In countries where the economic problem has been solved it is no longer necessary or desirable to think of work primarily as a means of material survival. The great majority of people are freed of this constraint, so work can become first and foremost an activity devoted to fulfilling human potential. Since (with important exceptions) questions of payment no longer need to be paramount, in addition to rethinking the structure and purpose of paid work we can dispense with the distinction between paid and unpaid work—including household work, other work at home and work in the community. For the first time, paid and unpaid work can be considered equally valid forms of self-creating activity. In other words, the arrival of abundance allows us to discard ingrained beliefs about work, formed as they were in the Industrial Revolution and before. It is no longer a question of achieving a ‘balance’ between work and life; it is one of living fully through work, both paid and unpaid.
Traditionally, the Left has been concerned with the relationship between workers and capitalists in the process of production. Struggles over pay and working conditions have provided the inspiration for generations of people on the Left. The contradiction between workers and capitalists has provided the starting point for the analysis of social structure and political change, and even the foundation of a theory of history. Factories, mines and shipyards have been the scenes of hard-fought and often heroic struggles by working people whose very survival has rested in the hands of the owners of capital, and it is for this reason that trade unions have had a crucial role in Left politics. The preoccupation with wages, working conditions and unemployment, and with a welfare state that provides collectively for workers when private markets fail, has meant that Left politics has been above all concerned with activities and relationships in the production sphere. This was consistent with the Left’s political analysis of power, since the power of capitalists—individually and collectively—derived from their control over the production process, including employment. This focus on the sphere of production is shared with neoliberalism, although neoliberalism is prone to see power residing in trade unions rather than in ownership of capital and prefers to explain unemployment in terms of the personal failings of the victims rather than the structural features of the system.
In contrast, most of this book is concerned with the sphere of consumption. As discussed in Chapter 3, in the period since the Second World War there has been a dramatic change in the forces that drive society. In the case of capital, modern firms are driven less by competition through cost cutting and more by product differentiation and marketing. In the case of ‘workers’, questions of identity, social structure and political orientation are now determined more by consumption activities than by production and employment. Previously, social classes, based predominantly on where people found themselves in the production process, were the primary source of personal and social identity. The spread of affluence and the transition to consumer capitalism have meant that identity now has less to do with one’s work—where one is placed in the production process—and more to do with one’s consumption choices, including the consumption of cultural products. The uniformity of self-definition associated with class identification has been superseded by the apparent differentiation of self associated with the construction of identity through consumption behaviour.
The change in emphasis from the production to the consumption sphere is one shared with postmodern social analysis, except that postmodernism accepts consumption at face value, with little appreciation of its historical purpose or personal significance. It was not ‘modernity’ that had changed; it was capitalism that had morphed from industrial capitalism into consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism has now co-opted and transformed those cultural products of society that had hitherto maintained a certain autonomy from the economy. At the systemic level the transition has been prompted, as always, by the imperative of profit, yet the pursuit of profit became increasingly a function of a firm’s capacity to surpass rivals through product differentiation, marketing and branding. In short, corporate success depended on a successful appeal to the ‘needs’ of classes of people whose wealth enabled them to search for a way of expressing themselves through their purchasing behaviour and associated lifestyles. The objective of capital is unchanged and so is its manifestation in corporate power, but the means to it have been utterly transformed. This transition’s effect on the definition of self has been as profound as the effect of the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism, and it is this basic truth that postmodernism has unwittingly grasped.
With the transition to the new form of capitalism, the relationship between ordinary people and corporations has changed dramatically. Where once they responded to the unfair exercise of power by joining industrial trade unions, now they react against perceived exploitation by joining consumer groups and Greenpeace. The failure to recognise that corporate power continues to lie at the centre of social, as well as economic, transformation is the error of both the postmodernists and the advocates of the Third Way. Theorists of postmodernism have forgotten about the economy—the relationships between people and the production and consumption of goods and services—and have had eyes only for processes of cultural change. But, without falling into deterministic Marxist notions of an economic base supporting the political and cultural superstructure, it must be recognised that the processes of cultural change and differentiation are shaped and constrained by the ideological and cultural needs of economic, corporate and, above all, marketing organisations and systems. Individuals cannot be constituted outside of their institutions. In the case of the ‘lifestyle politics’ of the Third Way, its advocates fail to understand and react to the way corporations, through their marketers, have seized on and captured the yearning people have for authenticity, attributing ‘autonomy’ to people who remain captive in an entirely new way.
What does all of this mean for our understanding of work? I have argued that the principal contradictions of modern life lie not in the sphere of production but in the sphere of consumption. The arrival of the age of abundance for the first time provides the possibility of the liberation of work. Transcending the primacy of the growth motive creates the potential and opportunity to restructure work, so that it finally becomes centred on creating the worker rather than the product of work. While abundance provides for the liberation of work it should not be taken to mean liberation from work, since work is the means to human fulfilment and the expression of creativity.1 The extent to which this liberation can occur depends on many factors, only some of which can be explored in this chapter. They include the structure of the labour market as well as various influences beyond the labour market. Moreover, it must be acknowledged that, although large numbers of workers labour in occupations that already allow for a certain amount of creativity, there are others, particularly in less-skilled occupations (check-out operators, building labourers, data clerks, and so on), where alienation and drudgery remain hard to avoid. The transformation of these jobs is yet to be done, but their continued existence should not prevent us from seeing that the liberation of work is now possible for the majority of the population.
We should, however, caution ourselves against moving to the other extreme. The archetype of the new flexible, mobile worker—the ‘symbolic analyst’, or ‘bourgeois bohemian’2—provides no model for the future. Robert Reich suggests that these ‘mind workers’, who make up around one-fifth of the workforce, can sell their services anywhere and are happy to do so. But we should not mistake mobility for freedom. The cosmopolitan elite is just as prone to manufacturing their identities through the symbols of consumption as everyone else; indeed, they are more prone because they are more likely to have uprooted themselves from communities that act as a counterweight to the free-floating identity so beloved of the marketers. Cosmopolitans in fact commodify culture, so that it can be consumed rather than experienced. As Thompson and Tambyah argue:
Cosmopolitans actively consume cultural differences in a reflexive, intellectualizing manner, whereas locals remain content in their parochial ways of life . . . Cosmopolitanism is . . . a style of consumption that creates and maintains status distinctions between high-cultural-capital consumers and low-cultural-capital consumers.3
Travel and detachment are seen as being at the core of identities marked by a sophisticated global outlook, but they are identities that frequently suppress the anguish of voluntary homelessness.
Reconsideration of work has a particular resonance for young people. Radical changes in the nature of the labour market—the death of career, the decline of standard hours and the rise of casualisation—have already meant that young people are less preoccupied than their parents with security and long-term plans and more determined to find working arrangements that offer them fulfilment and personal growth. At least, this is true for those with the education to allow some meaningful choice. Some European analysts go further and apply the idea to the workforce in general. In the words of Oskar Negt, ‘A distancing from work, a critical evaluation of whether one’s work is really a worthwhile activity, has taken hold on the consciousness of broad masses of the population’.4 This is an undoubted trend, reflecting both the liberation that abundance permits and, perversely, the sundering of old ties and obligations in the employment relationship introduced by neoliberal governments and corporations seeking flexibility. While Negt’s observation holds true across large cohorts of youths and young adults, its general application awaits more radical and deliberate social change.
Nevertheless, in a post-scarcity world work can be liberated from the bonds of wage and salary payment, so that it can be considered a creative self-realising activity. Moreover, we can finally break down the barriers between paid employment and work in the household and the community. Rebalancing of paid and unpaid work is an essential component of this rethinking, but its implications go much further. As Gorz has written:
Reducing working hours will not have a liberating effect, and will not change society, if it merely serves to redistribute work and reduce unemployment . . . It requires a politics of time which embraces the reshaping of the urban and natural environment, cultural politics, education and training, and reshapes the social services and public amenities in such a way as to create more scope for self-managed activities, mutual aid, voluntary co-operation and production for one’s own use.5
At a public meeting in a regional city a few years ago, 200 people gathered to hear a lecture on economic growth and the meaning of progress. During the discussion time many people commented on the personal and social troubles caused by widespread unemployment. Then one man stood up and said that three years previously he had lost his job because of an industrial accident. Some months later when he had recovered, he began looking for work but, despite his sustained efforts, could find none. After a year or so he lapsed into despair and stared suicide in the face. Then one day he woke up and decided to look at his situation another way. Now, he told the audience, he has three jobs. They are all voluntary and, although he does not have much money, he has never felt so fulfilled and happy.
In the economics textbooks, work is characterised by its ‘disutility’, the suffering associated with the act of labour; we engage in work activity each day for only one purpose, to earn income to enable us to buy consumer goods. The theory is based on the view that we would all prefer to be idle, whiling away our lives in leisure pursuits, but our consumption demands compel us to go out and work.6 The textbook theory of wages is built on this foundation. While employers’ demand for labour depends on how much value a worker can add to output in a day, workers supply their labour to the market up to the point where the pain from an extra hour of work exceeds the pleasure they receive from the extra wages. Thus, in this view of the world workers are free to decide how much they will work and how much they will enjoy leisure, given the wage they can earn with their level of skill. Consequently, restrictions on the ability of individual workers to supply their labour or on the ability of employers to offer work to anyone at any wage are not only restrictions on basic rights but are economically inefficient. To avoid such restrictions, power must be dissipated by vigorous competition between employers and unfettered competition between workers, who must be free to choose where and how much they work.
The Left has had a very different understanding of how workers fit into the labour market—one in which power is naturally in the hands of employers. In the era of industrial capitalism the nature of the labour process and the relationship between workers and employers meant that work, instead of being a free expression of creative capacities, became alienating, so that workers’ capacities were constrained and crippled. Moreover, the fruits of their labour were appropriated for the benefit of others. Workers could sometimes combine into trade unions in order to counterbalance the power of capital by withholding their labour or influencing governments to impose laws that improve wages and conditions. But, in the end, capital always had the whip hand.
The Left’s analysis is unquestionably closer to the truth. Work, paid or otherwise, is inseparable from living a full and rewarding life. Although some ascetics seek their inner selves through long periods of meditative retreat, for most people purposeful activity is the means to fulfilment. Among the many who have studied the role of work, Jahoda argues that employment provides five categories of psychological experience that are vital to wellbeing—time structure, social contact, collective effort or purpose, social identity or status, and regular activity.7 Most of all, and notwithstanding the role of consumption in modern identity formation, work continues to provide a sense of personal identity, and it for this reason above all that in wealthy societies the wellbeing of workers declines so dramatically when they become unemployed. While the ostensible purpose of employment is to earn income in order to consume, in modern times the unemployed suffer most not from material deprivation but from the corrosive psychological impacts of exclusion from meaningful activity and the concomitant absence of time structure, idleness, impoverishment of social experience, and loss of social status. Jahoda comments on how unemployment eats away at one’s sense of self: ‘Because of widespread consensus in public life about the social status assigned to varying jobs, people tend to adopt this assignation as one clear element in defining themselves to themselves and are reluctant to dispense with this support for their personal identity’.8
While it is politically convenient for conservative politicians and populist demagogues to attack the unemployed for their laziness and their willingness to sponge on society, in fact few people are equipped to sustain their mental health when they have no way of filling their day in a structured and purposeful way. This is why so many men enter a period of deep malaise, often leading to illness and death, when they retire. Rotary clubs owe their existence to this psychological fact.
Few jobs are so lacking in psychological reward as to render prolonged unemployment preferable. How, then, do we explain the fact that some people discover that their lives are improved by being made unemployed?9 Haworth reports a study of a small group of people who, on becoming redundant, experienced material deprivation but no psychological loss. Each of these unemployed workers could distinguish between employment and meaningful work and ‘the majority indicated the importance of having values that gave direction to life including political, religious and personal development beliefs’.10 The study showed that these people obtained the psychological benefits of employment by other means. Their new activities allowed them to structure their time and share experience outside the home (and in some cases inside the home as well). They had ‘transcending’ goals and purposes, and many derived status and identity from new activities such as voluntary work. These people are the exceptions that prove the rule about the psychological damage of unemployment: they demonstrate that purposeful work, rather than paid employment, provides the rewards people most crave. Those who benefit from redundancy or retirement benefit not because they are freed to indulge in idleness but because they are freed from one form of activity to take up another that they find more rewarding. Unlike the man whose story opens this section, these people are usually able to sustain a reasonable level of consumption once their payments stop, but it is remarkable how many of them report that the decline in material rewards has meant no great loss of life satisfaction.
In the 1960s it was widely believed that within decades we would witness a transition from a life of work to a life of leisure. Extrapolating from the historical decline in working hours, and noting the apparently unlimited labour-saving properties of technological progress, commentators foreshadowed societies in which the populace would indulge in a life of lotus-eating relieved of the drudgery of work. These forecasts could not have been more inaccurate. Writing in Fortune magazine in 1994, William Bridges summed up the feeling: ‘We used to read predictions that by the year 2000 everyone would work 30-hour weeks, and the rest would be leisure. But as we approach 2000 it seems more likely that half of us will be working 60-hour weeks and the rest of us will be unemployed. What’s wrong?’11
In the early 1980s working hours for full-time employees in the West stopped their historical decline and, contrary to expectations, began to increase, especially in the Anglophone countries. There is much popular comment on the phenomenon of overwork and ‘time stress’. The pressure on work time has occupied many analysts, with some wondering whether work patterns in the United States and Europe were mimicking the legendary overwork of Japan’s ‘salarymen’ and factory workers. It is a vision few have welcomed. Acute observer Gavan McCormack has noted that nowhere is the crippling effect of modern work more apparent than in Japan, where working hours are much longer than in other rich countries. In the car industry, Japanese workers put in an average of 2275 hours each year, 33 per cent more than their counterparts in Europe.12 A 55-hour week is common and fewer than 20 per cent of employees enjoy a two-day weekend. Despite Japan’s wealth, the pressure to work longer and harder has intensified in the last two decades. Even employers have acknowledged the corrosive effect of such a ‘work ethic’: the chairman of Sony Corporation, Moria Akio, wrote that Japan is ‘in desperate need of a new philosophy of management, a new paradigm for competitiveness, a new sense of self ’. The key to this, he said, is shorter working hours, something that most Japanese workers want.13
Overwork among full-time employees was not the only startling new feature of the labour market and the nature of work to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. The widespread unemployment that grew out of the recession of the early to mid-1970s persisted, leading to the creation of a substantial underclass of long-term unemployed, with serious social ramifications. Gorz refers to the ‘post-industrial proletariat’, made up of the unemployed, the occasionally employed and those in precarious casual or part-time work,14 and suggests that they make up 40–50 per cent of the workforce in Western European countries. We must, however, distinguish between people who are on the margins of the labour force and desire, with varying degrees of desperation, full-time work in order to attain a decent standard of living and people in a wide variety of circumstances who are not motivated to join the labour force in the traditional way. In Europe more than half of part-time workers have deliberately sought their working arrangements.15 Among women employees, 42 per cent would prefer to work fewer hours; 54 per cent of male employees would prefer to work fewer hours, one-third of them wanting to work more than five hours less.16 Young people, in particular, often spend years moving in and out of the workforce while they pursue a range of other ‘projects’, sometimes supported by casual work or by payments from the state or their parents or partners, but often living without the need for substantial incomes. These ‘workers’ feel no compulsion to define themselves or find their life course through paid employment; instead, they seek autonomy through a range of other, unpaid, activities, a choice permitted by social arrangements in the era of abundance. This is a far-reaching but little acknowledged social transformation, for it reflects not only the fact that the ‘economic problem’ has been solved but that the even harder nut of economic rationality has also been cracked. In his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, Keynes wondered whether the nut could be cracked at all:
Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature—with all of our impulses and deepest instincts—for the purpose of solving the economic problem . . . Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.17
Keynes’s concern about the inbred work habits of the ordinary man is a nice counterpoint to the presumption of modern economics texts that the basic instinct of homo economicus is sloth. But Keynes could not have seen how abundance would transform the psychology of ordinary people. Perhaps that is because he used as his marker of the future the example set by the wives of the well-to-do, ‘unfortunate women . . . who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional occupations—who cannot find it sufficiently amusing . . . to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing’.18 Freud’s work also suffered from the assumption that bourgeois women of the turn of the century constituted a representative sample.
Thus the creation of large numbers of part-time and casual jobs has been a result partly of the demand for part-time jobs, especially from women workers entering the labour force, and a result partly of the supply of part-time jobs by employers seeking greater flexibility of employment. The effect on people’s lives has been profound, but it has been a double-edged sword. For many workers, part-time work suits their circumstances perfectly, while others, anxious for full-time work, must subsist on half or less of what they require.
Whatever the effect on people’s lives, the old model of full-time male breadwinners is now redundant. In general, only about one-third of workers work a ‘standard’ week of around 40 hours; another third work substantially more, and the remainder work part time or not at all.19 Some analysts have seen only the downside of the new flexible workplaces. The sharp increase in mobility and outsourcing has weakened the forces that previously bound employees to their workplaces. In his influential book The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett observes that a young American with two years of college education can expect to change jobs eleven times in a 40-year working life and to retrain at least three times.20 He reflects on the corporate motto ‘No long term’ and quotes an executive talking about ‘the contingent worker’ and companies where ‘jobs’ are being replaced by ‘projects’ and ‘fields of work’. Sennett argues that we need long-term relationships in order to develop trust, and that the sense of place associated with familiar workplaces is fundamental to being emotionally rooted. Change can be stimulating, but too much of it leaves us floating and uncertain. Yet this is precisely what suits modern capitalism—the imperatives of growth make everything expendable and the capriciousness of consumer tastes requires businesses to be ever more light-footed. Sennett comments thus on the psychological implications of the new world of work: ‘Detachment and superficial cooperativeness are better armor for dealing with current realities than behavior based on values of loyalty and service’.21
Arguably, it is safer to try to put down emotional roots by creating a personal ‘lifestyle’ through the consumption decisions over which one has total control, rather than through a job for which there is no long term. The central feature of modern life is the rise of individualisation, the process in which people, no longer defined and constrained by social categories of class, status and gender, must ‘write their own biographies’. But although we are freed from the constraints of the past—constraints that, while limiting, also provided a sense of security and of knowledge of who we are and where we fit—the new labour market conspires against us in our efforts to find a course through life. As Sennett observes, ‘How can a human being develop a narrative of identity and life history in a society composed of episodes and fragments?’22
The contradictory nature of changes in the labour market is captured in the history of the idea of a career. It is often said that women today have difficulty balancing their home lives with their careers. But what is this idea of a career? At one level it is a progression up a well-defined path in a profession or, less formally perhaps, the continuing acquisition of skills and experience that makes someone a more productive and valuable worker. Sennett argues that the idea of pursuing a ‘career’—a word that originally meant a road for carriages and came to mean ‘a lifelong channel for one’s economic pursuits’23—emerged in the early part of the 20th century as a means of countering the danger of a life of aimlessness, an ‘antidote to personal failure’.
My father, a ‘career’ public servant, lived in an era when men acquired status and a place in the social order by demonstrating the qualities of reliability, stoicism and loyalty. Those who put these qualities above others were rewarded. The need for the security of a career owed a great deal to the depredations of the Great Depression. If their own fathers had not been thrown out of work and their families forced onto the breadline, then certainly their neighbours’ had been. But the career, then as now, was frequently a trap, a cocoon of security and social sanction that prevented men from spreading their wings and seeking out the niche in the world that would allow them to realise their potential. They were frustrated. The fact is that, even for those who successfully work their way to the top of their chosen career path over 40 years, the bulk of the time is spent treading water, engaged in activities that do not in any way contribute to their professional capabilities or personal advancement.
The superabundance of modern capitalism has liberated people from the need to cling to a career path. One has to ask, then, why women worry about threats to a career. Admittedly, there are times in a career that are more important than others for making progress, but for the most part those who make early progress end up spending longer periods marking time later on. Young people are increasingly replacing the idea of a career with the notion of a life narrative,24 a transition consistent with the era of individualisation. Certainly, the idea of autonomously living out one’s life story has more appeal than pursuing a career whose indicators of success are defined by some impersonal reference group motivated by self-validation. Yet society conspires against the brave, for the career is, above all, an insurance policy against failure. In a society of winners and losers, most people lose. In fact, even the winners lose. While there appears to be no way back from having your ‘career destroyed’, rewriting your life narrative allows you to confront your failures, integrate them into the story, and move on. Abandoning the idea of a career is in fact a process of self-liberation, an act of taking control of your life. In a post-scarcity society, one can fail in one’s career but succeed as a man or a woman.
The wholesale transformation of labour markets in the late 20th century has been quite properly criticised by the Left for robbing many segments of the workforce of security, but it has also opened up enormous opportunities to go beyond the deadening relationships of the past. Labour market changes have not reflected only the wishes of employers: some workers have been able to renegotiate the way they work so as to suit their own preferences and family needs. Increasing numbers of people want to have more control over their work, especially their working time. The enormous growth of part-time work has perfectly suited large numbers of workers, especially students and women with children. Many others have been able to work as independent contractors or consultants. Although it is more risky, this way of working offers a degree of flexibility and autonomy, which explains why some workers who are made redundant subsequently see it as the best thing that could have happened to them.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the success of the women’s movement has been the devaluation of household work. While for many women a lifetime of ‘home duties’ meant a lifetime of boredom and an enormous waste of latent talent, at least before the 1970s being a housewife had recognised social status. To be sure, it was a social status sui generis, outside the hierarchy of professions and trades, but it was universally acknowledged and understood. The more recent disparagement of ‘home duties’ was coupled with the emerging sense that women who stayed at home, even to raise young children, were committing themselves to activities of no value. But however much that status might have been constructed by males for the benefit of males, we must ask whether the solution was to denigrate and disparage the activity rather than transform it. For many women, what drove them into the labour market in huge numbers in the 1970s and 1980s (mostly into part-time work) was as much the desire to avoid being left in a role that society had suddenly decided was of no value as the lure of financial independence and a career. The fate of those who refused, even temporarily, was to be characterised as talentless drudges or passive victims of patriarchy.
The 1990s saw the eruption of deep-seated dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. After all, the housework still had to be done, and neither men, technology nor the market seemed able or willing to take over the task. There was a brief celebration of the Superwoman who successfully juggled career, children and housework, but that has been superseded by some profound questioning of the desirability of the whole project. On one hand, serious questions have been raised about the capacity of paid child-care workers to provide the love and security that young children need. The gnawing guilt of mothers (and some fathers) has been compounded by a new body of research documenting the psychological and developmental disadvantages of children consigned too early to long-day care. On the other hand, the sheen of the male world of work—the career, the status and the independence—became decidedly tarnished. As I have argued, these doubts received one of their strongest expressions in Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman, in which the seminal voice of anarcho-feminism maintained that women had accepted equality in place of liberation. Equality allowed women to unlock the cage only to find themselves in the bigger cage that men too laboured in. For Greer, the problem had become not just patriarchy, but patriarchy conditioned by the global system of corporate and consumer capitalism. If we take the patriarchy out of capitalism we are still left with capitalism and all its superficiality, materialism and exploitation of the Third World.
And still the housework remained to be done. A new appreciation of its value is emerging, along with that of its less-disparaged partner, voluntary work in the community. Household work is the material foundation of a living environment that is healthy, comfortable, supportive, nurturing and loving. We allocate time to the various tasks—cooking, cleaning, washing, child care, gardening, shopping, home maintenance, and so on—roughly according to how much each contributes to our own and our household’s wellbeing. In fact, household work contributes enormously to our physical comfort and emotional contentment. In the right circumstances, doing household work can be one of the most rewarding ways for people to spend time nurturing themselves and their families. This helps explain why, despite major advances in household technology that have reduced the time and effort people need to devote to many tasks (and the availability of commercial services for those who can afford them), time-use surveys show that households in Western countries today devote as many hours a week to household work as they did in the 1950s.25
People who remember life in the 1950s might recall their mothers hauling sopping clothes from the washing machine to the hand-operated wringer, clothes they may have made themselves. They might remember their fathers cutting the grass with a push mower and chopping wood or hauling coal to heat the house. There were no dishwashing machines, microwave ovens, steam irons or clothes driers, and pre-prepared foods were confined to canned fruit, fish and meat. Despite the 1970s and 1980s disparagement of housework and those who did it, people’s unwillingness to reduce the amount of housework when the opportunity arose is telling. Some have attributed this to demands for higher standards of cleanliness, better quality meals, and so on. Advertisers have promoted this creep in standards, urging us to have floors we can eat off and trying to frighten us with fears of hidden germs. But perhaps the main reason that time devoted to household work has not declined is the obvious one: people like to do it. Or at least they like to have the sort of family and home life that housework provides. While the performing of housework can be a chore, it can also be satisfying. The act itself, as well as its outcome, contributes to our wellbeing.
Because housework contributes to a warm, loving and nurturing home environment, we are mistaken to think of it merely as an activity that produces ‘household goods and services’. There is a strong current of thought, particularly in the feminist movement and spreading into official thinking, that household activities should be considered in the same way as paid work outside the home. On this basis demands are made for women to be paid for the work they do in the household. Although this is an understandable response to the historical trivialisation of women’s work, there are grave dangers in such a proposal. In this view, household work is characterised as the process of production of household goods and services that are consumed by members of the household. The Genuine Progress Indicator described in Chapter 2 accounts for household work in this way. But, while the GPI is a useful device for pointing to the narrowness of official thinking about progress and to the influence of androcentric notions of value, the commodification of household work—like the commodification of the natural environment—serves to change the work’s character and devalue it.
Characterising housework as ‘work’ that happens to be performed in the home is a misguided attempt to induce greater equality between the work of women and men. It is a short step from paid housework to the full representation of domestic relationships in economic terms, as in the perverse world of neoliberal economics analysed in the seventies by Gary Becker, the Chicago economist par excellence. In an article published in one of the profession’s most prestigious journals,26 Becker defined marriage as an arrangement to secure the mutual benefit of exchange between two agents of different endowments. In other words, people marry in order to more efficiently produce ‘household commodities’, including ‘the quality of meals, the quality and quantity of children, prestige, recreation, companionship, love, and health status’. The marriage decision is therefore based on quantifiable costs and benefits. The gain from marriage has to be balanced against the costs, including legal fees and the costs of searching for a mate, to determine whether marriage is worthwhile.
Becker went on to analyse the effect of ‘love and caring’ on the nature of the ‘equilibrium in the marriage market’. He defined love as ‘a non-marketable household commodity’, noting that more love between potential partners increases the amount of caring and that this in turn reduces the costs of ‘policing’ the marriage. Policing is needed ‘in any partnership or corporation’ because it ‘reduces the probability that a mate shirks duties or appropriates more output than is mandated by the equilibrium in the marriage market’. After pages of differential calculus, Becker reached a triumphant conclusion: since love produces more efficient marriages, ‘love and caring between two persons increase their chances of being married to each other’. What Becker’s wife thought about this analysis is not recorded, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was sufficiently impressed to award him the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1992.
This is the path down which proposals to turn housework into a paid activity inevitably go. The commodification of household work brings the value system of neoliberal economics into the realm where homo economicus is least welcome. Not only are ‘goods and services’ such as cooked meals and clean clothes turned into marketable commodities; even the love of a parent for a child must succumb. It is then only a matter of economic calculation to decide whether or not to contract out the range of services provided within the home—including care of infants and even, as Gorz suggests, the processes of conception, gestation and birth themselves though exogenesis, growing the foetus in vitro to the point of ‘birth’.27
It is, of course, important to avoid glamorising housework. It can turn into drudgery, but the most common cause of this is the unfair distribution of it and the failure of those who benefit from it to appreciate its meaning—that failure itself often being a product of patriarchy. Although the distribution of housework remains unequal, it is less unequal than it was 30 years ago. Surely the answer is not the transformation of the home into a factory for producing household goods and services and the inevitable imposition of economic rationality, but the democratisation of the household. In a democratic household, differentiation can be consistent with equality. In such a household, those who perform the household work are already paid, in the sense that they have an equal right to the income that comes into the household from the person or people working outside the home for pay. The difference between the democratic household and the commodified household is the difference between the warm home and the cold home.
Similar comments could be made about the commodification of voluntary work in the community. The transformation of charities into businesses that deliver government services under contract changes them at their heart. The application of economic rationality to community work destroys its spirit and thus its purpose.
The shift to self-employment, or ‘ownwork’,28 and the spread of part-time work are laying the foundation for a post-growth society. While capitalist enterprises are driven by the need to make profits and expand, people who work for themselves or in small self-directed groups do not of necessity operate under the same compulsions. Even some capitalist enterprises are showing a change in organisational goals, recognising that providing a congenial and flexible workplace for their employees can be viable, although in the end the interests of shareholders rather than employees will always prevail. The entry of women into the labour force and the feminisation of many professions previously reserved for men provide an excellent opportunity to change the nature of work and attitudes to it, although progress in this regard has generally been disappointing, with women too often adopting male approaches to work.
In response to the epidemic of overwork, commentators often suggest that we should not live to work but work to live. Ironically, the idea of working to live is precisely the model that informs neoliberal economics texts, where work has an instrumental function, one that allows for achievement of the real purpose of life—enjoyment of time away from work. (We need to remember that ‘work’ here encompasses all purposive activity, paid and unpaid.) An essential feature of a post-growth society, perhaps its defining feature, is the dissolution of the boundary between ‘work’ and ‘life’, so that work becomes life. In an era of abundance we should not be confronted with the problem of work–life balance: we should revel in the merging of the two. A century ago most workers over a lifetime spent roughly 70 per cent of their waking hours at work. For young people today, the combination of more years in education and longer retirement, coupled with shorter working hours, sabbaticals and breaks for other pursuits, means they will spend around 25 per cent of their waking lives working for pay. They will not spend the other 75 per cent idle; instead, they will pursue a proliferation of projects that will provide discrete chapters and narrative threads for their life biographies.
Andre Gorz also takes a longer view, imagining a society in which, after a 200-year interregnum, people can once again own their own time, time that was taken away by the world of commerce and wage labour. This applies to both work time and leisure time. In the last several decades commerce has systematically attempted to colonise the ‘free time’ of workers and turn it to consumptive purposes. Leisure activities increasingly require an entrance fee or a pay-TV subscription. Tradition-rich sporting teams have been bought up and repackaged. Urging the Left to ‘seize the emancipatory potential of post-industrial civilization’, Gorz writes that the objectives must be:
To force capital . . . to leave the savings of working time at the free disposal of a society in which economically rational activities can no longer be preponderant; to fight for the expansion of spaces of autonomy in which economic purposes and commodity logic no longer prevail; and to render . . . development favourable to the reappropriation by individuals of time, of their environment, of their model of consumption and their mode of social cooperation . . . 29
In an observation reminiscent of the discussion of Keynes’s doubts about the psychological aptitude of ordinary people to take the opportunity when it is presented, Gorz adds, ‘It will be objected, no doubt, that all this presupposes the desire and the capacity on the part of individuals to reappropriate time. But this is precisely the nature of the cultural change that is currently under way’.
Quite so. The culture of long hours has been encouraged by pressures from business and its appeal is enhanced by the fear of redundancy, but the greater part of the culture of long hours is entirely voluntary. With the exception of an important group of workers in less-skilled occupations, people have a choice over their jobs. It is the cultural rather than the economic power of capital that convinces them they must work longer and harder: they do so because of their belief about how much income they need in order to maintain an acceptable lifestyle and because income and job status remain central to social status. In other words, people have become habituated to high levels of income to sustain their sense of worth. Globalisation, as a cultural phenomenon, has spread and intensified the habit. But if in a post-growth social formation our sense of personal identity is allowed to flourish through free expression of our creative potential, the culture of overwork will fall away.