Hatred of work has become an international meme. Entertainment around the world bemoans the arrival of Monday while celebrating Friday and the end of the work week. Under this pop culture visage is a very real problem, with almost a third of workers in the Western world affected by workplace stress.
In his latest book, The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming, Professor of Business and Society at City University London, explores the stresses of the modern workplace and why we put up with them.
One of the fundamental issues is our misidentifying of the work we do today as being a natural phenomenon.
While in the past our work was directly linked to our survival, if we didn’t hunt or tend the land we had no food, that link has become broken for most of us. As Peter explains: “it’s socially manufactured, the division of labour, the types of work we get today...it’s one of the last socially made, manmade things that we still take for granted as a part of nature”.
While the nature of work has been forever changing, technological advances have speed up this process. The modern model began with the First Industrial Revolution and gathered momentum with each great invention and innovation. By the end of the 20th century this had seen almost half the world’s population had become urbanised.
This change was especially acute in the West where the cities swelled with people looking for industrial or service work. The ritual of work became embedded into society. A person’s standing became largely determined by their job, and their standing in work determined by how hard they worked.
In The Mythology of Work Peter explores how the modern cult of work has come about, what keeps it in place, and how it has become distorted.
Paranoid about losing our jobs we continue to push ourselves harder and harder. Yet this rise in productivity hasn’t seen a rise in reward. According to Peter: “our performance and our productivity have become slightly detached, if you like, from the wages which we receive”.
While this is obvious in the wage gap between employee and CEO for example it is also seen in different jobs. Comparing dog walkers and personal trainers to nurses, Peter illustrates that necessity and work rate have little impact on wages.
Susan Cahill, presenter of Talking Books, spoke with Peter about his book, what he sees as the issues with the modern approach to work, and what the future might hold.
How did work become so all powerful? Why is e-mail “like the Frankensteinian monster”? What is the impact of these stressful workplaces on the home? And what lies in store down the road? Are people “slowly waking up to the idea that this has all been a con-job”?
In the second half of the show Susan talks with James Booth about the life of Philip Larkin and his biography of this great, if sometimes controversial, poet, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love.
This week’s music to read to
Breaking Down by Clem Leek opens the show with Max Richter’s Vivaldi Recomposed playing out of part one. The show ends with Goldmund’s Threnody.
