Meaningful Work and Workplace Democracy

In advanced industrialised societies, work occupies a peculiarly ambivalent position — simultaneously valued for providing the means for self- realisation and disvalued for being burdensome and compulsory. Shcrshow (2005) describes work as consisting of a ‘double necessity’, whereby ‘we see ourselves both as working to live and as living to work’ (ibid: 13, original emphasis). On the one hand, work is a source of expressive human action, one of ‘the hopes of civilisation’ (Morris, 1993 [1890]), fulfilled in a correctly ordered society which enables all persons to do decent, humane and dignified work. On the other hand, work is an experience of oppressive degradation, which must be minimised, if not eliminated, since the worker deprived of worthwhile activities ‘generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’ (Smith, 1999 [17761), resulting in him or her becoming ‘a crippled monstrosity’ (Marx, 1978 [1867]). We can be in no doubt that our survival and our ability to flourish depend upon our being able to work together to produce the material and social goods which satisfy individual and collective human needs. But acknowledging that work is unavoidable for most people leaves us with limited resources for investigating whether work is simply what is necessary to sustain life, or whether it can add to the experience of a full and meaningful human existence.

I begin by claiming that the widespread institution of meaningful work is a proper moral and political project, which is attentive to contemporary concerns for the nature and organisation of work.1 My reasons for making meaningful work for all a political project is grounded in a normative argument that being able to experience one’s life as meaningful is a fundamental human need, which, under present economic arrangements, is extremely difficult for most people to satisfy if their work lacks the structure for meaningfulness. I shall argue that meaningful work is a fundamental human need because it satisfies our inescapable interests in being able to experience the constitutive values of autonomy, freedom, and dignity. By requiring social organisation to ensure that all work is structured for meaningfulness, I distinguish my approach from liberal political theorists, for whom meaningful work, whilst an important ideal, is an individual preference which may or may not be expressed in any particular conception of the good life, and thus cannot be the legitimate target of state intervention without coming into conflict with the principle of liberal neutrality. Instead, I propose that meaningful work is a fundamental human need within a liberal perfectionist framework (cf. Roessler, 2012).

Serious political attention to the organisation and content, of work is lacking. To remedy this neglect, my objective is to outline the normative content of a political and social agenda which aims at proliferating the experience of meaningfulness in all kinds of work, where meaning- fulness is structured by the bipartite value of meaningfulness. To that end, I identify the importance of each person being able to engage in the creation and maintenance of a repertoire of positive meanings, from which they draw to create the practical identities giving them a sense that their lives are worth living. Widespread participation in positive value generation requires an opportunity structure which fosters the relevant capability formation and status equality⁷ through institutional arrangements for democratic participation. Furthermore, positive value generation depends upon our being able to distinguish between more or less meaningful work, for which we require a critical conception of meaningful work constituted by a standpoint from where we can reflect and make judgements between different kinds of meanings and values. In order to provide the tools for evaluative meaning-making in the content of work, 1 draw upon critical social theory to specify a positive critical conception of meaningful work which distinguishes between meaningful and non-meaningful work from the standpoint of an ethic of care.

Never has work appeared to be so divided, intense, separated from our personal control and divorced from our sense of who we are. From Biauners (1964) industrial blue collar workers labouring under changes to the division of labour as a consequence of automation to the ‘managed hearts’ of Hochschild’s (1983) airline attendants, the complaint is that the experience of work has been systematically deskilled and subjectified by a capitalist project which aims to increase profit by appropriating and controlling workers’ agency in the exercise of their skills and the formation of their identities. The critique that contemporary conditions of work are thoroughly alienating opposes deskiiled and subjectified work to the mastery and secure identity of craft work, but, I shall argue, this dualism presents a narrative of work as irretrievably degraded which is not consistent with work as it is experienced by workers. I shall show the limits to the opposition between alienated work and craft work by describing a floor-level of irreducible autonomy in every act of work, which reveals that there is no completely alienated work from which the possibility of autonomous action has been eliminated. I shall propose that the identification of a level of irreducible autonomy enables us to conceptualise personal autonomy in work as fundamentally relational, and the pre-condition for the exercise of political autonomy.

I argue that the proliferation of meaningful work requires the institution of a system of workplace democracy with the dimensions of democratic authority and agonistic participatory practices. In this chapter, I will explore the first dimension of democratic authority, arguing for a system grounded in the value of freedom as non- domination.

As human beings, we are ‘obligatorily gregarious’ (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008: 52), implying that we cannot evade our physical, social, and emotional inter-dependences, from which we derive many of our most important relationships, projects, and sources of meaning. To be inescapably social means that, although we are separate individuals, we are not sovereign. We do not pick and choose our life plans from social materials which exist apart from us — instead, we are already constituted by our relations to others with whom we co-produce and co-sustain the meanings, norms, and values of our intersubjective existence. This means that to experience our lives as meaningful, we require positive self-relation s of self-respect and self-esteem, which are intersubjectively shaped by our relations to others. But realising positive self-relations becomes problematic when our relations to others are such that our valued identifications are misrecognised, or when institutional norms and values make it difficult to achieve a sense of being a valued person, in the contemporary work of social cooperation, stable positive self- relations are increasingly difficult to experience, making the task of forming a practical self-identity a demanding project. I evaluate the limitations of the concept of self-respect in Rawlsian justice, and of the concept of self-esteem in Honneth’ theory of social recognition, both of which mediate recognition through individual achievement.

In Chapter 4, I dealt with the dimension of democratic authority at the level of the organisation necessary for a system of workplace democracy to proliferate meaningful work. In this chapter, I turn to agonistic democratic practices at the level of the task. Despite an extensive literature on economic democracy (DabI, 1985; Albert & Hahnel, 2002; Boatright, 2004; Blumberg, 1968; Cohen & Rogers, 1992; Cohen, 1989; Cohen & Rogers, 1992; Schweikart, 1980; Strauss, 2006; Williamson, 2004; Bowles & Gintis, 1993; Hirst, 1994)¹ much democratic theory uncritically assumes that the contemporary experience of work is inhospitable to the political mode of being, and therefore devoid of emancipatory potential.² Despite this, I have sought to theorise how the active agency of workers can never be entirely eliminated by subjectified and divided work practices, but is, instead, intersubjectively manifested through working with others and upon objects. Furthermore, this intersubjective action gives rise to interpretive differences which will remain as pre-polirical potentials unless revealed through expressive participatory practices. However, if participatory practices are to be generative of interpretive differences, and capable of mediating those differences into positive meanings, making them available for appropriation to the meaningfulness of people’ lives, then they must possess certain characteristics, I shall argue that these characteristics can be specified from an evaluation of agonistic democratic theory.

In structuring meaningful work using the bipartite value of meaning- fulness, I have drawn attention to how experiencing meaningfulness depends upon our being able to exercise the capabilities and status for meaningfulness, which are formed through our participation in action contexts with agonistic dimensions- By re-conceiving work in this way, we can begin to see the outlines of a programme of social and political action aimed at proliferating meaningfulness in the organisation of work. Of course, meaningful work has always existed, but in most societies it has been an ideal which aims at elite meaning or the maximal degree of meaningfulness for a few. However, a system which institutionalises elite meaning transgresses any scheme of justice which is concerned to meet fundamental human needs, including goods such as meaningful work. Hence, I argue that we should aim at egalitarian meaning or a satisficing level of meaningfulness for all. In this case, the goal is not to guarantee that everyone will find their lives to be actually meaningful, but to secure social arrangements that will provide the relevant capabilities for the functioning of meaningfulness, consistent with the demands of justice (Muirhead, 2004),

I have sought to identify the philosophical basis of a political agenda which attends to the importance of mcaningfulncss in work. In order to diversify and expand the range of work which is conducive to mean- ingfulness, I have argued for a set of institutional guarantees, including an entitlement to democratic participation in determining the purposes, means, and circumstances of the work one does through the Capability for Voice. “Moreover”, specifying institutional guarantees implies a public policy suite designed to secure meaningful work for all, including: a good work index; a basic income guarantee; an entitlement to individual capability development through institutional belonging; a regulatory framework establishing direct and representative employee voice, which includes the collective voice of union representation; an equal playing field for different organisational forms, such as mu tuais, cooperatives, and employee-owned enterprises-and a general dismantling of hierarchies or networks which foster the arbitrary use of power through non-democratic authority.