conditions of the ordinary working life grows with the growth of intelligence and sensibility among the working-classes.Under the older order, of accepted class distinctions and economic status, implicit obedience to the employer's will carried no conscious moral cost.A new sense of personal dignity and value has now arisen in the better educated grades of workers which interferes with arbitrary modes of discipline.When they are called upon to do work in a way which appears to them foolish, injurious, or inequitable, a sense of resentment is aroused which smoulders through the working week as a moral cost.With every widening of education there comes, moreover, a discontent not merely with the particular conditions of the labour, but with the whole system, or set of conditions, which addicts so large a proportion of their working hours and energies to the dull heavy task by which they earn their living.So too the narrow limitation in the choice of work which the local specialisation of industry involves, becomes a growing grievance.The 'conditions of labour' for themselves and others, taken as a whole, are realised as an invasion and a degradation of their humanity, offering neither stimulus nor opportunity for a man to throw 'himself' into his work.For the work only calls for a fragment of that 'self' and always the same fragment.
So it is true that not only is labour divided but the labourer.And it is manifest that, so far as his organic human nature is concerned, its unused portions are destined to idleness, atrophy, and decay.
This analysis of the conditions may seldom be fully realised in the consciousness of the worker.But education has gone far enough to make them real factors of working-class discontent.They constitute a large motive in the working-class movement which we may call the revolt of the producer against the excessive human costs of his production.
This is the great and serious indictment against the economy of division of labour.Associated with it is the charge that the worker in one of these routine subdivided processes has no appreciation of the utility or social meaning of his labour.He does not himself make anything that is an object of interest to him.His contribution to the long series of productive processes that go to turn out a commodity may be very valuable.But, as he cannot from his little angle perceive the cooperative unity of the productive series, it means nothing to his intelligence or heart.
So not only does the performance of his task afford him no satisfaction, but its end or object is a matter of indifference to him.There is this vital difference between the carpenter who makes a cupboard or a door, fits it into its place and sees that it is good, and the bricklayer's labourer who merely mixes mortar and carries bricks upon a hod.A man who is not interested in his work, and does not recognise in it either beauty or utility, is degraded by that work, whether he knows it or not.When he comes to a clear consciousness of that degradation, the spiritual cost is greatly enhanced.It is true that specialisation in labour is socially useful, and that, if that specialisation does not encroach too largely upon the energy and personality of the individual worker, he is not injured but helped by the contribution to social wealth which his special work enables him to make.Larger enlightenment as to the real meaning and value of his work, and the sense of social service which should follow, may indeed be expected to reduce considerably the irksomeness of its present incidence.
But it can do so only upon two conditions.In the first place, the duration and strain upon his physical and moral nature must be diminished.Secondly, the general conditions both of labour and of its remuneration must be such as to lead him to recognise that the discipline which it enjoins is conducive to a larger liberty, viz., that of willing cooperation with his fellows in the production of social welfare.As yet the attainment of these conditions has not kept pace with the new desires and aspirations which have grown so rapidly among the rank and file of workers in the advanced industrial countries.Hence a new burden of spiritual costs, expressing an increased divergence between conscious aspirations and the normal conditions of the worker's lot.The education of the town worker, the association with his fellows in large workshops, the life of the streets, the education of the school, the newspaper, the library, the club, have made him increasingly sensitive to the narrowness and degradation of excessive routine in joyless labour.
NOTES:
1.Cf.Goldmarck, Part II, pp.126.
2.Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Early Closing in Shops , 1901.
