A Discourse On Work

By Author: Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah
Total Articles: 2
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A Discourse on Work
By Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah
Work is an important activity that sustains our lives. The level at which our living conditions get to depends largely on the value of work. If the value is rich, then we are likely going to have equally rich living conditions. The question of happiness is wedded into this conditional sentence, and one is, thereby, encouraged to ask: how do we acquire happiness? Happiness could come in many ways. I may get happiness from an inner satisfaction about some good thing that I have been able to accomplish, publicly or privately; happiness could come from public services that are provided by different levels of government. Hence, I may go to a public park with my friends to view the green environment and luxuriate in it, or, even, have an exceptional picnic there. But a greater part of happiness could also come from one's own deeds, which are rewarded with money. And to this last point, one may say that more profitable deeds are often rewarded with much more money such that one is able to accumulate wealth. Therefore, to say that more profitable deeds imply hard work ...
... is beyond question. What is questionable is whether hard work means working too much at the expense of leisure or working smartly in order to have room for leisure. There is hardly any conflict about the claim that hard work and innovation are together indispensable for generating wealth. The point that wealth is necessarily a major key to happiness may, however, be disputed. Often, this point is based on the issue that the buying of services and tangible things could bring happiness, so that the more wealth a person has, the more he/she can buy such services and tangible things. I may, for instance, put up a huge mansion because I am wealthy. The mansion may have all kinds of facilities such as a jacuzzi, a gym, a meditation room, a classy movie and music room, and so on. I am free to have pleasure from any of these things at any time because they belong to me and nobody else. Even I can employ all kinds of maids to serve me in whichever ways I want. The point is: am I having these kinds of pleasure upon accumulating wealth, or am I forsaking them in favour of an established habit of too much work? Suppose I have acquired all these pleasurable things but still work too hard without having time to enjoy them, then the meaning I have attached to life is not only strange but lacking in sense. My initial supposition or plan that I must work a lot in order to acquire these things as the route to pleasure, happiness, would have been invalidated by the present lifestyle I have chosen for myself. And having said these, I do, therefore, believe that inordinate hard work without adequate leisure insults human decorum even though it can bring about much wealth. Too much work to the neglect of leisure would not constitute profitable deeds even though it could generate much wealth; and it is to this point that an unconditional connection between wealth and happiness has to be criticized. For a person who works too much all the time with the hope of accumulating wealth has not given much meaning to life, and can only taint life with dullness instead of happiness. I should now clarify the issue of too much work or inordinate hard work. Inordinate hard work or too much work may be temporal and may take place because the agent is bent on completing a project that is both ambitious and novel. This kind of enterprise is common with skilled jobs where the intention is to reach a result that demonstrates human feat and smartness in production. In achieving the desired end, the agent will, of course, be very happy emotionally and mentally. But if inordinate hard work is other than what I have stated, then it cannot be justified in the moral and business sense. The idea that one should work a lot is a burden on every aspect of life, and, as I have stated, holds back leisure, hence happiness; nor can too much work in business create a responsible business except to remorselessly exploit labour to the extent that puts undue stress on each employee and the work environment. Laziness, which is the contrary of work, properly understood, has to be eschewed. Anyone who opts for laziness when the choice of work is available has become a social misfit and has to be persuaded to settle on some job. On the other hand, an initial action, by authorities, of bullying such person out of laziness may be counterproductive, even silly. While laziness is not justifiable, it could - astonishing as it seems - be right in some circumstances, and one example will, here, suffice. Think about John, our hypothetical individual. He has made every effort to be profitably employed. He has filled out countless job application forms and sent off countless resumes. He has even walked directly into the offices of numerous companies enumerating his skills and his readiness to work. Yet no company has offered him a job. Frustration has set into John's life, and he has resolved not to look for a job any more. John has become lazy because the society has forced him to be so; and it is the duty of society to cater for John, otherwise he may resort to any means necessary for him to survive. Often, such means may be badly chosen, even dangerous, and may cause the society more harm than good. Some may object to the choices that John has made, thinking that he should have created some kind of business for himself. But this contention is wrong; for whether a person can create business for himself or not depends largely on an initial capital as well as a mental and emotional fibre that is not wrecked by frustration. Let me now move into a new terrain, perhaps the most important one, about the issue of work and leisure. It is in the area of business. To begin with, I shall cite the case of John again. The point that John has been unable to get a job because a job is simply not there for him is an all-too-familiar point. Suppose John is employed in company Q when, according to profit-minded business employers, he is not supposed to, then it may be claimed that he will instigate underemployment - that is, he will, most likely, bring about the situation whereby he has to share a job with one or more other employees, a job that he need not have done. Instead of one or more employees working a full eight hours, John's work has led to the eight-hour work of these employees being reduced to, say, six hours or less though the employer still has to pay the employees in question according to the stipulated eight hours that they were bound to by contracts. In present-day capitalist systems, most people are prepared to say that underemployment of the sort that has cropped up due to the hiring of John has to be avoided, else it leads to waste instead of utilizing labour to its optimum. Careful thought can point to the contrary. If too much work is a personal habit, it can, by this logic, be carried into the domain of business and be the mode for running a business. The employer, say Jim, bent on securing for himself the health-given attributes of pleasure through an initial plan of hard work, gets trapped in the web of hard work. Thereafter, he is unable to extricate himself. And when this kind of work ethic is carried over to employees, as if it is an invariable logic, it throws the entire corporate culture into it. Every aspect of business gets connected to the code of too much work. The proliferation of overtime work or longer working hours arises from the habit of postponing leisure and replacing it with the code of too much work. Thus, one of the chief mysteries of human life dwells in the unrestrained lust for monetary profit. To satisfy this whim, the pursuit of leisure has to be deferred indefinitely, and too much work has to take its place. It is obvious that in modern societies, progress, development, happens to be measured in terms of monetary profit. So progressive societies are viewed largely in terms of how monetary profit reflects on people's living standards, and, more specifically, the collective purchasing power of the people. Careful observation will confirm that, in many cases, whether monetary profit is the fundamental paradigm used in judging progress, or whether the productive capacity of the people is the rule, the issue of too much work comes to the fore. What a large class of humans have abolished is collective self-determination and adequate leisure crucial for reinforcing the mental, emotional, bodily and social health of people. The habit of too much work proliferates unemployment. It fixes the eye of the employer on how retained employees can work too much to sustain or even swell monetary profit. If this habit is left unchecked, then it will make no sense for profit-minded employers to reduce the working hours of employees in order to give room for other people to be employed. All becomes business as usual; production becomes largely unplanned because too much is produced from too much work; surpluses idle in factory rooms; business tricks are advanced particularly by advertising managers to catch the eye of potential consumers who, in any case, may not want goods that are idle; and daily activities in business get connected to unceasing utilization of gimmicks. Finally, the crushing difficulties that arise as a result of the mass surplus of goods compete with the natural environmental for space, leading, as it were, to uncalled-for pollution. Whether business and human conduct can be salvaged from the traps of too much work and monetary profit, whether power ought to reflect on abilities and talents that are valuable in any number of ways and not necessarily business or corporate power, whether social responsibility can be made an essential principle of business enterprise and business ethics, and, lastly, whether - it is hoped - the role of leisure in fostering human advancement can be fully comprehended as a preliminary, ongoing and final component of work and business will depend on a fundamental shift in human behaviour in grasping the essence of happiness for all. But the hope of happiness for all appears to be forlorn. Too much work and too much profit has given all the clout to corporate businesses, and this enables them to run over the political governance of people through elected leaders. And it is true to say that, in our modern era, power, used largely as a control mechanism, comes largely from the kinship between monetary profit and corporate power.