The Real Nature of Work, About Which We Never Speak

Nobody really discusses the actual mechanics of having a job, because the truth is so depressing

Most of us have jobs, but few of us ever reflect upon the true nature of the activity and this, like other forms of self-deception, causes psychological problems which reveal themselves in a variety of ways; some mental, others physical. If ever we do think deeply about what working for somebody means, we either shy away before following our thoughts to their logical conclusion or, having unearthed what is actually happening and been appalled by it, we thrust the knowledge from us and bury it deep in our unconscious mind. The explanation for this is simplicity itself. Most people do not wish to dwell on the grim reality of what jobs actually entail and prefer to disguise their colleagues and even their boss as friends and pretend that they work because they enjoy it, rather than simply as a way of avoiding homelessness and starvation.

     One way in which the average person gets around facing up to the problems which work presents in the modern world is by talking about it in terms of service, devotion, loyalty and friendship; as though the average office was similar to a medieval monastery. This strange way of looking at things is common; from high-ranking civil servants to the humblest worker in a warehouse. Instead of seeing themselves as working for a living and making as much money out of the activity as they are able, there is a tendency to downplay this distasteful, mercenary aspect and emphasise other, supposedly more important features of what they do. Consider Britain’s former Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders. As a barrister, she spent decades working for various agencies as a prosecutor, before landing the top job in the country of DPP, with a salary of £230,000; about £80,000 a year more than the Prime Minister.

     When Alison Saunders retired from the role of Director of Public Prosecutions in 2018, there was, for reasons which need not concern us, controversy about whether she should be appointed Dame, the traditional reward for those leaving this job. She claimed indignantly that she had, ‘dedicated over 30 years to public service’. Somebody who has been donating her time as a voluntary first-aider might claim to have dedicated herself to public service; a woman who has been drawing a salary of £230,000 has simply been doing an exceptionally well-paid job. This is work, rather than public service. It is this fantasy, the hope that one’s job will be viewed by others as being ‘dedicated’ to this or that lofty aim, rather than merely as a good way to pay the mortgage, that many people indulge in.

     An even more egregious instance of this attempt to represent jobs as being altruistic endeavours, undertaken for the benefit of others, was given on 19 March 2020 in a Tweet by MP Diane Abbot; then Shadow Home Secretary. She said, ‘The Windrush Generation came here to rebuild this country’, which makes post-war immigration from the Caribbean sound like a noble crusade to help Britain recover its strength and vitality, which had been shattered by six years of war. Of course, what those who came her were really after were jobs which would pay more than they could earn in Jamaica or Barbados; rebuilding a country had nothing to do with it. The rate of unemployment was high in Barbados and low in Britain, and so it made economic sense to move to the country where work was more readily available.

     At a lower level, workers in many institutions and companies try to give the impression that they too are not working for money, but rather other intangible and less crude benefits than the merely financial. In advertisements for Amazon in 2019, employees working in warehouses said things like, ‘I work here because I like the people’ and ‘If I didn’t enjoy what I was doing, I wouldn’t be here.’ For these people, the love of their fellow members of the human race or the sheer enjoyment of stacking shelves provided the primary motive to stay in their jobs. No mention at all was made of the wages which they were being paid.

     Pretending that you are going to work every day because you are serving the public, love your workplace or find your fellow employees exceptionally congenial, are part of a general attempt by wage-slaves to hide from themselves the true nature of their lives. One cannot blame anybody for doing this; nobody likes to reflect on the uncomfortable truth that most of us only get up in the morning and go to work because if we didn’t then we and our children would go hungry. To avoid facing the blunt reality, which is that we are compelled to trudge to our place of work each day under the threat of poverty and hardship, it is little wonder that many of us try to present ourselves more in the light of selfless servants of the public or gregarious souls who love their jobs because of the opportunities which they give us to socialise with our friends; which is how we see our workmates or colleagues. Properly to understand what is going here, we might begin by clearing the ground a little and thinking about the nature of paid employment in general; regardless of the type of work done.

     Most of us who work are either employers or employees. The first thing to remember is something which should be fairly obvious, but is frequently forgotten or hastily brushed under the carpet; that the needs and wishes of employees and employers are irretrievably and diametrically opposed. This is the case no matter how we might try to hide the fact by claiming that our boss is a really good person with whom we enjoy excellent relations. His or her aims are still, despite the superficially pleasant relationship we maintain, still antithetical to our own. This is just as much the case with hospitals, as it is with factories, with department stores, as with schools, bus companies, shipping lines, charitable foundations multinational conglomerates and any other enterprise with employees, of which one cares to think. This fundamental opposition of aims and intentions forms one of the chief driving forces in the lives of almost everybody and yet is seldom remarked upon. It is a dialectical process, where two mighty imperatives clash and bring forth innumerable compromises, and our ability to buy food and pay the mortgage or rent depends on the eventual outcome of such compromises. This background to our lives is scarcely acknowledged and indeed, most of us try not to think about it at all.

     As employees, we wish to have as much money as possible for doing as little work as we can get away with. Ideally, we would be paid £1000 per hour for doing next to nothing. Employers have quite a different perspective on this. In their case, they wish to get as much work from their employees as they can manage, while paying them the least amount of money. Their ideal scenario would be for their employees to work like dogs for a hundred hours a week at a rate of 10p an hour. This is of course why so many companies outsource their production to less economically developed countries. It is far easier to get people to work a hundred-hour week for 10p an hour in Thailand or the Philippines than it is in Western Europe.  Since nobody in his or her senses wishes to give away money, and most of us want as much money as we can lay our hands on, there is bound to be some conflict between the interests of these two, very different groups, those of employers and workers. Because the actual nature of the situation is seldom spoken of out loud, those wishing for more money for less work, in the case of the employees, or more work for less money, which is the aim of the employers, typically trick out what they are doing in fancy terms, designed to conceal what they are really up to.

     Money is a vulgar word and often avoided in polite company. We speak instead of income, salary, funding, resources, renumeration, compensation and so on. It sounds so much better when an organisation is trying to put the bite on a government to obtain more money, to refer instead to ‘chronic under-funding’ and a ‘lack of resources’. A shortage of money becomes a ‘funding crisis’ and somebody hoping to persuade a former employer to give him of a large sum of money due to some injury suffered in the workplace is said to be seeking ‘compensation’. For their part, employers wishing to get staff to back off from pay-claims will put the frighteners on them by threatening them with wholesale sackings. Not that anybody would dream of putting such a plan in those words; it sounds so much better to talk of ‘restructuring’ or ‘rationalisation’.

     Here then is an important point which so many of us do our best to forget.  We do not go to work because of our devotion to some ideal or because we like those with whom we work. We do it because we have to in order to survive. Deep inside, we know this and feel resentment. This resentment is felt by both bosses and workers. The bosses resent the fact that their employees are lazy and greedy and the ordinary workers feel bitter that they are being exploited as wage-slaves. What is truly extraordinary is that neither group openly admit any of this, even to themselves.  Instead, they fight a guerrilla war against each other, each struggling for advantage over the other. The rules of the game though dictate that neither side can ever come out and say what they really mean. This undeclared war is fought with subtlety and cunning, so that neither we nor our opponents are aware that a struggle is actually taking place at all. I sense that some readers will dismiss this ass fantasy; in what possible way are they engaged in a guerrilla war against their employer? The idea is ridiculous! Perhaps a real-life example will make this easier to understand.

     The idiomatic expression 'Throwing a sickie' is common throughout the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. On average, each British worker annually takes nine days sick leave; that is to say almost a fortnight's worth of working time a year. Although some of these people are genuinely ill, the great majority are not. They are 'throwing a sickie'; which is to say feigning sickness in order to cheat their employer out a day or more's wages. To lend verisimilitude to these deceptions, those committing this fraud often put on a croaky voice, pretend to cough and then appear at work after their time off looking as unwell as can be managed. The purpose of the whole imposture is to trick their employers out of a few hundred pounds; the money which will be paid to a healthy employee who does not feel like doing any work that day. The average wage in the United Kingdom is around £500 a week. This means that somebody taking a day off work for a non-existent illness has cheated his or her employer out of £100. This works out at around £1000 a year that the average British worker cheating his employer out of.

     Most of those reading this book will have ‘thrown a sickie’ at some time; quite possibly they do so regularly. The internet is full of material relating to this practice, including YouTube tutorials advising people about the best way to persuade their fellow-workers that they are genuinely ill, as a prelude to defrauding their employer. The whole subject is treated in a light-hearted manner, as though it were all a great joke. Newspapers and magazines routinely carry amusing articles about avoiding being caught out when undertaking such deceptions.

     The fascinating thing about fraud of this kind, which according to the Confederation of British Industry costs billions of pounds each year, is that none of the otherwise respectable people committing the crime acknowledge, even to themselves, that they are criminals. Of course, cheating and fraud are not the only kind of crime in which the average, respectable worker indulges. One of the humorous newspaper articles about ‘throwing sickies’, of the kind mentioned above, appeared in the British publication The Scotsman on 5 February 2012. Although the title of the piece was intended to provoke a smile, ‘Not to be sneezed at: the etiquette of throwing a sickie’, the content is genuinely shocking. The tone of the thing makes it very clear that not only fraud, but theft is condoned, although the language is artfully manipulated to conceal this awful fact. After casually discussing the estimated £2.7 billion lost to the 30 million or so fraudulent days off each year, the writer, with breath-taking candour, had this to say;

     Judging by the number of internet sites dedicated to boasting about it, skiving

     is seen by many as on a par with taking an envelope from the stationery

     cupboard.

In this context, ‘taking’ an envelope from the stationery cupboard refers to stealing office supplies. In other words, fraud and theft are made to sound innocuous by being concealed behind the weasel words ‘skiving’ and ‘taking’.

     Once in a while, somebody gives the game away and tells things as they are about the world of work, but this is uncommon. In October 2015, journalist Suzanne Moore published an opinion- piece in the Guardian newspaper with the headline, ‘Phone in sick: it's a small act of rebellion against wage slavery’. Other than such occasional lapses into truthfulness though, the struggle remains largely unreported.

          We have looked so far at the way that employees fight their campaign against those who are employing them, by stealing from and cheating the organisations for which they work,, but this of course works in both directions. It is no coincidence that many of the more successful businessmen and employers are psychopaths and know just how to exploit others for their own profit and aggrandisement. . How do employers cheat people and steal from them? They use much the same methods as their employees. Perhaps readers who have ever been guilt-tripped or coerced into working past their usual going-home time could raise their hands? I suspect that this will include almost everybody reading this article. Just as when a healthy worker ‘throws a sickie’, this is a way of scamming people; stealing their time by making them read emails when they are not at work, among other things.