate selfishness, man is a social animal. Society does not owe us a living, we have to go out and earn it. It’s worth noting that the organization in which most people work is actually in most languages called a “society” (“société”, “Gesellschaft”) and so in English when we say “company” , we should understand the word also in its more companionable sense. The workplace is a microcosm of society and in it the normal rules of human relations apply, a fact economists and bean-counters ignore at their peril. Fairness, honesty, politeness, loyalty, consideration, tolerance, gratitude and so on are all relevant virtues; it’s a world of give and take, not just take. In the long run (which is generally ignored by those addicted to quick profits) a contented workforce will be ready to go the occasional additional mile for its employer.

Work is essentially a social activity for it is at work where we interact with other human beings, while we make our productive contribution to the overall wealth of society, which has then to be divided among those who can work and those who cannot. This distribution is properly the subject of politics.

Work is something so basic and essential to the human condition that the concept has been created of “the right to work”. The Italian constitution, it may surprise you to learn, starts by stating that “Italy is a democratic Republic founded on work”.
This is in itself a profound thought as to the nature of a society, but it is also very much of the twentieth century. Contrast the US Declaration of Independence from the eighteenth century where the rights are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
This prompts me to make two points. Firstly we in the 20th and 21st centuries may have got our priorities wrong by putting work so high on our list. Secondly those in the 18thC Age of Enlightenment may have been unrealistically naive about happiness.
A century later the more pessimistic Dostoyevsky realized that man is also inclined to pursue suffering: the only explanation for some peole’s actions is that they are deliberately trying to get themselves into trouble and pain. Indeed the rounded human experience, it can be argued, demands a certain dose of suffering.
In which case, what better way to suffer than by getting paid for it. Thus remunerated suffering becomes useful, obviating the need to invent other kinds of suffering; for believe you me, idle rich people of leisure are sensitive and do suffer, but for all sorts of trivial reasons. At one and the same time then, work satisfies our basic existential demands for unpleasant experience and a source of income.

Here I would like to suggest that in our material age,
financial independence has largely replaced earlier concepts of honour. It is honourable to be seen to be earning your own living, it is shameful to be seen to be scrounging off society on the dole. Just try proposing to a young educated lady of today that she might like to become a kept woman: you’d probably get a slap in the face; and rightly so - it”s not honourable.

More importantly work is seen to confer a social identity.
These days you are not so much pigeon-holed by others on the basis of where you come from and who your parents are as by what you do. “And what do you do?” is a question I try to avoid immediately asking someone just introduced to me at a party, so as to give an opportunity for other impressions to coalesce first. The awful truth is that we really do have a tendency to categorize people on what is only part of their lives. Which is why in turn having a job is extremely important to people. We also tend to categorize others with quite a dose of snobbery. However, if we can step back from all that social stereo-typing for a moment, we have to admit that pretty well all jobs, however great or humble in the common perception, are useful to society. Actually right now I’d probably think more highly of a plumber than a trader in stocks and bonds.

Not everybody feels good about their job. In his enjoyable and thoughtful book “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, Alain De Botton spends quite some time guiding the reader through the extreme division of labour in the modern economy in order to make the point that many individual jobs are strangely disconnected from a meaningful context. His example of the manufacture of chocolate biscuits is very amusing.
He writes “When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.” In many jobs sadly that is not immediately obvious.
In my own work as an interpreter I can see through the booth window the expression of understanding or bafflement on the delegate’s face and sometimes even expressions of gratitude that I have facilitated understanding. Many workers, however, are denied that immediate response, in the words of Marx describing 19thC industrial manufacturing processes they have become “alienated”. In these circumstances it is difficult to feel job satisfaction. If I had to work in a distant room off an AV feed and couldn’t see my delegates through the window, I would also feel alienated. Likewise, a craftsman who turns out a chair by hand feels some satisfaction at the production of a well made lasting object, whereas the factory assembly line worker screwing some widget into an endless series of incomplete machines does not.
While everyone craves to have a job to give some meaning to their life, in practice the nature of many jobs is that they provide little satisfaction and self-fulfilment.

What about my own working life?

When I was young I lived a relatively charmed life coming to proper full-time paid employment only at the late age of 24. I was a student for a long time and between a combination of saving out of grants and scholarship money, parental generosity, voluntary work and taking up invitations, I never had to work for money during my long vacations. I should also explain that I had no particular desire to acquire material possessions so I felt no need to take paid work to save up for anything and was happy living from hand to mouth. During this time I did also have two posts as a language assistant in schools in France and Germany, but the teaching duties were minimal and so too correspondingly the money to live off, but it didn’t seem to matter. I have always had a knack of living within my means, affording what I want but not wanting what I can’t afford. It’s not that I’m frugal or mean, it’s just that I have the Yorkshireman’s natural aversion to extravagance.

My transition to regular work was fairly smooth in that suddenly I found myself doing for real what I had been training and practising for, only it took up more hours in the week, leaving me feeling more tired and with less free time but with a healthier bank balance.

On Bertrand Russell’s definition of real work as “altering the position of matter in relation to the surface of the earth”, I have hardly done a day of it for pay in my whole life (though plenty for free for family and friends). I did once do a day of garlic harvesting in the South of France, which left me with a stiff back and blistered hands; so I didn’t think much of it. Since I have not needed to, I have not repeated the experience. The supposedly praiseworthy nobility of manual labour is an invention of those who would get others to do it without doing it themselves.

As a conference interpreter, I count myself lucky in having a good job with shortish hours and highish pay which is varied in terms of human contact and content, even at times interesting and enjoyable. I can be directly useful in helping people understand each other.
I work for the European institutions, whose greater purpose is to promote peace and prosperity on our continent. While that purpose may not be immediately apparent in the minutiae of negotiating and implementing legislation, it is nonetheless present even if only by dint of constantly bringing people together from different countries. I can believe in the ultimate usefulness of my work in a much broader context.
There are also occasionally genuine opportunities to travel, that is without having to rush back immediately, thereby enabling me to venture beyond the airport, hotel and meeting room.
Another big plus point is that when a meeting is over, that really is the end of the day’s work, leaving the body free to engage in other activities which it needs to after sitting in a box all day and also the mind, that is if it is not suffering from overload and feeling like an evening off. Yes, some days I do come home feeling like a zombie.

For as I tell students aspiring to interpreting as a career, it’s just a job and like any other job it has its good days and its bad days. To be honest, a lot of it can be stultifying: there’s a limit to the amount of mileage to be had out of customs procedures or pesticide residues. Still, it’s what I do for pay and with a bit of patience a more interesting meeting comes around and the colleagues are generally good company, so on the whole I enjoy it and stick with it, partly I guess because by now there’s not much else I know how to do.
I suspect this is largely the nature of most people’s work and their attitude towards it.

Therein lies the trap, for to quote Paul Simon:

“We work in our jobs, collect our pay,
Believe we’re gliding down the highway,
When in fact we’re slip sliding away”.

Work accounts for most of the days in our week, most of the weeks in our year, most of the years in our life.
The sad reality of many jobs is that they just don’t leave much time and energy for much else once the daily logistical business of merely existing has been attended to.
The great absurdity of the progress of mechanization and automation throughout human history is that it has not as it should have done led to a significant reduction in working hours for all, thereby allowing a greater quality and enjoyment of life, but rather an increase in the numbers of unemployed. We live in an economy where many patently work too much and others not at all. It’s quite absurd. Russell pointed this out already in the 1930’s and things have not changed.

Those in work cling desperately to their jobs as they need the money and their work has come to define who they are, almost to the exclusion of anything else, while the unemployed feel they have lost a meaningful rôle in society. Both categories would benefit from a more equitable share-out of the limited amount of work there is. (For if work is in theory limitless, tell me how come in practice so many people are unemployed?)
However, economists pour scorn on these notions and it is true that the bold French socialist experiment of the 35 hour week was not successful in creating more jobs. At the end of the day, most people are also just not prepared to take the concommitant pay cut for shorter hours and to down-size their life-style. In short they are trapped in the organized materialism that makes our economies go round.
I am very fortunate in that I am able to put some of my ideas into practice: every summer I manage to take a month of unpaid leave; I earn less but have a better life.

This “all or nothing” illogical distribution of work among the willing also applies to our overall working life. All of a sudden full-time workers are expected to stop at retirement age and enter a world of more leisure than they know what to do with, instead of progressively reducing the amount they do to phase in a new life-style. Nonetheless, many do become understandably fed up of the relentless daily grind and seek early retirement, often actively encouraged to do so by their employer so that they can be replaced by someone younger, not yet burned out and on a lower wage. However, not every job requires brute force and speed and in fact vast amounts of experience and, dare I say it, wisdom are squandered in this way. The natural way of things would be for older workers gradually to do less and still make a small but quality contribution until quite late in life.
I hope that when the time comes my employer will still be offering a scheme of pre-retiremnt part-time work.

Some of the points in this essay, you may say, are easily made from my position of a well-paid, not too time-consuming, secure job. I accept that. However, I do believe things could be organized much better than they are and I know the reason they are not is quite simply our society’s preference for brute economics over human well-being.

Work is a useful part of life but in the end it is better to work to live than to live to work.