THE TRUTH OF JOBS: THE CONCLUSION
In this series of essays we have investigated whether it is realistic to ask ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’, as though the opportunity to find your calling is available to all. As we have seen (and shall now summarise, going back over what we have learned) nothing could be further from the truth. Jobs exist within a market system where profit is the main driving force, and that means competition to drive down costs, including the cost of labour. Research has shown that what makes work rewarding are qualities such as creativity, the ability to act autonomously, the opportunity to exercise judgement and flexible work that can be tailored to one’s own lifestyle. Also, work should be ‘meaningful’ in the sense of it being ‘important’, making a positive difference to society. Together, this shows that people crave work that gives scope for enhancing one’s individuality and to make a positive impact within society.
But ‘individuality’ is not what capitalism really wants from employees. You can see this is so by imagining an extreme version of an ideal job, one perfectly tailored to suit an individual (yourself, say). If this job is also meaningful (and it would be if we are imagining the ‘perfect’ job for you) one can appreciate what trouble the business would be in if you were to be run over by a bus. The job was so perfectly tailored to your unique self that nobody could replace you in the event of your demise.
On the other hand, imagine a job that did not entail creative thinking, individual judgement and autonomy, and required minimal mastery on the part of the individual employee. A job position, in short, that could be filled by anyone. Obviously it would be far less significant if the employee who happened to fill such a role was to disappear. This would be because any other person would do. In other words, the employee would be less of an individual and more like an interchangeable unit, at least as far as the job is concerned. This would reduce their bargaining power (particularly if being out of work is made to be as unpleasant as possible), because who would dare complain about raw deals when the employer can replace you with somebody else with relative ease?
In the real world there is some rewarding work undertaken by people who love their jobs. But the cost-saving potential of reducing the creativity, judgement, autonomy etc required of the individual employee is so strong that most jobs tend toward the ‘mere cog in a giant machine’ concept of employment, rather than that of the unique individual maximising their reward potential. And this pressure to reduce the qualities of work that make it engaging comes not just from those in pursuit of profit. The consumerist craving for ever-cheaper goods and services plays a contributing factor too, just as surely as the pursuit of cheaper foods leads to animals facing less than ideal conditions. Don’t those workers in white-collar sweatshops, crammed into uniformly gray cubicles, kind of resemble battery hens?
The drive to reduce the aspects of work that make it rewarding also make the worker more prone to replacement by AI. It’s just a fact of capitalist drives that there are always businesses looking to build the technology that can allow highly-skilled workers to be replaced by those easier to train, easier to replace and consequently in no good position to bargain for working conditions that favour the employee. In a way, the replacement of human employees with robots is the ultimate expression of this drive to monetise labour.
The harder it becomes to find positive motivation in a job, the more necessary it becomes to rely on negative motivation for pushing people into employment. Fortunately (so far as the system is concerned), capitalism has evolved into a parasitic system that is now mostly concerned with increasing costs and pushing up debt, rather than increasing utility. That’s not to say nobody pursues increased utility in modern markets, only that that kind of capitalism is now a relatively miniscule part of what goes on in pursuit of profit. You can see this is so by considering that only 0.8 percent of the £435 billion created by the UK government in quantitative easing (ie money printing) went to the real, productive economy. The rest went to the financial sector that only increases paper profits (in other words, creates nothing but debt.) The relentless pursuit of paper profits, of tax-avoidance and other dubious aspects of modern capitalism results in austerity that eats into welfare, making it increasingly difficult for those in the care sector to provide adequate resources for the vulnerable in society. This of course means that jobs which should provide great non-material reward become stressful, anxiety-filled environments. Also, the more social safety nets are eroded, the more dire the consequences of being unemployed become. Prospective employees scared by what unemployment could mean make for exploitable commodities ready to ‘agree’ to whatever terms and conditions their masters feel like imposing. No wonder we are seeing the rise of gig work where so-called ‘entrepreneurs’ feel like indentured servants, and workfare job placements more akin to slavery than the opportunities we were promised.
The ironic thing about all this is the way we bring people up to expect their job to be an overall fantastic experience, and then, when they find the reality is often nothing like what was promised, we wonder why they don’t just accept what is on offer, and instead act as though entitled to something better, something like the very careers they had been promised all their lives. This attitude really shouldn't surprise anyone if you think about it for more than a few minutes. The journalist Max Hastings reckoned “it is a wicked fib to tell the young they can choose what they want to do in life, because only the brightest will do so”. In saying so he highlighted a truth that goes unacknowledged far too often: It is a requirement of the capitalist drive to increase profits and decrease cost, and that means most of us must be pushed into labour that offers little in the way of reward. ‘The brightest’ are of course, by definition, a minority group, one most of us will be excluded from. We can only conclude, then, that asking “what do you want to be when you grow up?” as if this were a choice we are all free to make, really is the ‘wicked lie’ Hastings claims.
On the plus side
There as been a lot of negativity toward capitalism throughout this series of essays. Let's end, therefore, on a slightly more positive note. Saying capitalism is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is pretty much meaningless unless we specify what it is being compared to. Those are, after all, relative terms. It is possible to find something to compare capitalism with that shines a positive light on this economic system. Many people would argue that, compared to Communist regimes, free markets are more capable of bringing prosperity to the masses. It would also be fair to say that capitalism has enabled a far greater standard of living for modern people than our ancestors from Neolithic times onwards could have expected.
Anyway, the point of these essays was not to serve as a criticism of capitalism itself, but rather to raise objections to a commonly-held belief within that system, namely the belief that this is a system that both needs and provides the opportunity for everyone to find rewarding work. While we should credit capitalism for making possible the material abundance that has improved the lives of so many, we should, at the same time, acknowledge that this achievement was made at the expense of the promise that rewarding jobs await each and every one of us, for it is the desire for more goods and services at ever-cheaper prices that in part drives the commodifying of labour and the erosion of those qualities that make work engaging.
If there is a plus side to this, it would be the fact that actually securing such employment should be considered a real achievement (assuming it was won on merit). After all, the reason why we celebrate people who climb Everest much more than those who manage to reach the top of a flight of stairs, is because you are much more likely to fail when attempting the former. Similarly, succeeding in finding work aligned with your calling is much more impressive when achieved within a system that needs only a few to achieve that success and is much more dependent on a majority who fail to find satisfying work and so are pushed into the unrewarding jobs that material prosperity is built on.
If we wanted to speak the truth of jobs, and assuming we insist on sticking with this current paradigm where you are expected to submit to employment, what might we say to future workers? How about:
"You have had the privilege of living in one of the richest countries. Your comfortable existence was paid for by millions of people who sacrificed the time of their lives in minimally-rewarding labour. It was through the efforts of these unsung and poorly-rewarded serfs, labouring away in dull, dirty and dangerous jobs, that society was able to provide the cheap goods and services that have made life so good for you and I. When you grow up, you may be one of the lucky few who are given a job aligned with your interests. But in all probability you too will have to submit to unrewarding labour so that your kids’ generation may enjoy the same privileged life you've been able to enjoy".
That may sound harsh. That may sound brutal. But that is the truth of jobs.
REFERENCES
“Well Done, Mrs May. It’s Absurd for the State to Fund Degrees In Circuses, Surfing and The Beatles” by Max Hastings
“Shaking The Magic Money Tree” by Michael Robinson
“On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber
“Austerity” by Kerry-Ann Mendoza
“Why We Work” by Eric Schwartz
“The Corruption of Capitalism” by Guy Standing