Curse of the Working Class

The historian Thomas Carlyle once claimed that “All true work is sacred.” To which the philosopher John Stuart Mill responded: “Work … is not a good in itself. There is nothing laudable in work for work’s sake.” Ever since, a debate has been raging in Western societies about the nature of toil — what it is and what it’s worth. In Blood Sweat & Tears (Texere; 338 pages) Richard Donkin, a Financial Times writer on management topics, sets out to find some answers. The quest is not a complete success, but it does offer some comfort to today’s overworked wage slaves.

Donkin leads with his chin. In the first few pages he asserts that most of us work to help “make a better world,” that “work has come to dominate the lives of the salaried masses so much that they are losing the ability to play,” that the modern working environment is suffocated by technologies like e-mail and pagers, and that we now feel guilty if we have “fun” in our working lives. Donkin reinforces these assertions by describing how employment and management theory have evolved since the Stone Age. He is especially persuasive about the re-engineering trend that scythed through middle management in the 1980s and ’90s, turning shareholder value into the new corporate mantra and “temp” agencies into the largest private employers in the U.S. In Donkin’s view, we are now at a stage where there is more work than ever, the work ethic remains deeply embedded in the Western psyche and our identities continue to be framed by who employs us and how we earn a living.

The author is less compelling when he peers into the future. Conventionally, he predicts more home working, telecommuting and team working, and fewer one-company careers. Wages, he believes, “will become more erratic.” People will ease gradually into retirement and “there will be no accusatory finger pointed at those workers who want a more balanced life.” Management will be reinvented. “Work will remain in tomorrow’s enterprise and will still need to be managed. But people will increasingly manage themselves,” Donkin writes. Less predictably, he argues that barriers between work and leisure will blur, cooperatives will flourish and a new work ethic will develop based on personal choice and the needs of society.

Given current Western views about work — broadly defined as “living for work” — and Donkin’s nirvana in which toil offers the hope of something better, the question arises of how society will move from A to B. The key, as he sees it, lies in ourselves as we cut free from single sources of income and employers-for-life. “Work will need to earn its place in our lives,” he writes. “We cannot live for work. Instead we must take control of our lives. But the choice will be ours.” Not quite Jerome K. Jerome, who in Three Men in a Boat memorably observed: “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.