Dignity of Labour
Dignity is the type of big word favored by popes and presidents. Dignity is elusive, difficult to define, not just about worthiness in a job hierarchy. It is also about something we acknowledge when lost, the negation of dignity, and suggests the violation of an essential humanity.
Prologue
For many of our fellow citizens modern capitalism has failed to deliver. Yet it is the left that lies in crisis. Politically, this reflects the collapse of post-war social democracy built around growth, welfare capitalism and distributive justice, and the destruction of the telos – the absence of a noticeable conception of the good life.
The contrast between the state of the left in 1968 and 2010 is stark. In the late 1960s it was alive and agile reflected in this active contest between alternative models of justice – the utilitarianism of the economist Harold Wilson, the rights agenda of Labour revisionism, and the ethical concerns of the New Left.
The left went all in on the “Third Way” and the ‘end of the boom and bust’. By 2008 when the music stopped, it looked little more than a vainglorious punt.
The 2015 election loss was one of the most significant defeats for the left since its organized inception in the 1890s.
Work and the Modern World
Political instability threatens the foundation of liberal democracy.
Politics demands thought and action.
Today’s political instability could reflect a declining attachment to physical communities in the modern world, disrupted by technological change and the processes of globalization.
If work retains personal significance, what consequences follow when it is threatened and is unable to provide what we wish it would.
Identities based on work are transforming in an age for many characterized by precariousness, declining material reward and flatlining social mobility, digitalization, job rotation and meaningless labour. Many now question the future of work itself.
Work is important beyond providing us with material subsistence. It can both contribute to and undermine our overall sense of worth; our human wellbeing.
The paradox of labour is the contrast between what we want from life and what modern capitalism provides.
Recent renewed interest in the organization of work and automation on the left has sought to politicize work again. In the past the study of labour was fundamental to both political philosophy and the day-to-day practice of politics. In recent years especially on the left, we have withdrawn from these political traditions.
History has not ended, it has been upended. Modern liberal democracy, the political philosophy that told us competition was the guiding principle of human activity and the guarantor of true liberty, has incubated sinister new forms of populism.
Michael Sandel suggests the left requires a new telos, a new public philosophy. He identifies four themes for progressive politics to confront, linked to questions of work, human labour and the creation of community.
- First is the need for economic strategy to engineer inclusive growth.
- Second suggestion involves the language used by today’s liberal progressives, emphasizing opportunity and the removal of barriers to success. Meritocracy, an ironic description to justify inaction over inequality.
- The third theme relates to the meaning and future of work and how this will affect the lives we wish to lead. Our economies have been reoriented away from building things to manage money.
- Finally, Sandel requests renewed concern for the moral significance of national boundaries, a philosophical request for politics to return to its classical origins in term of the creation of community.
To challenge the modern story of dispossession and abandonment offered by the populist right, progressives must forge a positive reimagination of community and nation anchored withing a politics of work.
- Conservatism capitulated to the economic liberals.
- Social democracy remains a stale project barely recognizable when compared to the post-war movement to civilize capitalism.
- Within the Liberal Democrats the centre-left social liberal tradition lost out to the ‘Orange Book’ economic hardliners.
All three traditions appear ill-equipped to offer post-pandemic renewal.
The future world of work: The two poles emerged in the general debate. One signposts a post-work nightmare of escalating inequality amongst a threatened humanity subservient to technology, the other a future utopia of abundance, numerous routes to self-actualization and even enhanced transhuman possibilities, with lots in between.
Tech-utopian has become a defining characteristic on the modern left, possibly as a safe space to inoculate against the daily grind of electoral defeat.
UBI has become the signature policy for automated new times. The idea of a minimum income first appeared at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
We will rehabilitate certain intellectual and political traditions in the understanding of human labour and the regulation of employment and in so doing criticize a lot of fashionable thinking.
The dignity of labour should inform how we order society and contribute to the renewal of a social democratic vision of justice.
The Economics of Labour
We have two classical political economy: Marxism and Neo-Classical Economics.
The first considers embodied labour as the source of a commodity’s value, the second the exploitation of a person’s capacity to work as the source of profit under capitalism, whilst the third essentially ignores the organization at work.
The Labour Problem
The labour problem in the decades after the war was the Dagenham story. Early skilled unions had fought to protect their jobs through controlled access to their trades. Later, in contrast, the industrial organization of the unskilled and semi-skilled was built around numerical power, reflected in the emergence of general unions.
The power of the independent shop stewards and unofficial Dagenham unionism was broken by a management driven from Michigan with tacit support within the formal union machinery; a defeat whose repercussions played out over decades and are still remembered locally even today. For many, the Dagenham story symbolized the post-war ‘British disease’ and the social democratic response was industrial pluralism.
Pluralist labour relations traditions stress the inevability of workplace conflict given the plurality of interests within complex social systems. John Dunlop’s 1950 approach to industrial relations through Systems Theory stands as a landmark pluralist approach.
CPE – Classical Political Economy is basically a theory of production, or specifically a theory of expanded production, upon which distribution and exchange relations are understood. For both Ricardo and Smith, the three classes of landlords, workers and capitalists were identified in accordance with the distribution of revenues associated with the three factors of production – land, labour and capital – the so-called ‘Trinity Formula’.
The problem occurs when there is no growth to manage and redistribute.
Search for an economic theory of value built around embodied labour contained unresolved tensions within CPE. The problems of Ricardo and ‘Ricardians’ appears when prices and values diverge.
For the modern commentators, automation breaks the link between labour and value, triggering crisis and transition beyond capitalism.
Work was inherently political because the income distribution between classes was depended on the organization of production.
The British Labour Party was created to retain this separation between labour relations and the law. Conservative politicians began to target comparative systems of labour regulation in their search for answers to questions of global competitiveness. This approach sought to establish tripartite union-employer-state architecture to integrate the organized working class into a national project to boost competitiveness and anchor post-war social democracy.
The Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers Associations, with Lord Donovan as chair, was established in April 1965 and its final report was published in 1968. The Donovan Report proposed Industrial Relations Act to register collective agreements, extend collective bargaining and remove barriers to union recognition. The strategy was to incorporate the working class into the governance of industry. The 1968 report stands as the hallmark of post-war Oxford pluralism.
The 1969 strike signaled a move away from the shorter sporadic local actions characteristic of the 1960s towards the more protracted industrial battles of the 1970s.
By 1979 the corporatist state was now being systematically undermined with the wide-ranging intellectual challenge we now described as ‘Thacherism’ in reaction to widespread industrial militancy, the break-down of pay policy and recurring stagflation. Thacher’s embrace of economic liberalism signaled a reorientation away from the concerns of post-war bipartisan corporatism.
Miracle Cures
In 1977 Joh Hoskyns circulated a landmark political report entitled Stepping Stones. The goal was transformed nation. Moral and economic transformation had several ‘sub-objectives’: ending inflation, correcting inflationary expectations, cutting back the state’s tax take, overhauling pay bargaining structures, restoring investment: but they were all second-order concerns when compared to confronting union power.
Work becomes the bridge between production and outputs. People are hired dependent on their marginal productivity – if their predetermined productivity exceeds the wage.
Over a period of 18 years successive Conservative governments sought to confront organized labour and dismantle labour market regulation and employment rights equipped with a language of freedom, liberty and justice in pursuit of an abstract economic ideal.
The 1980s saw a neo-classical onslaught backed up with growing unitarist sophistication defeating post-war pluralism and its identification of the labour problem.
England has long-term productivity problem. Enter New Labour.
New Labour
In 1997 campaign, Blair announced that with him in power UK labour market would remain the least regulated in Europe.
Whilst the pluralist tradition helped shape policy in Labour’s first term, any real influence disappeared after 2001. Traditional pluralism was in retreat not just due to a lack of Treasury support but because of the effects of European integration.
The Blair effect was that ideas became the raw material to achieve political position. Votes are the form of exchange, policies the commodities and elected office the derived profit.
Labour regulation helped define Labour after 1997, but in opposition ways to the industrial pluralism of post-war Labour Britain.
In the knowledge economy, the old structures and labour markets associated with large public and private sector organizations were allegedly being replaced by networks of independent, small-scale companies.
The idea of new ‘knowledge work’ ended the case for regulation.
There was no revolution in the demand for labour – the key growth areas were in traditional, often low-paid jobs, many of which were caried out by women. In contrast to the language of Labour’s knowledge revolution, analysis started to note the emergence of an “hour glass” economy in UK.
Under New Labour, trade unions density continued to decline from 31 per cent of all employees in 1997 to 27 per cent in 2009.
We appear in desperate need of a new approach to managing the labour market. On the left we were supposed to have been offered one with Corbyn, one more in keeping with Labour history. In reality, as we shall now discover, what was really on show was more of the same rather than the promised break from New Labour.
A Return to Marx
Chronocentrism is a term first coined by Jib Fowles to describe ‘the belief that one’s own times are paramount and that others pale in comparison’.
Once again work and labour are ‘dematerializing’.
The ‘post-workerist’ reorientation on the radical left was popularized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. The theoretical inheritance was present amongst the younger democratic elements within the Momentum organization and parts of what was the Corbyn leadership team.
Marx identified four elements to labour – private, social, concrete and abstract.
- Concrete labour refers to the precise type of labour that creates use-values.
- Abstract labour is homogeneous labour in a collective general sense.
- Social labour relates to the objective social form taken by labour and society.
- Under capitalism, concrete labour is ‘privatized’ and the social aspect is ‘abstracted’.
Marx diagnosed how under capitalism work becomes a commodity – labour power.
Marx distinguished between value and exchange value – price.
The economics reading of Marx prevailed and little work within the Marxist tradition focused on the actual dynamics of the employment relationship under capitalism.
For Harry Braverman, scientific management, or Taylorism represented the clearest practical articulation of the coercive imperatives of accumulation to undermine the dignity of human labour. The labour process was being deskilled through technological change, the fragmentation of tasks and the erosion of craft traditions, thereby removing personal discretion from the hands of the worker.
For a short period, Braverman reset Marxist analysis of work in line with Marx’s own method.
At a stroke, the ‘holy trinity’ of Classical Political Economy in the creation of value – of land, labour and capital – is replaced by people, ideas and things. Capitalism is thereby dramatically dissolved as the labour process disappears.
Traditionally, the left’s ‘base’ was the working class. Paul Mason is clear, when he suggests that a new strategy must be based on the realization that Labour’s heartland is now in the big cities, among the salariat and among the globally orientated, educated part of the workforce. The new core of the Labour project.
The Ethics of Labour
Rebuilding our society and economy will require a different form of moral and political leadership.
Dignity
Michael Sandel facilitated a public dialogue on people’s attitude to work and a future without it in Dagenham in 2017. With the aid of the audience, Sandel established an essential reality that much work commentary tends to forget that people’s views are complicated.
Work can be a source of both hope and humiliation.
It is not a question of work being inherently good or bad: it is the recognition of complexity.
As a noun, work describes activities that involve mental and/or physical effort to achieve a desired result; as a verb it details the activity undertaken.
Work has a contested quality, a capacity to provide intrinsic personal meaning and wider social use but it can also be unfulfilling and exploitative. From 1801 to 1834, three dispossessions of the people happened. First one was from the Land – 1801 General Enclosure Act. Second from their own labour – 1834 Poor Law Reform Act. Third dispossession of the landless from the franchise – 1832 Parliamentary Reform Act. So began what Karl Polanyi described as the ‘double movement’ of capitalism. On the one hand, the market destroys old social network and reduces all human relations to commercial ones. On the other, is the counter-tendency to defend human values and human dignity: the search for community and security.
Neither labour, socialism nor history is predetermined. The history work is therefore intimately linked to questions of human dignity.
Our dignity is shaped by what we tolerate and what we do not.
The sociologist Phil Hodgkiss has suggested three elements in a historic appreciation of dignity, all of which largely coexist today. First, considered as decorative, appraisal, ranks, privilege. Second, personal character and esteem. Third, considered as declarative, universal ethical ideal, could be political or legal status.
Dignity of work find a place in writings of pope. On the other hand, in Kieslowski film Talking Heads, a group of people, defined that self-identification can be achieved through labour.
What Do We Think and What’s Going to Happen?
At a basic level evidence tells us work remains a significant landmark in our lives.
The key drivers of unenjoyable work are: lack of flexibility, agency, initiative and security. The quality of employment is known to impact on people’s health, life expectancy and life chances.
Over 25 years ago Will Hutton suggested Britain had developed a fractured ‘30/30/40’ society. 30 per cent disadvantaged and marginalized, 30 percent insecure, 40 percent privileged.
Assertions of ‘technological disruption’ have always been around. Keynes argued that by 2030 the average working week would be 15 hours as new methods of economizing on labour exceed its new uses.
Justice and the Left
Labour leaders such as Lansbury, Hardie and MacDonald, are labelled the ‘apostles of the old faith’ by the great Labour historian Ken Morgan.
The invisible hand can’t touch the human heart. Think about duty, hope and compassion.
Political debate, both within and between parties and traditions, is grounded within alternative philosophical approaches to questions of justice. We can also think about three philosophical traditions trying to maximize human welfare, freedom and virtue. The first tends to consider the material wellbeing of the people as the measure of justice; the second is concerned with a respect for, and the extension of, personal rights and freedoms; the third the promotion of virtue.
The moral significance of work, the dignity of Labour, has always been a central political concern within left tradition.
Withing the UK social democratic left, it is often associated with the work of the Fabian Society.
Across both the left and right wings of Labour, utilitarian thinking continues to dominate. In contrast to question of utility, an alternative tradition has focused on question of freedom and rights. The third approach is more ethnical in orientation and more ancient. It is concerned with nurturing the human characteristics upon which a good or just society is formed. This approach has been generally exiled from modern thinking, especially on the left. Virtue politics tends to be seen – especially in the United States – as the preserve of cultural conservatives and the religious right.
The division between utility and virtue, economics and ethics, has also shaped the history of Marxism.
The purpose of life is to employ one’s talent to useful, beautiful and meaningful ends. Work is about relationships. We inherit knowledge from the past and we shape it with others into new forms of value. Work creates hope. William Morris described it as ‘worthy work’.
The ILP generation of Hardie, MacDonald and Lansbury – the three religiously devout ‘apostles’ – established a labour identity descendant from both Morris and Christian socialist tradition. The ILP blended both.
Oxford School, especially in the work of Clegg and Flanders, represents part of generation’s transition from pre-war radicalism towards post-war social democratic revisionism.
On 6 July 1983, in his maiden speech to the House of Commons, Blair argued that ‘British democracy rests ultimately on the shared perception by all the people that they in the benefits of the common weal’.
Tony Blair has consciously buried his early political character.
What developed was a dystopian ‘winner takes all’ vision of capitalism modernity in which the human values of commitment, fidelity and loyalty were subordinated to anonymous and unpredictable market forces with its ‘creative destruction’ of ethical values, social cohesion and cultural identity. Labour lost its moral purpose and language, its hope and optimism as it detached from the lives of the people.
Human Labour and Radical Hope
Today the agile, meritocratic winners are those who can reinvent themselves – the educated, networked and resourceful.
This is not nostalgia but a condition of resilience and survival.
This is what Johnathan Lear means by the notion of radical hope, of a future without guarantees. Borrowing from Plato, it is hopeful in wishing for something not necessarily understood. This form of leadership demands courage – the key political value.
Reimagining the dignity of work can help avoidance of despair in communities that have experienced a culture death.
Can politics today create radical hope?
People value work over welfare, the data is overwhelming. Yet in remaining agnostic on the means to secure a certain distribution of outcomes, policy makers miss this and fail to understand the feelings generated when left unfulfilled.
Much of the left assumes technological change guarantees a new left progressive coalition amongst the urban educated networked youth.
In February 1998 the sociologist of the ‘third way’ Ulrich Beck offered us the ‘Cosmopolitan Manifesto’.
The idea of alliance between the nation and the working class is not yet dead. Just as working class has reappeared, so too has the nation state, not least in resetting national labour markets.
Today the inheritors of the radical intentions of Stepping Stones can be found in the pages of Britannia Unchained, a short, 2012 edited collection from a group of young, then unknown, right-wing Tory MPs including Kwarteng, Patel, Raab, Skidmore and Truss.
Historically, the arguments for a basic income were theological rather than ideological. The idea has support on the radical right.
Technology is not destiny – if it were, we might all support UBI. If politics matters, and could help create good, purposeful, rewarding work, then the case for UBI would be less overwhelming than in a world of inevitable ‘bullshit’ jobs.
The United Nations Economic and Social Council defines ‘decent work’ as that which ‘respect the fundamental rights of the human person as well as the rights of workers in terms of conditions of work safety and remuneration … respect for the physical and mental integrity of the worker in the exercise of his/her employment.
Good Work Covenant:
- Right – Everyone should have the right to good work.
- Fair reward – Everyone should be paid fairly.
- Decent conditions – Everyone should work on decent terms and conditions.
- Equality – Everyone should be treated equally and without discrimination.
- Dignity – Work should promote human dignity.
- Autonomy – Work should promote autonomy.
- Wellbeing – Work should promote physical and mental wellbeing.
- Support – Everyone should have access to institutions and people who can represent their interests.
- Participation – Everyone should be able to take part in determining and improving working conditions.
- Learning – Everyone should have access to lifelong learning and career guidance.
To restore dignity and pride into the world of work means recognizing and rewarding vocation – calling.
There is a fashionable tendency across the left to write off the working class. The next Labour government should be organized around the moral imperative to reorder our economy and society in recognition of the dignity of labour.
