Shall Work Set Us Free?

Extract

Much of the recent interest taken in work springs from our present plight of high unemployment, united with fears that the microchip technological revolution will increase unemployment such that we shall have to move to a leisure society, where to work is a privilege.

This presentation (in the medical sense) of the problem affects the diagnosis and affects, too, the way we think of work. For instance, very few commentators seriously challenge the equation of work with paid employment. This shoft-term focus excludes areas of work which should be included both because they are definitely work, and also because taking cognizance of longer-range matters might help us see the present position more clearly, although at a greater distance from the plight of the depressed ex-steel workers of Consett. Incidentally, here it is worth remembering that if we look at the world as a whole, the vast majority of its inhabitants are not in paid employment — they are either outside the market economy altogether, living in subsistence societies, or, as in Britain, supporting those in paid employment by the hidden subsidy of home work, the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing necessary for the maintenance of society, and the consuming necessary for the maintenance of our kind of capitalist society. Thus out of a British population of some 55 million, only about 18 million are in paid employment. On the old model of society these 18 million were seen as supporting the rest; a shift in the phantasm, partly brought about by reflecting on the possible consequences of the micro-chip, has enabled us to see things a little differently — the old,