The Crisis of Old Work

Why do we need an alternative to the job system? Why do we need “New Work”? One important answer is this: because “old work” is in crisis; because it is increasingly marked by deficiencies and abuses; because it suffers from many “illnesses” and in turn makes people ill. Frithjof Bergmann therefore calls his critique “a pathology of the job system”. What are these “illnesses”, or these “deficiencies and abuses”?

Joblessness
The most obvious deficiency is joblessness. It can happen to anyone – men and women, academics and craftspeople, old and young. Joblessness is not only a local, regional, or national phenomenon, but above all a global one. In view of global population growth and worldwide migration from the countryside into cities, the army of job seekers is growing without end. Labor is available in abundance.

At the same time, the job system is coming under pressure, because automation is receiving a tremendous push through digitalization: more and more human labor can be replaced by technological labor (machines, robots, automated systems, 3-D printers, and so on). This intensifies the chronic shortage of jobs.

Joblessness is often presented as the only deficiency of the job system, but it is by no means the only one. It is nothing other than the tip of the iceberg, most of which lies hidden below the surface.

Precarious Employment
The next serious abuse to name is precarious employment. These are poorly paid jobs that are easy to terminate and often limited in time. They also include agency work and temporary work, marginal employment, and in a broader sense business start-ups born out of necessity or embarrassment, from which people can barely make a living.

Precarious employment also includes those seemingly secure, permanent full-time jobs that are threatened by joblessness – whether through the globalization of work, the rationalization of work, or the restructuring of work, which often leads to staff reductions and outsourcing. For employees this means constant unrest and uncertainty about whether they will keep their jobs. This is currently visible in the discussion around Work 4.0, the “digitalization of the world of work”, where the assumption is that infinitely more jobs than before can be automated in the future. Frithjof Bergmann, incidentally, predicted this trend more than 30 years ago.

Overwork
Employees are working more and more overtime. In Germany alone, the number of overtime hours has now reached the billions. Mobile phones and laptops that people take home and carry everywhere mean that they are constantly reachable. They also blur the transitions between work and private life, meaning they are no longer as clearly separated as they once were.

Performance Pressure

The term must be taken quite precisely: we are speaking of performance pressure, not work pressure (just as we are no longer really a work society, but a performance society). We no longer pursue work; we deliver performance. How did this happen?

Work turns into performance when the aim is only to accomplish as much work as possible within a given unit of time (for example, eight hours a day). Performance is defined as a physical quantity – work divided by time. This ratio is constantly optimized through overtime, work intensification, and the acceleration of work processes. And the more it is optimized, the more we come under performance pressure.

One could also put it this way: the more we have to work, the more the idea of performance moves into the foreground. The more other aspects of work recede into the background. This idea of performance is omnipresent in the world of work and is not limited to human beings. To use a deliberately stark example: in agriculture, cows have long been expected to deliver more and more performance, meaning more and more milk. Increases of several hundred percent have occurred. Animals and humans alike suffer under performance pressure.

Closely connected with this is

Time Pressure

: the more performance has to be delivered in a given unit of time, the less time one has for each task. Take the example of a social worker in a youth welfare office: over the years, things have developed so that the social worker is expected to process more and more cases per day, leaving hardly any room to do justice to the individual case.

Pressure to Succeed

Success has become a decisive category: in society, in school, in parts of family life, and most of all in working life. Success is what counts. It is the altar to which people sacrifice and on which they are sacrificed. One problem with success is that it does not satisfy; it makes people hungry – hungry for more success. Goals, plan figures, expectations, and efficiency are constantly ratcheted upward. This creates pressure to succeed – and, incidentally, powerlessness, because success depends not only on one’s own effort but on many factors over which one has no influence.

Further Abuses in the Job System

• No prospects within the company
• incompetent superiors who lead to demotivation and inner resignation among employees (poor leadership style, lack of communication, no trust)
• bullying
• corporate cultures damaged by scandals (to name only companies such as Deutsche Bank, Bayer/Monsanto, or the VW Group shaken by Dieselgate)
• routine. On the one hand, routine allows us to do our work better and better, so it does not overwhelm us and we can carry it out “routinely”. On the other hand, routine leads to boredom, a lack of challenge, and a loss of imagination and creativity. Anyone who performs repetitive tasks for eight hours every day becomes passive.
• lack of room to shape one’s work
• unused potential that people want to realize but that the company does not call upon
• being caught in “working” and “consuming”, a cycle emptied of meaning
• other contents of life cannot be integrated sufficiently alongside the job, leading to conflicts in reconciling work and life – for example:
– reconciling family and work
– reconciling work and partnership
– reconciling work and caring for relatives
– reconciling work and voluntary engagement
• many people have to do work that is questionable, if not meaningless, and brings no real added value
• commuting: the number of commuters is constantly rising. From one city to another. From the countryside to the city. From east to west. Commuting costs time, nerves, and money.

The Job System Promises a Lot and Delivers Little:

• It promises professional identity and recognition, yet the “illnesses of the job system” make these impossible. Instead, insecurity, disappointment, inner resignation, the experience of replaceability, and fear for one’s job are the order of the day. Professional identity has already eroded in many cases.
• It promises full employment, but is characterized by the split between those who have a job and those who do not; those who have a secure and well-paid job and those who must make do with precarious employment.
• It promises general prosperity, yet increasingly deepens the gap between rich and poor (rich North – poor South; wealthy managers / moderately earning employees; people who own capital and multiply it while the income of those without means stagnates. A particular form of impoverishment arises through migration from countryside to city on a scale of millions. In the countryside, as a farmer, one could make a modest living through self-provisioning; now, as a migrant worker, one leads a precarious existence or ends up in the slums of the world, where one struggles to get by).

The Job System Entangles Itself in Contradictions:

• On the one hand, those who have a job work more and more; on the other hand, jobless people have nothing to do.
• On the one hand, meaningful work that needs to be done lies fallow; on the other hand, people who want to work lie fallow. Work and human beings do not come together.
• On the one hand, there are vacancies that cannot be filled; on the other hand, there are unemployed people looking for work and unable to find it.
• On the one hand, a great deal of “unnecessary”, “meaningless”, and “superfluous” work is done. Many jobs are degrading to human beings and their only added value consists in keeping people occupied so they have something to do and increasing the company’s profit. On the other hand, a great deal of meaningful, socially necessary work is waiting to be done.
• On the one hand, the job system is always marked by a shortage of jobs, so there are always jobless or underemployed people; on the other hand, the job system is incapable of organizing the infinite abundance of work that exists in itself. It is important to point this out: jobs are scarce, but work is not.

Let us draw a

conclusion:

The job system is haunted by “illnesses” from which many people suffer. Frithjof Bergmann calls the job itself a “mild illness”, meaning it does not kill us, but it constantly troubles us, makes us dissatisfied, drains us, takes our strength, exhausts and depresses us. In the long run, the job deforms and cripples us, so that not much of us as human beings remains when we retire. Like the anti-smoking campaign “Smoking endangers your health”, one would have to start a campaign saying: “The job endangers your health”.

Human beings have subordinated themselves to the job system. They serve it as a means for its purposes. The job system is not interested in them as human beings, in their real, deeper, most individual wishes, needs, gifts, and potentials. It has no interest in people developing through work into more self-confident, stronger, more independent, or more complete beings.

Human beings have made themselves dependent on the job system in many ways. Because this is so, and because we have no alternative work system, we need jobs or employment opportunities at any cost. In view of the fact that automation, digitalization, and the rationalization of work constantly destroy jobs, we absolutely need economic growth to compensate for the loss of jobs. We are therefore forced to depend on growth. Otherwise the number of unemployed people immediately shoots upward and leads to mass joblessness.

Finally, the question must be asked: what purpose does the prevailing job system actually serve? Does it not serve more than anything else:
• the social division between rich and poor, between job holders and the jobless?
• the enrichment of a few at the expense of many?
• the disciplining, control, subordination, dependency, and making-compliant of human beings?

Suppose Community Production were to prevail and the world’s population could be materially provided for by it sufficiently; suppose individually definable self-provisioning could be achieved with limited effort: the economy would no longer be an end in itself, but a means to an end. Concretely: its function would be to create the necessary condition for “free work”.