Unleash us with the work value!
Now is the time for contradictions. Between the speeches on work that you - elected officials, leaders, unions, contenders for power - utter and the objective evidence, a chasm has widened. The most varied tasks escape us every day in favor of machines, and yet you still erect employment as the guarantor of all our rights - health, old age, citizenship - and of our happiness.
You affirm that work is the way to conquer our freedom and our independence. We find that working conditions improve only for a thin layer of superheroes.
You explain that our holy grail is the CDI guaranteed for life, backed by a decent salary and a mortgage. We search in vain around us for the few survivors of this lost paradise of the last century.
You say that work is the key to our fulfillment and living together. We fail to find any sign of happiness in the chain of repetitive tasks, hierarchical pressure and latent psychological insecurity.
You draw meritocracy and the level of diploma to justify inequalities in the labor market. We strive to find a correlation in our lives and those of others: without success.
Let me tell you bluntly: you look more and more like professors of morality, who hope to hide the vacuity of their thought by the daily invocation of the great principles of humanism. To citizens, employees, the people, you have no other vision to offer than this lowest denominator that you have in common: the value of work.
A moral value at work?
We are and have never been fooled by your supposedly ethical rhetoric. If the people have ever attributed any moral value to work, it is because they derived pecuniary profit and very real advantages from it.
During the last two centuries, the individual enterprise and salaried employment have been two rather effective ways of climbing a few rungs of the social ladder. We were well aware, basically, that by signing this CDI, we were giving up a large part of the fruits of our labor, but the promise of various and varied social protections was enough to dispel our few doubts.
Although the women complained that their domestic work was one and that it was still not recognized as such despite its arduous nature, the vast majority of us had it on our own and did not open it too much.
The assimilation that you made between work, effort and salaried employment seemed much too rapid to us, of course, but as long as there was a salary and prospects of becoming a boss yourself, we did not quibble too much about your conceptual errors. .
Work at all costs
Today, your speech has lost the playful tone of the last century and is tinged with guilt-inducing, moralizing, prescriptive intonations. We must work at all costs, you say, because effort leads to psychological and social salvation while inactivity condemns our society to permanent assistantship. You have also taken care to create a clear distinction between the good student - the one who works even when his qualification has nothing to do with the position - and the outsider-marginal who must report to Pôle Emploi every month to receive his meager savings.
Your voice grows hoarse when you publicly remind us that we must pay off our debt to society and to the state - the original debt we inherited from birth. You are indignant at curves that do not bend and sign pacts of responsibility that provide you with a handful of exploitable language elements for a few months. Basically, you rejoice in knowing that making others work costs less and less while these others produce more and more.
Your game is as old as the world and it is so easy to see clearly: the moralization of work is - and has always been - the best instrument of physical, psychological and social control of men. You praise effort in the Judeo-Christian tradition: effort cures laziness, turns away temptations and teaches humility. The erection of full employment as a millennial objective allows you to rationalize the imbalance of power relations between employer and employee, while providing a legal formalism for the alienation of the means of production.
The job to rethink
The scope of the field covered by the concept of “work” is thus reduced to its most simplistic expression: employment accounted for by national statistics. Everything else - from the practice of artists to domestic chores - is not part of it since it does not fit into one of the boxes provided by INSEE, Pôle Emploi or the International Labor Office.
Stop your cinema, because we no longer believe your speeches and deny you any moral authority. We have a long enough memory to be wary of any social prescription that erects work - arbeit, rabota ("work" in German and Russian) - as a universal moral norm. Salaried employment is gone and we have plenty of time to rethink for ourselves what work really means to us, and how it fits into the models of society we want to build.
Perhaps we have one piece of advice for you: drop morality and worry about the economy instead. By dint of giving it in turn the most varied roles - from cultural determinant to instrument of social cohesion - you have forgotten its primary role as a factor of production.
However, the purely economic value of work has never stagnated so much, reviving inequalities that Western societies have not known since the beginning of the last century. Today, we need you to define a satisfactory system for adding value to our production. Because if work is not our only salvation, it is still our main livelihood.
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Diana Filippova is a OuiShare Connector. This article appeared in issue 4 of the journal Socialter
Diana Filippova, OuiShare5 mins
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