Some thoughts on the modern workplace.

In 1937 George Orwell published The Road to Wigan Pier. The book follows the narrator’s journey through a number of lived experiences in the North of England, focused not on any of the individuals featured, but aiming to give a broad flavour of the bleak, impoverished, and austere lives led by Miners in the aggregate.

It contains harrowing tales of the physical terrors exerted on the bodies of the young men spending up to 10 hours a day down mines in order to eke a meagre living, from broken backs to catastrophic lung issues, the men were brutally treated by their savage profession.

Here we are, 80 years and mineshafts of workplace safety legislation later, in the modern workplace. Air-conditioned, caffeine-fueled ‘workspaces’ abound. It’s now common to see non-ergonomic keyboards thrust into the tip. Black quad-wheeled, cotton upholstered chairs tossed aside, determined to not offer the kind of supple back support that a 21st Century Pret-a-Manger KALE BLAST smoothie-swiller relies upon.

Take a stroll through a central London office, and you’ll find more folded Bromptons than cases of coal dust induced Bronchitis. Am I attempting to argue that these improvements are a bad thing?

No.

But the differences in the relationship between the working environment in the early 20th Century and our time don’t simply end with the workplace. Something seems to have altered the very nature of work itself, the relationship between the individual and her labour.

In the 30s the relationship between worker and employer was based on economics. It was often an antagonistic relationship, with employer fighting against collective bargaining and unionisation to protect his power to set wages and working conditions. The worker was often exploited and seldom appreciated for his labour, yet there was an honesty and integrity in the work that simply could not be denied.

If you were to ask a Wigan-based Miner in 1937 whether he loved his job, he’d have likely answered with extreme violence or expletives. There however was a mutual understanding between he & his employer, a simple, economic deal that was taking place. Labour for Wages. As austere, brutal and Sisyphean the daily task was, this contract seemed to count for something ephemeral in the working psyche.

It’s difficult to select the 21st Century equivalent to the northern Miner, but if we were to look at a similarly overworked, undervalued and routinely exploited role, a retail shop assistant wouldn’t be too far away. I could spend a great deal of time dissecting the strange fascination with fetishising low skilled work with the illusion of gravitas, so adored by the corporate class, but I’ll just leave you with the gentle and beautifully illustrative example of Subway legally calling their staff ‘Sandwich Artists’.

I’ve no doubt that some people, a large minority in fact, do feel a connection with their work. That some feel that they are working for an organisation that provides good to the world that fits with their value-system. One only has to browse LinkedIn for as long as one can stand, to imbibe the self-aggrandising, virtue-signalling posts of estate-agents, corporate lawyers & accounting professionals. They do all seem to love what they do. A lot.

In a recent job advertisement for a Store Assistant at a famous discount furniture retailer, one of the essential qualities candidates needed to have was described as “a real passion for providing furniture to our customers”.

I believe that this demand for faux-enthusiasm for things that no sane person truly has demeans the social contract that one must have with their employer. It further impoverishes the already exploited individual with further degrading masochistic demands to love ones oppression.

It’s simply not enough anymore to offer your labour for a fair price, you must now be forever subjugated, and love your chains.

I simply argue that those of us who do not have this connection are no longer punished or subjugated for seeing our own link with our labour as an economic transaction. I see it as an undesirable essential for maintaining an income to fulfil personal needs, necessarily and deliberately untacked from the economic system in which we find ourselves.

I assert my right to not hold ‘a genuine passion for delivering world class catering solutions’, or to stop short of being ‘truly driven to offer the finest cloud-based software platform on the market.’

I assert my own right to not love my chains.