Most of us think that, work is the central, dominating fact of life. We spend more than half our conscious hours at work, preparing for work, commute to and from work. What we do there largely determines our standard of living and to a great extent the status we are accorded by our fellow citizens as well. It is sometimes said that because leisure has become more important, the indignities and injustices of work can be pushed into a corner, that because most work is pretty intolerable, the people who do it should compensate for its boredom, frustrations and humiliations by concentrating their hopes on the other parts of their lives. I desparately reject that. For the foreseeable future the material and psychological rewards which work can provide, and the conditions in which work is done, will continue to play an essential part in determining the satisfaction that life can offer. Yet only a small minority can control the pace at which they work or the conditions in which their work is done; only for a small minority does work offer scope for creativity, imagination, or initiative.
Inequality at work and in work is still one of the cruellest and most glaring forms of inequality in our society. We cannot hope to solve the more obvious problems of industrial life, many of which arise directly or indirectly from the frustrations created by inequality at work, unless we tackle it head-on. Still less can we hope to create a decent and human society.
The most glaring inequality is that between managers and the rest. For most managers, work is an opportunity and a challenge. Their jobs engage their interest and allow them to develop their abilities. They are constantly learning; they can exercise responsibility; they have a considerable degree of control over their own — and others’— working lives. The most important thing is that they have opportunity to initiate. By contrast, for most manual workers, and for a growing number of white-collar workers, work is a boring, dull, even painful experience. They spend all their working lives in conditions which would be regarded as intolerable — for themselves — by those who make the decisions which let such conditions continue. The majority have little control over their work; it provides them with no opportunity for personal development. Often production is so designed that workers are simply part of the technology. In offices, many jobs are so routine that workers justifiably feel themselves to be mere cogs in the bureaucratic machine. As a direct consequence of their work experience, many workers feel alienated from their work and their firm, whether it is in public or in private ownership.