Easy to descend into cross purposes, especially on a subject as huge as the nature of work.
A results oriented relationship is extremely open to abuse due to the unequal power relations. Just to twist it here back in the direction of my own particular hobbyhorse if you’ll forgive me, i.e. teleworking, that power relationship in the general sense (not the highly skilled specialist but the routine data processing teleworker) becomes even more skewed by the social isolation and casualised nature of the contract. There is no opportunity whatsoever for collective action by workers in such a situation, there is no collective workforce, no common cause, its the 21st century lump with keyboards and broadband instead of shovels. Again, I’m not suggesting that this necessarily applies to your situation, nor does it to my own particular situation. I’d make the point again though that our current generation of remote or flexible workers are enjoying a premium that derives from the transition into these work practices, a premium that will not be passed on to the next generation when institutionalied work flexibility becomes another tool for reducing labour costs and increasing profit. Or if not increasing profit then simple survival in a generally globalised on-line economy which is without national borders and national labour market differentiation in terms of pay and conditions of employment. It facilitates the race to the bottom. I do think it’s slightly naive to believe that capital will not use the unequal power relations to its benefit. Not saying that specific employers will consciously use flexible work arrangements to drive up their bottom line, but in a globally more competitive labour market the motiviation to lower labour costs becomes an accepted “common sense” that is simply unquestioned, with workers carrying the can as a result.
Democratisation of the workplace is another big discussion.
“If work is not about ‘happiness’ what is it about?”
Well now, where to start? I don’t have a stock answer for that. For the overwhelming proportion of workers it is about economic necessity, that’s the bottom line. Clearly it’s better to spend the hours doing something that doesn’t leave one physically or emotionally broken at the end of the day, so I’m not going to shoot you down in flames for suggesting that “happiness” is part of the mix in that sense, where “happiness” as a catch-all equates to the basket of attributes involved in the exchange of labour apart from just money. But I think one has to acknowledge that the situation of the privileged brain-workers in the developed western economies is far from being representative of the situation of most workers on the planet. In the pyramid of needs there’s a bit of angels on a pinhead sort of meaninglessness about whether some fluffy notion of good employer practices are really the important issue of the 21st century global proletariat. It simply misses the point that work in a capitalist economy is about exploitation, maybe with ribbons on in some cases, but exploitation none the less. I mean, you don’t need to be a Marxist these days to see that the future work prospects are pretty grim in simple terms of quantity of work let alone quality of work. In that sense I think the prioritisation of work quality for the upper echelons of the labour masses is simply fiddling while Rome burns. It’s not that the qualitative aspects of work are not important per se, they’re just not as urgent as addressing the structural economic issues that underlie unemployment and under-employment in capitalist economies. I appreciate that as an individual employer you can’t solve the problems of the global capilatist economy, whereas you can make improvements within your own sphere of influence in your own business enterprise, and every little helps of course. But it’s still a bit of a cop out. I don’t mean that personally or nastily.