The Working Day Reconsidered
I was thinking this week about the working day, and about how it has been transformed in recent decades. I’m sure that there is plenty of sociological work on this of which I am not aware, but thought I would sketch a few thoughts about developments since the time of Marx, if only to start a discussion.
More and more, work in Britain is project-based. As a greater number of people start to work in the service sector, the old model of the production line has all but died away. That is not to say that there are no longer any manufacturing plants or factories that work in this way, but rather that as a model of labour this is no longer universalisable. Part of the problem is that even today, when unemployed people out number job opportunities by five to one, those of us in full time work are expected to work all of the time. Regardless of whether it is a busy period or not, whether a project is close to completion or has just been completed, one is expected to be busy between the hours of 9 and 5.
Of course the idea that any particular job takes exactly 35 hours a week to be completed is a myth, and the means by which people are kept busy have serious ideological consequences. The first is that keeping busy is enforced by the idea of there “always being more work to be done.” No project is ever properly complete, and no day or week’s work can ever be completed satisfactorily, rather work acts as a mental treadmill. Away from the production lines in which the working day at the very least made sense (one worked, produced, and then went home when the factory closed), the model of work on the production line, the idea that one can be ever more productive by creating one more commodity in the day, is extremely problematically transferred to the office environment, clearly having an effect of immiserating the workforce.
The other aspect to this is related to alienation. Whereas in Marx’s theory, the worker is alienated fully from the fruit of his labour at the point of its finished production, the alienation here runs in some ways deeper – the worker is not even allowed to know the fruit of his labour, rather it comes under the generic category of “work” which is piled up again and again. There cannot be any pleasure taken in “a job done well” (not that Marx was referring to this sort of pleasure when he talked about alienation anyhow) as capitalist management structures are used to break down the connection between what we do in work and any knowledge that a something has been created or finished.
The answer is not to rid us of permanent contracts. If anything we need all workers on permanent contracts should they be desired, as those on temporary contracts have far less control over the workplace, and the job security remains an important goal, but we must reconsider how work is organised and the effects that management structures and the demand that we are always busy is having on workers.
As I say, these are just a few rather abstract and sketchy thoughts, but they may be fertile grounds for discussion.
