neurotaylor

Work? What a silly idea

A study making headlines today in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology suggests that having a mentally demanding job before you retire is associated (in about 4000 Americans) with “higher levels of cognitive functioning before retirement, and a slower rate of cognitive decline after retirement”. Use it or lose it, in short.

And who wants to lose it? A retirement spent blowing the kids’ inheritance on having fun is one thing; a retirement blighted by stroke or dementia is quite another.

A letter to my local paper last week, meanwhile, remarked on the way we insist on people ‘finding jobs’, even as companies increasingly use technology to replace them. Or to shift the work elsewhere: the forms which would once have been filled by a secretary are often now completed by customers, online.

Which got me thinking — as I and many before me have thought — about work and the way we organise it.

Frankly, it’s rather silly. The timing’s inept, the concept old-fashioned, and the execution often cruel. For much of history this hasn’t mattered, as there’s been plenty of work to go around; also many people didn’t live long enough to worry about retirement. But things are changing, as the available labour shrinks. And not only shrinks, but shifts towards two extremes: the much-puffed ‘knowledge economy’, and the rest.

• ‘high-end’ jobs pay relatively well and demand a lot of skills and brainpower (e.g. university teachers and researchers). They also have high workloads and long hours;
• more manual jobs, which we can’t yet replace with technology, are typically much lower-paid, despite the fact that it’s hard to see how caring for the sick and elderly is less important than teaching kids why Hamlet, or quantum mechanics, matters. Of course, you don’t need extensive training to be a carer.

(We might infer that high pay is perhaps a reward for time invested in previous study? — except that investment bankers can earn far, far more than university lecturers. Is it then a reward for effort, or physical labour? Tell that to a farmer. For danger? Ask a fireman. For being brilliant and/or irreplaceable? That’s what the most highly-paid often seem to be saying, but there’s very little evidence that they’re right.)

There’s less work to go round, especially for those without the best qualifications. And what work there is doesn’t always pay enough to live on. The private sector is on a win-win here. They can get away with paying low wages because the state will fill the gap. They can hike rents, or drive up house prices, because that’s ‘the free market’. They can make profits by pushing their costs onto others, and still whinge about the tax they have to pay — when much of that tax goes on payments that wouldn’t be needed if they weren’t so utterly focused on making money.

In Britain, we hark back to the days when great companies built houses for their workers, or gave their kids schools. That kind of philanthropy may still go on, but we don’t hear much about it. Instead we hear a lot about companies who seem to live by the ancient Roman principle: “homo homini lupus” (“Man is a wolf to man.”) And they have the cheek to complain about government ‘red tape’! Guys, if you behaved better we wouldn’t need to impose the regulation on you — and on everyone else.

As work becomes scarcer, the rhetoric of its desirability intensifies. You’d think humans lived entirely and only to work. The unemployed are stigmatised, their benefits decried (yet the far more expensive pensions of the elderly are OK, because they earned their rewards). Kids are so indoctrinated with the need to find a job that they spend much of their childhood cramming, agonising over exams, struggling with homework, knowing they have to achieve — at a time when they’re dealing with the massive social pressures of growing up. Small wonder some drop out. People who can’t work feel dreadful guilt. Some who lose their jobs are driven to suicide.

There’s something pitiful about a first-year university English Literature student distraught because she’s “wasted time” reading Wuthering Heights when it wasn’t on her course. Or a seventeen-year-old whose only idea about all the cultural riches available to them is how to get work that will pay them enough to buy lots of stuff. Come to that, there’s something pitiful about a middle-aged adult lying awake at night worrying about how they’ll cope with both a sick parent and the demands of running their own household, while working all the hours their job demands. And there’s certainly much to be pitied in the lonely senior, deprived by retirement of company and stimulation, or the hard-working tax-payer who, as they reach retirement, is diagnosed with some appalling illness, like dementia.

Why do we do it this way? It’s bad for our brains, our health and our happiness. At the time of life when we are most able to enjoy ourselves, some of us are working ridiculous hours while others face empty days. Women lose out if they have kids, especially if they choose not to deposit the sprogs in childcare. Some people aren’t paid enough to live on; others earn far more than any human being could reasonably need. Then we reach retirement age, and suddenly that’s it: we’re pensioned off, our productive days over. Yet creativity doesn’t cut out at sixty-five, nor intelligence shrivel at seventy. A man who turns 65 in the UK can expect to live a further 17.8 years, a woman 20.4 years, according to the Office for National Statistics. That’s a lot of years to write off, especially with an ageing population.

There are many ways in which we could change this mess. Most of them are extremely unlikely to happen, not least because the mess didn’t come about by accident. It suits the people in charge, insofar as anyone’s in charge. Yet it may be worth stating some options anyway, if only because they’re far too radical for serious politics and so aren’t often heard. (I’m not a politician, so I don’t need to be serious.)

• Make the private sector pay its way. Rent caps (why should taxpayers spend masses on housing benefits so that landlords can get rich?). Tackling tax evasion and business subsidies. Redistribution: in the UK this year, a few lucky bankers collected over £5 million each from Barclays Bank. Why are they worth 50 times what we pay our most senior nursing directors, let alone frontline nurses?

• Encourage job-sharing, volunteering, hobbies and part-time work. Make it acceptable for people of both sexes to take career breaks in midlife. Pay parents better: bringing up kids is hard work. Defusing the social pressures around work and worklessness with clear financial incentives would do wonders for the nation’s health bill, apart from its other benefits.

• Rethink education. Currently it’s mostly stuffed into our youngest years, and some of it’s pretty irrelevant to most adults. It should be lifelong, as much a part of our routine as running a bank account. That old canard about brain development ceasing around 18 is nonsense.

• A living wage and/or minimum income guarantee (discussed here in the US context). Many people who’d like to volunteer can’t afford to; many who can afford to can’t spare the time. Making sure that everyone has a minimum guaranteed income to live on would help with at least the first of these problems, as well as reducing the devastating costs of stress-induced mental illnesses. It would also save on the gigantic benefits bill, not least because it would be a good deal simpler to administer than current systems.

• High-end jobs like running a university, company or bank may be extremely hard and stressful, but the work itself is not intrinsically unpleasant or dangerous (except insofar as the sedentary lifestyle brings health risks). Jobs which are unpleasant and dangerous should be paid more, or workers given a tax break, to express the nation’s gratitude that we don’t have to do this stuff. And if that study I mentioned is correct, perhaps we should be targeting the financial rewards towards encouraging workers to continue their education.

• Abolish retirement except on health grounds. If work — in moderation — is so good for us, we shouldn’t be driving people away from it. If there’s less work to go round, we need to be more creative in how we organise it — because there’s plenty to do; it’s just that much of it isn’t currently paid work. Making high-end jobs less demanding and low-end work more interesting, and giving people more life space to do unpaid work, would make retirement look less attractive, as well as providing benefits for workers and society.

Work is bound up with many half-acknowledged ideas: about fairness and reciprocity, status and identity. While there was plenty of it, there wasn’t much need to examine its rationales, and how deep-seated feelings and ways of thinking affect them. But work is changing, and we need to change our ideas about work.