A working life

Judging by how my own career has advanced since writing this, I think it was something that spurred me on to try and advance myself up the career ladder.



Working: Isn't it just the most joyous period of your life? Coming in to whatever your place of employment happens to be, spending a 3rd of the day there for at least 5 days a week, being appreciated for the work that you do, and leaving with the satisfaction of a job well done. Yes, working life in the 21st century is a good life!

And they, ladies and gentlemen, are the most sarcastic few sentences that I have ever written in my natural life! Indeed, I don't think I could have told a bigger lie had I said that the coming war with Iraq had nothing to do with oil. Working in the 21st century, and I hope you know this and I suspect you do, is not that many rungs on the ladder above slavery in the 1st century. Naturally I would imagine that you are rather...resistant to that idea. Well, maybe I'm completely wrong to think that, but I find myself believing it more and more these days. So please, hear me out before deciding that I'm talking utter nonsense...

Firstly I'll declare my own bias; though the conditions where I work have started to improve recently and though I now find myself getting some more management responsibility and (eventually) more money, generally speaking I get the same pleasure from my job as I would from having my eyeballs wrenched out and licked clean by a leper's dog. Without getting too graphic, you can safely assume that I'm not really of a mindset to be delighted at the working environment that I and the millions like me find ourselves in.

Secondly, seeing as I'm using them for a comparison, it's worth seeing just what kind of conditions slaves in the 1st century had to endure. Back then, the number one slave-owning people were our old friends the Romans. The keeping of slaves by all social classes was commonplace; anyone who was anyone had at least one personal slave, and the rich landowning classes had legions of slaves in their household. But their lot was not entirely as bad as we may think. My image of a Roman slave incorporated endless misery, whips and torture, being kept in near starvation, and living in perpetual fear of losing one's life due to the whims of ones master. Whilst this was very occasionally the case, generally speaking a slave’s life was not as bad as the various movies make out.

There were numerous laws in place to protect slaves from ill treatment by their masters. Every slave had to be properly fed and housed. Sick slaves had a right to medical treatment. And all slaves had the prospect of winning freedom from their masters and making the most of their lives; in later years, even Roman Emperors were sons of freed slaves. So whilst they were not exactly living in ideal conditions, they were at least guaranteed a full belly and a reasonably safe and uneventful life to the extent that many preferred slavery as it at least guaranteed them a roof over their head at the sufferance of their masters.

Now then, what of our own working lives? Well, if one were to replace the word 'slave' with employee and 'master' with employer then chances are the above paragraph isn't a million miles away from what we have. Perhaps it's even an improvement on your current lot. For example, sickness at work. If you are feeling unwell (perhaps you have a touch of flu or your stomach is rebelling against you. For the record, I'm talking about GENUINE illness here...), will your employer accept that you are unfit for work and make the necessary allowances? Or will they put pressure on you to turn up anyway, make veiled threats about your future at the company if you do not, and generally do their best to make you feel like a criminal for wanting to stay at home and recover? Jesus, at the company I work for there was an HR person who used to turn up at people's houses to check on them if she felt that they weren't sufficiently ill! At least Roman slaves were left in peace when they suffered an illness.

Also, if you were to ask the reasons why people are in the jobs that they currently have, what do you think the most common answer would be? Is it going to be job satisfaction? The salary? One's co-workers? Or is it going to be because we feel so beholden to whatever debts we've accumulated (mortgages, loans, and the other sundry costs of being an adult) that we are pathetically grateful to our employers due to our need for a steady, unbroken cashflow? To the extent that we will put up with any amount of crap from them? Because, in fact, we prefer to have a roof over our head? A roof placed there thanks to our masters...sorry, employers.

Meanwhile, even as we in the small world are concerning ourselves with such wonderment as whether or not we can afford some new electronic baubles and gadgets, big businesses and corporations are finding strange and inventive ways to avoid paying any taxes whatsoever on their embarrassingly large profits. So whilst we are being exhorted to work harder for the benefit of the company, not only are we paying the price in terms of leisure time lost (how many companies 'encourage' their staff to work longer hours?), stress (on the rise in the workplace according to statistics), and general unhappiness. No, we're also paying the price in terms of a greater tax burden. In effect, the harder we work the less we will be paid. And if you doubt any of that, ask yourself this question; if the company you work for has been doing well in the marketplace, have you yourself seen your job and conditions improve at a similar rate? Or has it gotten that much worse?

And if their profits should fall, will it be the company director who placed the company in such peril, and who can probably afford a few months out of work, that loses his job? Or will it be you or I? We may not be in perpetual fear of losing our lives due to the whims of our employers, but who can say that they have never had sleepless nights at the prospect of losing our jobs? And having been in that position myself, I can assure you that it is NOT a nice feeling at all. We may say that we are free men and women, but we really are not much more free than a Roman Slave; if our employers say jump then no matter who you are, the only thing you will think of asking is "How high?"

So why has it come to this? Speaking personally, I've always been under the (obviously misguided) impression that work should be for the benefit of society as a whole. The more society benefits, the better our lives in general will become. Yet we're living in a time of failing public services, shrinking investment in the national infrastructure, and the prostitution of our welfare state to the demands of big business (or "Public-Private Partnerships" as I believe they're laughably called). Our working lives would seem to be for the benefit of a very few people at the top of the heap.

I'm not disputing the right of a company to make full use of the spirit of free enterprise and do as well for itself as it possibly can. But genuine enterprise is just naked, rapacious capitalism with its hair combed and a nice shirt on. It is about cash, pure and simple, with no consideration of responsibilities toward society as a whole. So whilst it is the right of a company to maximise their profits at any cost, it is the duty of society's guardians to ensure that this is not done at the expense of the men and women in that company's employment. And d'you know who society's guardians are? That would be the government that we elect.

And that makes the whole situation...mostly our own fault really. We, who sit about on apathetic backsides and reassure ourselves that our votes won't make a difference whilst bitterly complaining about what the bastards at work have done now, are to blame for our own working conditions. On the plus side, that gives us something that no Roman slave ever had; the ability to change things. Whether we use it or not is another question entirely. On that note, I bid you an enjoyable day at the office.