Is work freedom or servitude?

What ‘undignified’ work can tell us about our own conditions

I walk to the Library every day of the work week to write. Almost every day on this journey, I come across a person wearing a mascot costume for a Canadian tax company. The mascot is extremely unoriginal, a ridiculously large red maple leaf.

The persons job, it seems, is to stand there waving at people. I think their employer assumes this will generate more business for them although I can’t speak to that as everyone passing by, myself included, averts any sort of eye contact and quickens their step.

The ‘shame’ I and others feel as we walk by is more an internalized one. I think in our avoidance of interacting with the mascot we recognize how lucky we are to not be in that situation, we recognize that our condition has spared us the need to do ‘humiliating’ work. Part of that shame is more of a guilt.

More importantly though, I think we avoid interacting with the mascot to spare us from wondering whether or not our conditions are that different. Are the dynamics we face at work any less demeaning as we plug away at whatever ‘less embarrassing’ jobs we hold? Is this kind of work really that much more dehumanizing than whatever it is we do?

The economic case for embarrassment

Market economists will jump in opposition at this thought, what is dehumanizing about this? The person is free to choose their line of work, if this was not agreeable to them they would not do it. They would go on to say that even if we view this work as demeaning, it still meets their needs, it provides them with the ability to make money and then use that money in whatever way they see fit, pursue a hobby, start a business, see friends etc. If we are to ban these types of jobs on account of their ‘embarrassing’ nature we will be impeding their freedom of choice to 1) take the job if they want it and 2) of the benefits of taking this job.

This argument is used extensively when it comes to global trade and the low wages paid to people working in sweat shops under deplorable conditions. Market economists would say that by demanding, let us say Bangladeshi tailors supplying H&M who work at a rate of one dollar an hour (a hypothetical number), to be paid more, then we are robbing them of the ability to make money as the company will just find its labour in another country where they can pay one dollar an hour.

Market economists would then dismiss our concern for these people as stuffy moralism, classism, and snobbery. And their accusation will hold. In a market system denying people the opportunity to work is as if we were giving them a death sentence, forcing them to live in conditions even more unsavory than their current ones. We would be removing their freedom of choice and agency.

Justified moralism

With this argument we should feel ashamed of our shame towards anyone taking ‘undignified’ work. We should, instead of seeing embarrassment, see a strong work ethic and determination, we should be congratulatory to the individual’s practice of their own agency and humanise them in it — see them as more than the work they choose to do and drop our petty moral interpretations of right and wrong (to see them as the person in the mascot and not the mascot itself.)

Here, though, we would be wrong to distrust our initial instinct. It’s true that our concern can be framed as a moralistic one as per the above argument, but this is only if we want to accept the terms of market economists. In reality, our concern was, from the get go, a concern of the individuals freedom. We are aware that if the individual in the mascot had any other choice they would have most probably taken it. The fact that this person has chosen the work of being a mascot is an indication of the lack of freedom the individual had in doing anything else.

But it’s important for us to not stop here, we need to expand our analysis not only to work that we deem ‘dehumanizing’ or ‘embarrassing’ but to our own condition. Here the question becomes what is the relationship between our work and freedom?

Does our work and the need for work provide us with freedom, or is it what takes freedom away from us? How many ‘sacrifices’ have we made to be able to work and make a living? Most of us put up with bad bosses at work, deal with annoying customers, or take unpaid internships to gain “experience” to get a job. We also take student loans to get the work we want and we make compromises on the things we want to study for the opportunity at landing a job in the future.

None of these sound like conditions of ‘freedom’. The idea of work itself is seen as an exchange between time (a limited commodity that encapsulates our agency) for money.

Choose your favorite manner of exploitation

Marxist philosophers certainly support this claim and seek to refute the idea of market economics all together.

Friedrich Engles, Karl Marx’s compatriot, makes his case against work and employment clear as he compares it to slavery in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844

The only difference as compared with the old, outspoken slavery is this, that the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class.

Although written more than a century and a half ago, Engles is apt in pointing out how our conditions of work provide us with the illusion of freedom. It may be true that our working conditions are better than the mascot’s but the fact remains that we are beholden to work itself. We have just had a better trade. This does not mean that we are free, but that we have had greater latitude in choosing the mode of our own exploitation.

In the same year, Karl Marx pushes the idea further in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He claims that it’s not just the simple trade of between work and time that impedes our freedom, it’s the mechanism of the market system itself which coaxes us to give up our individuality to save money.

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour — your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.

Here, even the argument that the job as a mascot is ‘enriching’ the individual’s life is completely obliterated. The individual doing this work is more likely to spend the money on things necessary to sustain their life (rent, food, childcare, etc.) and whatever is left over will be saved to try and improve their material (not individual) condition. This is not simply a personal choice, it is a choice motivated by market forces that pressures the individual to alienate themselves in the hopes that one day they will be able to travel, marry, buy a house etc.

This is not a polemic against work itself, but rather a polemic of the nature and dynamics of work within the market system. Marxists recognize that many of us find meaning and purpose through work, their argument is that we should all have the freedom to find work we find meaningful and fulfilling.

The path of least resistance

So is the person in the big red maple leaf being exploited or are they being empowered?

A mainstay of market economists is to present tough personal economic choices as a window into freedom, and it’s easier to go along with this interpretation than with the Marxist call of revolution and abolition of private property.

It’s no wonder then that we’ve become stuck with a moral feeling of unease whenever we come across those we view as less fortunate than us as we try to reconcile the harsh reality of market economics with our own beliefs of justice and rights.