Draft for Tällberg Conference 1985-09-29. The sources used for this statement are D Yankelovich et al, Society at Work , B Ekman et al, Dignity at Work , and H Zetterberg et al, The Invisible Contract . The common denominator in these sources is Pehr Gyllenhammar's initiative.
By Hans L Zetterberg
1. Mankind's work is never done. At every
moment there is an endless number of new and old tasks. There is always a more
efficient way of doing things. There is always a more humane way of doing
things. There is always room for more helpfulness, for more song and dance, for
more knowledge, for more worship.
Society never runs out of tasks. But we may
organize things so poorly that many things are left undone and many people are
left unemployed. Today there are crying needs for basic facilities and improved
conditions throughout the globe – and
500 million people are unemployed.
We need a society of activity.
2. More humanistic values should be enacted at
the workplace. It is common to design jobs that meet economic and technological
imperatives. The worker is reduced to a budget entry in an economic scheme or a
cog in a machine-dominated process.
Technological and economic values loom large
in business, industrial, and administrative elites. They assume much less
importance among the rank and file, where familistic, humanistic, or expressive
values are more common. The latter values, however, do not have the same
powerful spokesmen in enterprises and bureaucracies, as do economic and
technological values: so they lose out. Work becomes organized according to
economic and technological criteria, but is to be performed by people with
familistic, humanistic, or expressive values.
This leads to a mismatch and to a slackening
of the motivation to work. We face an unplanned, counterproductive consequence
of applying economic and technological criteria in a thoughtless way.
A good case can be made for giving priority
to humanistic values. They put a thinking, feeling, and responsible human
being, nay, a whole person, ahead of technological and economic schemes.
Economic and technical rationality usually allow for many more than one single
optimal solution. Innovative job designs can, with little damage to economy and
technology, allow for the enactment of humanistic values.
There is always a more humane solution to a
technical and/or economic problem!
3. Work gets the major rhythm of man's life.
The rhythm of work can be organized by the seasons, by the days of the week, by
the hours of the day, by the stages in one's life cycle. But a rhythm there
must be. Work therefore must be a pattern, not haphazard, scattered events.
Regular work is a vital factor. It is not an
accident that heart atacks and other trauma often arise during vacation or at
the onset of too early or abrupt retirement. Without the regular rhythm that
work provides, the body chemistry changes, mental acuity deteriorates, and the
phrase "you lose what you don't use" becomes a reality.
The pattern of work may vary from time to
time. No free society should impose the same pattern on everyone. Work from 8
to 5 for everyone must be abandoned as an ideal, and be replaced by a multitude
of interlocking work patterns. But a pattern it must be, for each and everyone.
4. Work must fit basic psychological needs. The
pattern of our work should be invigorating, not dulling.
Our ancestors evolved into the present
species over millions of years, when the conditions for survival were entirely
different. They adapted gradually to an environment which changed very slowly.
And it was the slowness of the change that made adaptation possible. With the
industrial revolution, about two centuries ago, the rate of change began to
increase drastically. And in the electronic era, just a few decades old, the
rate of change keeps accelerating.
In striking contrast, the human brain and
body have remained essentially the same over several thousand years.
Today's demands for the workplace, while
generally psychological rather than physical in nature, trigger the same bodily
stress responses that served our ancestors by making them "fit for
fight." Any situation perceived as a threat or challenge requiring effort,
takes signals from the brain to the adrenal medulla, which responds with an
output of adrenaline and noradrenaline. These "stress hormones" make
the body fit for "fight or flight." In the event that the situation
induces feelings of distress and helplessness the brain sends messages also to
the adrenal cortex, which secretes another stress hormone, cortisol, which
plays an important part in the body's defense.
Jobs should be designed to reduce not stress
per se but distress – the feelings of helplessness and of "giving up"
that are likely to occur when people experience that events and outcomes are
independent of their actions. Helplessness is accompanied by an outflow of
stress hormones, particularly cortisol.
The key is to design jobs that enhance positive challenge: effort,
determination, and involvement. There is, of course, no simple formula for
successful coping. However, a number of studies support the view that personal
control and influence are important "buffering" factors, helping
workers to achieve a state of effort without distress. Demands are experienced
as a stimulus rather than a burden. Under such conditions, the balance between
stress hormones is changed: adrenaline increases whereas the cortisol-producing
system remains at rest. This means that the total load on the body, the
"cost of achievement," will be lower.
5. Work gives us social contacts. The growing
numbers of singles, of one-parent families, of widows or widowers, of divorces,
is a recent but growing demographic trend. And for many of these individuals
the workplace is a major, if not the only, source of social contact. For many
married couples, too, the workplace has become an important field for social
interaction. Many jobs last longer than marriages and longer than the
child-raising period in our lives.
In work surveys many of the employees interviewed
attest time and again to the significance they attach to their relations with
coworkers: they are often motivated to do a job right so that they will not
shift the burden onto their fellow workers rather than from management, they
often rate the sense of fellowship with coworkers, of mutual caring and
concern, as one of the major assets of their jobs.
Apart from obvious monetary and material
rewards, and besides the sense of identity and fulfillment a job can provide,
the long-term unemployed also suffer the loss of a sense of belonging – a
profound bereavement for the social animals that we are. A bereavement that, in
the worst cases of unemployment, may be lifelong.
The widespread fear of being without a job
exists at a deeply human level, for while the economic losses of unemployment
can be compensated by social assistance, nothing of the sort can make good the
human losses to someone out of work and, consequently, without the
companionship of a job, in every sense of the word.
6. Labor should be organized to create capital
for all. Work creates riches. Work leads to an accumulation of capital, a
substantial capital if work is married to technology, knowledge, and marketing.
Capital accumulation is used for savings,
capital costs, developments, and investments. The remainder belongs to those
who have done the work: it is their pay and bonuses.
Work is often organized so that the value of
the work effort accrues more to the employer and top management than to the
ordinary coworker. This is applicable in public authorities as well as in
enterprises, irrespective of whether they are owned by private individuals, by
the state, by cooperatives, or trade unions. Governments with a socialist bent
can in different ways limit an employer's private accumulation of wealth. But
it always seems to be management that receives the best workplaces, the highest
salaries, better company cars, the generous allowances, company-paid business
trips, more flexible working hours, and more splendid funerals and memorials.
This is true of capitalist countries and it also holds true in all the
countries in this world that call themselves socialist.
Work produces such excessive inequality where
it is wrongly organized that different categories of coworkers are motivated to
strive in opposite directions. This is common in old-fashioned profit-oriented
hierarchical organizations. Management is rewarded for maintaining and
increasing productivity and for keeping costs within a budget. Those who belong
to management are promoted if they succeed in this. This is usually not the
case for lower strata employees. They know that if they increase productivity
the result will be detrimental to at least some of their numbers. To cut down
on delays, on the size of work groups, to skip coffee breaks usually means that
there will be less overtime available and that management will take the next
opportunity that presents itself to make cutbacks in the work force. The
conflict is built into the way work is traditionally organized, and is not
caused by laziness or industriousness on the part of one group or another.
Work should be so organized that the riches
it creates is shared fairly by all.
7. Job rights should be citizenship rights. The
history of democracy and of the welfare state is the history of rights on the
march.
Rights are granted to different population
groups through usage and legislation. In our society many rights are accorded
to every individual: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom to choose a
profession or occupation, freedom to choose one's place of residence, freedom
to emigrate, the right not to be detained in arrest for an unlimited time
without arraignment, etc. Contemporary citizens regard these civil rights as
just about self-evident. An acquaintance with history reveals, however, that
these rights are rather fragile and recently acquired treasures.
Other rights are not granted to everyone but
only to special groups, those who are entitled to them. Thus citizens 18 years
of age or older are entitled to vote in parliamentary elections, and citizens
67 years of age or older are entitled to old-age pensions (social security).
In recent years a number of special rights
have been coupled with job-holding. By legislation, there are pension rights,
which are based on the number of years one has worked and on income from work.
Another is the right to receive income through the national health insurance
plan when one is unable to work because of illness or disability; the amount of
the payments is determined by one's regular salary or income. In recent years
we have seen the emergence of many rights to adult education, particularly
vocational education and retraining, which can be exercised only by jobholders.
Employed citizens enjoy all kinds of rights
and are first-ranking members of society. Unemployed citizens are second-class
members of society: at most, they enjoy civil rights. This group includes
retired persons, minors, and a more or less large segment of individuals
between the ages of 18 and 65. The third-ranking members of society are the
"guest workers" who have work but lack citizenship; because of
language difficulties such a worker often seems to have considerable problems
in exercising work-connected rights. The fourth-ranking member of society is
the unemployed guest worker; he has almost no rights at all.
Employment thus becomes the true symbol of
full membership in society.
Europe differs from the Americas and from the
Far East in attacking more rights and privileges to the job, rather than to
citizenship.
We fully believe in the rights secured by
European workers. But they should be citizenship rights, not job rights. By
trying them to the job we encourage discrimination and what Ralp Dahrendorf
calls "the class structure of employment":
Some have more work than they can cope
with; many have jobs, often with the opportunity to work overtime; some are
left with nothing but unemployment benefits, or even social security. A very
crude model of the class structure of employment is: ten percent working class
at the top, eighty percent job class in the middle, ten percent unemployed
class at the bottom. In a more detailed analysis, one would have to
distinguish, within the large middle category, the self-employed (whose lives
are not dissimilar from those of the "working class" at the top),
those in public service (a large new category which is the source of much
protest and some innovation), those at the margin who are worried that they
might fall into the unemployed class, and others. But in our context the
important point is that the unemployed are not a random group. They are in fact
defined 'out' by those who are 'in'. There is something deliberate about the
distribution of work in modern societies.
Moreover, by linking essential rights
to the job rather than to citizenship we become clumsily dependent on the
existing job structure. The goals "Make jobs secure" and
"Safeguard employment" strive to save and secure everything that is
tied to a job today without questioning whether it really belongs to a job.
The economic crisis of the 1970s showed how
heavily we had come to depend on right-laden jobs. It used to be considered
self-evident that business and industry would aim at producing a maximum of
products and services for domestic and export markets as efficiently and
cheaply as possible. During the 70s we
learned that this was not the case, particularly in industries that employed
large labor force. So many fundamental values had become tied to jobs that
maintaining employment levels was given a higher priority than efficient
production. In some cases we were forced to buttress inferior jobs in
inefficient, expensive, and scarcely competitive production – jobs that also
most often entailed poor human qualities - rather than invest in humane jobs in
efficient, competitive production.
Governments, employers, trade unions, and
other interested parties have cause to review their outlook on work. So much in today's society has been pinned
onto one hook, a job. Could not much of
it be safely transferred to other areas of society? This calls for further analysis and reorganization work. Every interested group ought to ask
themselves: of all that today is tied
to work how much do we consider actually must be bound up with a job? In times
like these when unemployment is high and pressures for shorter working hours
are mounting, many rights could more appropriately be tied to citizenship
rather than work.
8. Redefining the goal of full employment. The
Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations includes mention of the right
to work. Many nations have in turn proclaimed that their goal is "Work for
Everyone." The major political parties, both right– and left-wing, of the
Western democracies, have long included full employment in their platforms.
But no one has succeeded in reaching this
goal, except on rare occasions and in certain regions. High (and often rising) unemployment is the
rule rather than the exception in industrial democracies. Politicians are
profoundly embarrassed about this grave and unexpected failure.
According to traditional thinking, full
employment means that all who desire it and have the intellectual and/or
physical capacities to manage it should be offered a paid five-day work week of
35-40 hours. Traditional thinking also
has it that downturns in the economy are temporary deviations and that a return
to a "normal" situation of full, or nearly full employment always can
occur.
The Western world seems unlikely to achieve
this state of affairs, at least in the near future, i e, during the present
generation.
This does not mean that we should content
ourselves with current unemployment statistics. They are altogether too
high. We of course have the greatest
sympathy for the most tragic victims of unemployment, youth and the long-term
unemployed.
However, full employment as defined above is
not something intrinsically valuable that must be pursued at any price. A job
is one among several other means of creating a rich, satisfying life. This is what the real goal should be.
There is moreover nothing sacred about the
idea of a 40-hour workweek as a basic description of an ordinary job in the
formal economy. This simply happened to be the norm in most countries of the
West between the middle to the end of the '40s, when "full
employment" became the prevailing goal of economic policy. This goal continued in ascendancy during the
following 25 years. Today we can see that this view of full-time work was largely
derived from the great demand for labor and labor time during the extraordinary
and long-lasting upturn of the post-war years.
But the plateau of a 40-hour workweek would turn out to be a short
interlude in a historical perspective, which manifests a long-term trend toward
shorter working hours.
What, then, should be the objective of our
labor policies? It cannot be to give the individual a lifelong guarantee of a
40-hours workweek irrespective of the costs and without regard to other avenues
of attaining a full and rich life available to him. There are, however, more
modest guarantees that society could and should give him.
Combating long-term unemployment is a most
urgent problem, and absolutely no one should have to endure lifelong
unemployment. Guarantees of employment should, first of all, be given to the
youth of a nation in order to provide them with employment credentials later in
life. The state could further guarantee each citizen a specified number of
years of employment (for example, 20 or 30 years), and the choice of
schematizing these years either in long periods of part-time work or shorter
intervals of full-time work.
The state should, in other words, guarantee
that everyone be employable even if it ceases to promise that everyone
will always have a job. It would be
like telling young people: "We will teach you to drive, we will see to it
that you get a driver's license, we will see to it that you get a lot of
driving practice and many good roads and highways. But we cannot promise that we will provide you with a car
throughout your adult life. You'll have to arrange that on your own."
We readily admit that the arrangement
proposed above would add to insecurity on the labor market in some respects,
but we believe that it could lead to substantial gains in terms of the
well-being of several groups. Research has shown that the parents of small
children in our type of society live under a lot of pressure. Many of them
would welcome an arrangement that would give them greater flexibility in
relation to the labor market. Many
middle-aged persons would welcome assistance in getting retraining for other
jobs or simply a chance to take a break from working life for a while.
We are not at all arguing for unemployment as
a means of economic policy. As we have seen, a job is so much more than an
economic transaction – it gives life a rhythm, opportunities for social
contacts, value and personal fulfillment, among other non-monetary rewards -
that any policy for unemployment is unacceptable. But we do see the
desirability of a freer structuring of
work and more limited guarantees of employment. It would bring relief to groups
that are now coping under a great deal of pressure, it would encourage mobility
between jobs, and it would give young people a chance to break into the labor
market.
9. Governments' taxation of work is
exploitation of workers In the beginning of the century capital was taxed
somewhat, but there was no tax on labor. Today governments exploit work more
than capital exploits work.
The invention of the withholding tax – put
into effect in the 40s and in most advanced countries - has greatly damaged
work. The same is true for the payroll tax paid by employers – which advanced
countries began to use extensively in the 50s and 60s. Both these taxes
increase the price of work. (By contrast the introduction of the Value Added
Tax in the 60s and 70s was more neutral to work: this tax hits primarily
consumption, not production.) From the viewpoint of the taxes they incur,
capital is relatively cheap in comparison to labor. It is no accident that in such a system wealth is won through
real estate, stock market and like transactions that require much capital but
little labor.
The relation between taxes on capital and
taxes on work must become the focus of a new debate. Most Western nations tax
work far too heavily to sustain employment. Jobs are priced out of the market.
Rationalizations are primarily made to cut down on the work force and only
secondarily to increase production.
One cannot achieve a balance between taxation
of work and taxation of capital merely by raising taxes on capital. Capital is
international: in each country the tax on capital must be maintained at a level
comparable to those in other countries. For most Western countries, the only
option left is to lower taxes on work.
10. Create task teams.
Since it is usually very difficult to lower taxes that have already been
enacted, we must create new, untaxed forms of work, more or less like the work
done within and by a family. Let us call the new forms "task teams",
lightly regulated, largely untaxed form of partnerships, limited in number and
in geographical scope.
The number of individuals in a task team
ought not to exceed ten. Research has disclosed that there is much solidarity
at workplaces with ten or fewer employees. They are easily managed; everyone
can keep informed about what everyone else is doing. Mankind formed teams like
these thousands of years ago to hunt, fish, and work the soil. It is significant that in today's team
sports such as football and hockey the active members in a team are limited to
between six and eleven individuals.
One ought to be able to form a task team by submitting a simple application. Each team would be assigned a number for use in reporting value added tax. It would be exempt from employer's payroll tax and withholding income tax, but would be required to pay a value added tax on their transactions and an income tax – but only on interest and earnings on capital. It would be required to restrict its activities to a unit of local government such as a municipality or county. Should it desire to operate on a national or international scale it would have to form a regular company and be taxed accordingly. An individual should be permitted to be on only one team at a time; he forfeits his place on the team if he takes regular employment or becomes an owner in a company or other business form.
A task team would be able to take on many
service tasks, such as care of the aged, baby-sitting, security, and forest
clearance. It would boost small local enterprises: small-scale farming,
bakeries, auto repairs, etc. Task teams could be contracted to look after
public facilities: public pools, sports areas, day nurseries. Some hospital
functions could be taken over by staff that resigns from its formal jobs and
forms a task team. Some industrial workers could similarly form a team and
carry out their work on contract.
In the past the family constituted a task
team, but family structure has changed and today a family can consist of a
childless couple, a couple with children, or be a one-parent family with
children. The families can no longer function as viable unit of work. We need
the task team to replace it.
It would be natural for young people to get
their first work experience in a task team, as they once did by working in the
family unit. It would be natural for task teams to absorb the unemployed and
support them while they are in between conventional jobs.
The task team, in effect, amounts to a
legalization (registration) and encouragement of the "good part" of
the informal economy.