Back to index of Nerve 13 - Winter 2008

WORK/LESSNESS

By Val Walsh

Once people were out-of-work or unemployed, which, while denoting disadvantage, were reasonably neutral terms stating someone's situation at the time. (This included mothers of young children, as well as children and other adults responsible for dependants.) Now "worklessness" has become the new label, sweeping up what are diverse situations, circumstances and behaviours into a unitary category to be targeted and forcibly reduced. Real people are now compressed and disappeared within this abstraction.

The term 'workless' denotes something negative. Along with childless, jobless, talentless, heartless, mindless, loveless, sexless, aimless, the suffix 'less' denotes lack: of something you should have. Problems of virtue and status lurk: it is about something perceived as not right, not normal, not natural; undesirable and perverse. A punishable offence? The 'less' signals a flaw or inadequacy in society's eyes. (The feminist move in the 1970s to replace childless with 'childfree' was an effort to avoid the stigma of not reproducing: of failing/being unable to, or refusing to.)

Work: linguistic roots

Travail(s), with its roots in Latin and French, denotes painful or laborious effort; toil. The Latin verb travare means to shackle; which found its way into French as entraver, to shackle and fetter.

Anglo-Saxon gives us the more neutral work (or Werk in German). There is also a link to Greek, with the meaning wrought, and Persian, as gain. The Cambridge Oxford Dictionary 3 defines work as first, an activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result; second, as such activity as a means of earning income (my emphasis).

Historically work has been seen as akin to punishment; something you have to do, rather than something you want to do; something involving external purpose and motivation, rather than something voluntary or spontaneous. But is it as straightforward as that in 2008?

Western binaries: the either/or

work - play
industry - idleness
labour - leisure
toil - pleasure.
obedience - liberty
deference - confidence
the bounded body - the sensuous body
coercion - freedom
regulated - unregulated
professional - domestic
public - private
external control - internal drivers
hierarchy - anarchy
inequality - peer process
slave labour - creativity
constraint - improvisation
servicing - caring
formal - informal
stasis - vagabond

Where does life maintenance fit within these categories? Or art/craft, creativity, love, self/discipline, social responsibility? The ethic of care, proposed by feminists in the 1970s, as different and equal to social justice as an ethical category, straddles both sides: cleaning, cooking, feeding, nurturing, nursing, home-making and the attendant emotional labour involved, for example, are inextricably bound into attachment, intimacy, love. For women, historically, certainly.

Cleaning a baby’s bottom or breast-feeding are necessary tasks. They are also how attachment and love are forged at the outset through look and touch. These hybrid experiences may be seen as the source of the inchoate stirrings we come to identify as our moral core as adults: receiving and identifying the look and touch of love as babies; and beginning to reciprocate.

Is this toil or pleasure? Power or love? Does it count as ‘work’? Whatever else, it demonstrates the inadequacy of these binary categories (the either/or of these classed and gendered concepts). At the ‘mucky’, domestic and libidinal centre of our lives, there lies fertile territory, rich in hybridity: replete with examples that are both labour and love.

"Health is Wealth"

A recent (interim) report from the Health is Wealth Commission charts:

"The City-region's worklessness profile, and in particular its claimant rate for Incapacity Benefit (IB)." The majority of IB claimants in the City-region are male and in the over 50 age bracket; not surprising, as the Report notes, in the wake of the industrial closures of the 1980s. "By far the majority of claims . . . accounting for almost 45%, are for 'mental and behavioural disorders', including stress-related illnesses and depression."

Long-term benefit dependency is also identified as a key issue for the City-region, where over two-thirds of claimants profiled in February 2007 had been in receipt of benefits for over 5 years. The proposed new model for a "North West Worklessness Task Force" is underpinned by the national requirement to investigate IB; to examine the determinants of worklessness and benefit dependency; and "realistically determine what proportion of claimants might be brought back into the workforce". The Commission is keen to see “improvement in the quality of life for the city-region’s employed citizens, so that ‘working life’ becomes an attractive proposition”. But the Commission may be hampered by the fact that it is composed entirely of members ‘drawn from diverse professional backgrounds, specialisms and interests’ (my emphasis).

The problem of "productivity"

The Health is Wealth Commission appears to take an economistic view of health as a basis for wealth (seen as a virtue). Or is it vice versa? Either way, productivity is implicitly prioritised. But in the move towards a more qualitative and holistic perspective, shouldn't we be asking and discussing:

• What counts as work?
• What work needs doing and why?
• What makes it a good thing, meaningful, a pleasure?
• What do we mean by productivity?
• How can we uncouple our experience of time from control, coercion, subordination?

Will the proposed worklessness taskforce break down barriers and open up opportunities? Or will it further embed divisions and stigma as instruments of social policy and control? This will depend on first, the information base at its disposal; second, on who does what: i.e. the structure of power and responsibility (membership and participation) within its sphere of action. If it simply reproduces existing power relations and divisions, all is lost. It must itself model change. But how can a taskforce do that? The military terminology itself is unpromising.
What do we know, for example, about the cohort of men over 50 identified as prominent in the long-term workless category, and assumed to be unproductive? What are they doing with their time and their lives? Possibilities might include:

• voluntary and community work/activism
• social and political representation and action
• parenting, partnership, childcare, role as carer
• part-time paid employment
• creative work, entertainment, research, education and training
• house maintenance, housework, food production, catering
  
• membership of community and public groups
• sporting and/or cultural activities.

Instead of implicitly labelling these men as feckless losers (er, workless), establishing some of these facts would likely produce a more varied and positive picture. But, of course, to declare any of these activities is to invite problems.

But I doubt that official researchers would be able to gather this data: it requires, in the first instance, voluntary, autobiographical sharing, undertaken in a confidential environment. As a second stage, identifying key crises and triggers, and obstacles to health, wellbeing, and paid employment, would provide more qualitative information (and not just about these men as individuals, but about social conditions, employment practices, attitudes and prejudices in the workplace, for example).

To be idle can be viewed as a temporary and/or privileged situation, even beneficial in the context of a driven, workaholic culture. Idleness, on the other hand, is deemed reprehensible: a mark of irresponsibility; a character flaw; a defective condition . Similarly, once workless becomes worklessness, there is a sense of blame and shame. The ‘condition’ attaches to the person as stigma. The language we use has consequences.

Victims scream or stay silent; hit out or withdraw; seethe and/or put up. We need creative, participatory approaches to social dilemmas, such as alienation, isolation, loneliness, social disconnection; and attendant poverty. Labelling, threatening, blaming, coercion are just the same old. The task is huge in Liverpool: to move from the entrenched 'parent/child' scenario in the public domain (where you are one or the other in terms of authority and power wielded), to the adult-adult relation of peers that democratic process promises.

In the context of current social, environmental and economic disruption, managing and manoeuvring may not be enough to secure us any kind of future, let alone one which is viable and humane. Now is the time to prioritise human and environmental sustainability, social justice and an ethic of care as foundational to any next steps, and to move beyond rhetoric and spin. Cuts in public spending, which will disproportionately impact on vulnerable women and children, for example, in order to shore up the City and its bonus-hungry culture, do not mark such a change or commitment. The vision and courage to work towards an Alternative Economic Model for the City, rooted in non-corporate, non-market values, now looks like a social and environmental necessity, rather than a sandal-wearer's pipedream.

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