Satisfaction Not Guaranteed: Dilemmas of Progress in Modern Society

6 The Dilemmas of Work in Modernity

111   6 The Dilemmas of Work in Modernity Polls taken of British factory workers by the 1950s and 1960s neatly defined the problem of figuring out how work stands in modern society : a majority professed some real job satisfaction, but nearly as large a majority said they hoped their kids would find different opportunities. The sense that options should exist, rather than parental footstep-following , was distinctly modern, but the clear ambivalence may have been modern as well.1 Modern work patterns emerged with industrialization, though they ultimately spread well beyond the factory setting. In contrast to most preindustrial norms, they involved speed, subordination, and specialization, and they could prove quite unpleasant. The key trends have gone through numerous iterations, with changing technologies and changing job categories , but the links between contemporary patterns and the early-19thcentury origins are clear cut. Efforts to accommodate to characteristic modern work problems stretch back as well, including a few false starts; at no point thus far, however, has an entirely acceptable arrangement developed for most workers. In many ways, modern work replicates, and in part produces, the larger relationship between modernity and happiness , but in somewhat darker hues. Workers themselves note, usually, that modern jobs serve satisfaction less well than modern families do— despite all the issues in many modern families. Distress for some, quali- fied adjustment for the larger number: here is a fairly consistent response to modern work over what is now many decades. For workers on the front lines of change, modernity in work got off to a screechingly bad start, bringing far more obvious deterioration than that attached to the false starts discussed in the previous chapter. For the rising , articulate middle classes, however, problems were masked by a particularly vigorous appeal to happiness and good cheer, which continues 112  maladjustments in modernity to hover around modern work even today—at an extreme, producing a kind of false consciousness where work is concerned, an inability to face problems squarely. The most important question is what has happened to the work experience after the bad start—which is where the challenge of interpreting ambivalence comes in. It is tempting to argue that a worsening of work life is a durable product of modernity, but there would be many workers themselves who would contradict this. At the least, it is clear that work has not improved as much as some early optimists hoped, and that the results play into the gap between modernity and satisfaction overall. Modern work, then, involves a deliberately harsh launch, masked only by optimistic rhetoric. Measures taken since the later 19th century have addressed the core issues tangentially, by cutting job hours or adding human resources coatings. The result is less a false start than a recurrently inadequate response. The Nature of Modern Work Anyone with a dim memory of history lessons about the industrial revolution will recall the many miseries that attended this central pillar of modernity: low wages and slum living in crowded cities, problems of sanitation and safety, and abuse of child labor, just for starters. Many workers accepted factory jobs only because they had no options, and readily fled back to the countryside for agricultural jobs whenever possible. Similar patterns emerge with industrialization still today, as in China, where millions of rural migrants crowd into urban factories. In fact, however, though these birth pains are significant, they are not the main point of the work experience in modernity. Successful industrializations , within a few decades, see improved wages (though with troubling pockets of poverty still); urban conditions ameliorate at least a bit, as measured among other things by better health levels; and abuses like child labor begin, if slowly, to recede. In significant ways, there is progress over time. It’s also important, on this vital topic as with others, not to overdo the beauties of premodern work, even aside from outright slavery. Jobs in agriculture and the crafts could be physically grueling; manual weavers, for example, frequently became permanently deformed because they had to activate looms with their chests. Not surprisingly, one of the boasts The Dilemmas of Work in Modernity  113 of modern work optimists involved the reductions of physical effort that machines could produce. Premodern jobs also frequently involved abuse of apprentices and common laborers, including harsh physical discipline as well as low pay. While in theory craft work allowed people to rise...