The Shoestring Initiative, founded by Elaine J Laberge a PhD Candidate from a poverty-class heritage, is a grassroots solidarity movement creating communities of mentorship, belonging, support, intercultural connectedness, and advocacy for Canadian university students from a poverty-class heritage. This webinar is part of the String it Together: Finding Togetherness on the Education Digi-scape series. Webinar recordings of past webinars are posted on the site. For more information, contact Elaine @ elaberge@uvic.ca.
Webinar recording: Youtube link https://youtu.be/fzrKxmx7NkY
In 2002 Sayer wrote, “Recent research on class reveals that, notwithstanding the desertion of class in some parts of the social sciences, it continues to figure centrally in people’s lives, especially for those who, as Beverley Skeggs so pointedly puts it, lack the privilege to be able to ignore it (Skeggs, 1997).” (https://www.socresonline.org.uk/7/3/sayer.html)
Twenty years later, COVID-19 has laid bare the gaping social class inequalities and inequities in societies. Yet, in colonized countries such as Canada, our social problems are still seen through the flimsy myth of the classless society veil. Andrew Sayer, a prolific teacher and writer about social class will discuss:
- What is class?: dealing with different concepts of class (horses for courses?) If class is the answer, what’s the question?
- Class on different levels: structural, institutional, culture and discourse, habitus and identity.
- Don’t forget the upper class.
- What about intersectionality?
- Why class matters.
Andrew Sayer, Professor Emeritus, Lancaster University, UK
I am Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy at Lancaster University UK. I work mainly on inequality and related issues, adopting a post-disciplinary approach that often brings social science into dialogue with philosophy. I have also written extensively on the philosophy of social science and understanding ethics in everyday life. The latter includes developing the concept of moral economy for social science. My main works on inequality are The Moral Significance of Class (2005, Cambridge UP) and Why We Can’t Afford the Rich (2014, Policy Press, Bristol). Although I have now retired to spend more time with friends, walking, cycling and making music (pandemic permitting), I still also write on political economy and social theory. See: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/people/andrew-sayer
Writings by Andrew Sayer
https://www.socresonline.org.uk/7/3/sayer.html
‘The Injustice of Unequal Work’
Andrew Sayer, July 2009, published in Soundings, 43, pp102-113
Most of what has been written about economic justice, equality and fairness deals with what people get – with distributive justice. But in everyday life, people are also concerned with what they are allowed or expected to contribute. Thus, arguments about fairness within households are often not about the amounts of resources that the individual members get, but about their contributions to the running of the household. In particular, arguments about the gender division of labour within the household are about the quantity and quality of the domestic work that men and women do. Men not only tend to do less, but tend to reserve for themselves the more interesting and rewarding kinds of work. Similarly, arguments within work teams are often not so much about what each team member gets in terms of pay, but what she contributes; is everyone ‘pulling their weight’, or are some ‘free-riding’ on the work of others?. There might also be objections if some team members hogged all the nice, interesting tasks, leaving the more tedious or unpleasant ones to others.
These are arguments about economic justice, but as Paul Gomberg puts it in his book How to Make Opportunity Equal, they are about ‘contributive justice’, not distributive justice.[i] What we are allowed to contribute, particularly in terms of work, is at least as important as what we get, because the kind of work that we do has such a fundamental effect on the kinds of people we become, and on the quality of our lives. Thus, part of the argument against the gender division of labour in the household and in the labour market was that the restriction of women to low quality work prevented them from realising their potential. Inspired by the work of Gomberg and others, developing ideas that go back to Marx and Aristotle, I want to argue that the familiar concerns about contributive justice that we associate with households or work teams should be generalised to the level of society as a whole. Unless we do this we won’t fully grasp the causes of class inequalities and the damage that they do to people.
Work may often be a burden and literally ‘mind-dulling’, but some kinds of work, in appropriate conditions, can be a source of meaning, development and fulfilment – a good or benefit in their own right. Those who do such work also tend to get recognition from others, providing them with a source of self-esteem in addition to that deriving from doing the work itself. There are many components to good work – interest, variety, complexity, being able to use skill and exercise control and discretion, being trusted and treated with respect, freedom from health hazards, sociability, and so on. These things don’t always go together – for example, a highly skilled job may lack opportunities for sociability – but for the purpose of my argument here, it won’t make any difference if we lump these qualities together and simply distinguish between ‘good’ or ‘superior’ and ‘bad’ or ‘inferior’ jobs.
The Unequal Division of Labour
The kind of work that people do depends on the opportunities provided by the wider society, particularly by the formal economy. Gomberg’s key point is that as long as the more satisfying kinds of work are concentrated into a subset of jobs, rather than shared out among all jobs, then many workers will be denied the chance to have meaningful work and the recognition that goes with it.
Often the division of labour between good and poor quality jobs is defended on the grounds that it is the most economically efficient way of doing things. However, these defences typically lump together two kinds of division of labour – a division between different tasks within a given process, and a division between different workers, whereby each worker is limited to a single or very small number of tasks – which we might term an unequal division of labour. The former does not in fact entail the latter, and through various forms of rotation and sharing of attractive and unattractive tasks within a given process, more workers can avoid being restricted to poor quality work.[ii] This would also give work a more cooperative character, in that individual workers would come to understand more about what their workmates do – because they would take turns at doing the same work.
But not many people are bothered about the unequal division of labour in society. We tend to take it for granted. In large organizations, workers in a particular occupation might be upset if a few members of their own rank were given much more pleasant and interesting work than others, but it is less likely to bother them that other occupations are more or less interesting or otherwise desirable than their own. Take the example of cleaning. This is a necessary part of most kinds of work. When we’ve finished a task, there’s usually some clearing up to be done, and in many spheres of life those who made the mess would be expected to clear it up (other things being equal), indeed it would be seen as unreasonable to expect anyone else to do it. (Of course, in many situations gender norms result in women cleaning up after men, but the feminist critique of gender inequality can appeal to this argument that those who create mess should clear it up.) However, in the formal economy, it is common for this to be left to specialist cleaners. At my own workplace, a university, lecturers are now expected to empty their own waste bins instead of having a cleaner to do it. I don’t mind doing this provided my colleagues also have to do it: I would feel unfairly treated if I were the only lecturer who had to do it. But before this arrangement was introduced I rarely questioned the existence of a separate occupation of cleaners, most of whose work consisted of emptying other people’s bins. (It is less irksome to empty your own bin than to have to empty many other people’s; in the former case you are aware that you were responsible for the waste, you know from what activities the waste was created, so the task is more meaningful.)
This shows how the reference groups in which we compare our lot with that of others and think about contributive justice are already set by the unequal division of labour itself. The parochial character of our concerns about contributive justice in turn enables this division of labour to be normalized, and indeed naturalized. Thus, skilled and unskilled workers seem like members of separate castes; they do not even see their contributions as comparable. This is itself a common effect of an unequal division of labour.
As regards the economy as a whole, it may seem hopelessly idealistic to argue that good and bad quality work should be equally shared, and it is easy to assume that the differences in the quality of work that people do simply reflect differences in ability and effort, or are a function of the pursuit of economic efficiency, from which supposedly, all benefit. In these ways, while we often hold strong views about contributive justice in some limited spheres, like work teams or the home, there is little concern about it in the economy as a whole. Arrangements which in one sphere seem unjust are accepted as fair in another sphere.
In 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, having analysed the division of labour in the pin factory, commented:
“The man whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”[iii]
Smith believed that the effects of this deskilled, repetitive work would spill over into life outside work, stunting the ability of workers in such jobs to participate in the life of the community. In his book The Moral Economy of Labor, James Murphy cites empirical research on the relation between the intellectual capacities of workers and the cognitive complexity of the work they do, which shows that over a ten year period the cognitive capacities of workers doing complex jobs developed, while those of workers doing simple and repetitive work deteriorated. Further, as Smith feared, there is evidence that “Workers in mindless jobs not only undermine their capacity for the enjoyment of complex activities at work but also their capacity for the enjoyment of complex activities during leisure.”[iv] As Murphy adds, while workers are increasingly protected from harm to their physical capacities, they are not protected from harm to their mental capacities.
Like Marx and Aristotle before him, Murphy argues that “What gives skilled work its dignity . . . is that a worker first constructs in thought what he [sic] then embodies in matter; conversely, what makes unskilled work sordid is that one man executes the thought of another.”[v] This implies that for work to be a source of well-being, planning and execution of tasks should not be split between different individuals. This in no way implies abolition of all divisions of labour, merely those kinds which deny some workers significant discretion and control over what they do and how they do it. Recombining conception and execution does not require abolishing distinctions between quite different kinds of work, such as health services, the internet, tourism or food processing; rather it requires abolishing or reducing the division between planning and execution, and interesting and boring work within particular sectors or organisations. Individuals don’t have simultaneously to be a doctor, web designer, tourist agent, or baker (to update Marx’s model of the unalienated worker), but within any one of those sectors, each job could include a mix of tasks with different qualities.
Gomberg argues that work projects – like producing and distributing tomorrow’s newspaper – tend to have a shape and unity to them. They may comprise many different tasks, each of which differs in its qualities, in the skills and effort it requires, and the interest or tedium it tends to generate, but the meaningfulness of any task depends not only on these qualities but on their having an intelligible connection to the larger project to which they belong. Thus, filing is one of the more routine and uninteresting aspects of office work, but if the filer also does more interesting tasks on that the larger project to which it belongs, then her work as a whole becomes more meaningful.
Gomberg starts from debates about equality of opportunity. He argues that if the good kinds of work are concentrated into particular jobs, rather than shared out among workers, there cannot be full equality of opportunity, merely ‘competitive equality of opportunity’. Even if job seekers could compete on equal terms for the good jobs, then no matter how hard they strove for them, only a subset of them could get them. Those who were successful would be so at the expense of others, indeed under these conditions it is in the interest of any particular job seeker that others fail to find high quality employment. This is commonly justified by arguing that because success in getting a good job and upward social mobility are possible for some individuals, success must be possible for all individuals simultaneously. This fallacy – a fallacy of composition, as logicians call it – is an important component of capitalist ideology; it’s central to the so-called ‘American Dream’ and a favourite of New Labour.
Writing in a US context, Gomberg claims that the education system is adjusted to this situation, and is organised to prepare a significant proportion of children only for a life of routine labour. From the narrow point of view of minimising the economic cost of education and training, this makes sense; it is a waste of resources to train 100 people for 40 skilled posts. Of course, we may want to argue that education should be for life, not just employment, but in the context of an unequal division of labour, this goal is bound to appear as a luxury. From the point of view of workers, many might reasonably consider it not worth the effort of pursuing good quality jobs. Gomberg argues that there can only be equality of opportunity in a meaningful sense if opportunities for good quality work are not scarce, and this can only be the case if as far as possible, good work is shared out among workers – which of course implies, that inferior work should be shared out too. As he points out, this is still compatible with insisting that successful applicants for jobs have to be appropriately qualified, in the same way that while there is no restriction on the number of driving licenses issued, only those who pass their driving test are entitled to them.
Objections and responses
All very well, but still all very idealistic, you may say. Surely it’s not possible let alone desirable to share out different quality work like this? Isn’t an unequal division of labour inevitable? Let’s consider some likely objections.
1. The efficiency/cost arguments. The usual justification for unequal divisions of labour argues that it is more efficient, not only to separate out tasks, but to make each one the specialism of an individual worker. Supposedly, everyone benefits from the efficiency gains, particularly where the product or service is a uniform one that can be produced in volume. It is seen as more efficient to do this. Rotation of workers across tasks, by contrast, allegedly wastes time in moving workers between them and increases set-up time. Secondly, where complex work is needed, training is required, which of course is costly. An unequal social division of labour means that fewer people have to be trained than would be necessary if complex and simple work were shared more widely among workers. Thirdly, once such a division of labour is established, employers become more dependent on the skilled workers than on unskilled workers, as the former are harder to replace than the latter. Since the price they have to pay for skilled workers tends to be higher, employers can save money by deepening the unequal division of labour to ensure that skilled workers do not do any tasks that can be done by less skilled, lower paid workers, and concentrate purely on what only they can do. Allegedly, this is why the unequal division of labour developed, and this serves as its justification.
2. Doubts about feasibility for highly specialised work. In some cases it may be infeasible to rotate workers across tasks involving very different levels of skills. Some tasks require the full-time commitment of individuals over many years if they are to be performed competently. Thus, while it would be possible for brain surgeons to do cleaning work in their hospitals, say for one day per month, it would not be possible for other workers who had not undergone lengthy training to do brain surgery.
3. Differences in workers’ abilities. The unequal division of labour is often claimed to reflect the different abilities and capacities of workers. In designing jobs, employers have to respond to the range of skills that are available. Many workers are allegedly only capable of routine labour.
How might we answer these objections?
First, the efficiency/cost argument was at least partly undermined, in the 1970s and 80s, by the discovery that Taylorist and Fordist forms of work organization, which took this kind of division of labour to extremes, failed to generate the hoped-for efficiency gains. This was because of communication and quality control problems brought about by the restriction of workers to single tasks. These forms of organisation also tended to generate absenteeism and worker resistance. In many countries, various alternative forms of job design were tried out to increase task sharing and team work, such as the Volvo experiments. Although these were not always successful, they at least weaken the efficiency argument.
A further response could be borrowed from the US sociologist, Charles Tilly in his book Durable Inequality. He argues that the unequal division of labour is partly a product of the hoarding of opportunities and resources by powerful groups of workers, rather than simply an outcome of the pursuit of efficiency and lower training and labour costs. These strategies are evident in industrial relations, in job demarcation disputes, and in struggles to construct professions and get recognition for them. He claims that the strategies are most effective where the dominant groups construct categorical inequalities between themselves and the subordinate, such as manager and worker, skilled and unskilled, or occupational distinctions. Where there are merely gradients, rather than clear boundaries between groups with different power, then the dominant are more susceptible to challenge. Thus, the categorical distinction between doctor and nurse is itself important for enabling doctors to hoard the most satisfying work and offload the less interesting work. Further, if the categories are widely adopted, they are likely to be naturalised, as people adjust to them and frame their expectations in terms of them. Thus the unequal division of labour is not purely the consequence of its superiority in terms of efficiency but a product of power differences.[vi]
What about the feasibility objection? I think it has to be partly conceded in the case of the most highly skilled kinds of work. Excellence in such activities is thus often a product of one-sided development of individuals, though we may consider this a price worth paying for their achievements. But even these kinds of work have their more routine elements – in the case of highly skilled work, these might include dealing with routine correspondence and maintenance, keeping records, and numerous other minor administrative tasks. Although less interesting than the more skilled tasks, they are necessary parts of the overall work, and they therefore derive some meaning from this. By contrast, doing other people’s chores for them so they can concentrate on tasks that make more use of their skills would be more tedious and meaningless. For the sake of contributive justice these more mundane and simple tasks should not be taken off the skilled workers and given to others who already have their own chores to do. Further, workers performing elite roles might be required to do occasional routine work. (We might argue that it would be ‘good for their souls’ and prevent them becoming arrogant and unappreciative of the privilege of being allowed to be excused the greater part of the routine work). This would also free up others to do some more complex or pleasant work, even if it is not of the expert kind, and unleash some of their potential. So while there is some force in the objection, it does not justify maintaining the unequal division of labour where it is feasible to reduce it.
Even if we accept some of the efficiency/cost and feasibility objections, it may be argued that there are nevertheless overriding considerations that outweigh these, for they take no account of the human consequences in terms of workers’ well-being and contributive justice. Is it ‘efficient’ – or socially just – to restrict the development of large numbers of individuals’ skills by confining them to routine work? Is it fair to deny them the satisfaction and recognition that doing complex work can bring and the self-esteem that tends to follow from that? In case that sounds too idealistic, remember that the idea of contributive justice is not something dreamed up in the philosopher’s study, but is evident in everyday arguments in households and work teams.
The most popular defence of an unequal division of labour argues that it’s an inevitable product of inequalities in people’s abilities and intelligence. But while there are some such differences, the major differences are – as Adam Smith saw – more a product than a cause of the unequal division of labour. The differences are largely a product of socialisation into a highly unequal society, in which the advantages and disadvantages of one generation are passed on to the next. Research by Leon Feinstein on children’s cognitive capacities shows that these develop more slowly in low social class children than high social class children, so that by 120 months, the brightest of low social class children at 22 months are overtaken by the weakest of high social class children at 22 months.[vii] The score at 22 months predicts educational qualifications at age 26 and is related to family background. The children of educated or wealthy parents who scored poorly in the early tests had a tendency to catch up; whereas children of worse-off parents who scored poorly were extremely unlikely to catch up. Feinstein found no evidence that entry into schooling reverses this pattern. Not surprisingly, social mobility in all major capitalist countries is low.[viii] While this does not contradict the claim that different qualities of work have a long term effect on individuals’ cognitive abilities, much of the development of differences in ability and skills takes place long before individuals reach the labour market.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, the late French sociologist, as we grow up in a particular social setting we tend to acquire a set of dispositions and reflexes that are attuned to the main relationships and situations we experience, and a set of expectations and aspirations that are adjusted to them. Thus someone who is born into a low income, low status family, is likely to acquire a set of dispositions attuned to that position, a ‘feel for the game’ – accustomed to economic insecurity and not being valued by those in more advantages positions, used to associating with people with little power, used to doing work that involves little autonomy and scope for decision-making. On the other hand, someone born into a high income, highly educated, high status family gains a set of dispositions that attune them to their position in the social field – in particular an ease that derives from economic security, and a sense of entitlement and confidence that they are the rightful inheritors of the most favoured positions, in which they will have the power to take decisions affecting others, and be served by them, and listened to. Although these dispositions can be changed, it’s a difficult, slow process requiring repeated practice at new behaviours. Not surprisingly, where people of working class origin do make it into ‘good’ jobs, they often say they never quite feel they belong.[ix]
The unequal division of labour has an indirect effect on the next generation’s expectations by shaping the dispositions and circumstances of their parents. Through its influence on the distribution of abilities and skills, the unequal division of labour produces effects which appear to legitimise it. Working class lives, characterized by lack of power, are prefigured in the relatively authoritarian character of much working class childrearing, which tends to set clear disciplinary limits without defending them through elaborate justifications – theirs is not to reason why. Children are also expected to amuse themselves, rather than interact with adults. By contrast, middle class parenting places great stress on reasoning, on education and self-development, and on talking to adults.[x] These prefigure lives of working in occupations where they are allowed to use these reasoning powers and take decisions, and where they can deal with professionals and managers as equals. I am aware that there is a common well-meaning kind of egalitarianism on the Left that doesn’t want to acknowledge these claims (even though empirical research supports them) but such wishful thinking leads to an underestimation of the damage that class inequalities do.
Even if we still find the idea of an equal division of labour too idealistic, it doesn’t invalidate the argument that the unequal division of labour is a key cause of class inequality in our society. It’s not the only cause but it often gets overlooked because it’s so easy to regard it as simply natural.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs . . . ?
While the Marxian slogan is widely known, it is generally the second distributional side of the formula that gets the attention, not the first, ‘contributional’ side. ‘From each according to their ability’ implies an expectation to contribute to the extent that one can, and not to free-ride on the work of others unless there are reasonable grounds for doing so in terms of one’s ability to contribute. It acknowledges not only inequalities in individuals’ physical and mental abilities to contribute but asymmetries in terms of their dependence on others. Thus, children’s free-riding on the labour of adults is warranted, and the fit and mature are expected to contribute more than the young, the frail or the infirm. (Other things being equal, it is the formula most likely to be adopted in a democratically-run household.) However, we need to consider not only how much work people should be expected to do, as Marx’s slogan implied, but also the quality of the work they are allowed to do. As we have seen, an unequal division of labour of the kind that has developed in modern societies makes the contributive principle of each according to their ability impossible to achieve, and tends to produce an adjustment of abilities to that division. In turn, it encourages mis-placed self-congratulation in the fortunate, and resignation or resentment in the less fortunate.
Conclusions
Thinking about the contributive injustice produced by the unequal division of labour helps us understand the injustice of class, as well as of gender inequalities; it is not only unequal distribution that matters, but inequalities in the availability of good quality work. The flip-side of sharing complex, interesting, rewarding tasks is, of course, that we share routine, tedious and unfulfilling tasks as well. An unequal division of labour limits what some people can do and hence the extent to which they can develop their own abilities and find fulfilment, respect and self-esteem. Insofar as it indirectly shapes the contexts in which the next generation is brought up, it also tends to produce inequalities in their aspirations and abilities which appear to legitimise the very same unequal division of labour that gives rise to contributive injustice. Merely getting rid of discrimination against particular groups of workers will not produce genuine equality of opportunity, just more diverse groups of winners and losers. Nor will increasing access to education produce equality, for it just intensifies competition for existing jobs. Desirable though these two things are, they don’t tackle a key source of structural inequality. The fact that it’s hard to imagine modern life without an unequal division of labour doesn’t mean that it isn’t a major source of injustice.
[i] Paul Gomberg, How to Make Opportunity Equal: Race and Contributive Justice, Blackwell, 2007
[ii] James B. Murphy, The Moral Economy of Labor, New Haven, Yale. 1993
[iii] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2.V.I., art.2, pp.302-3. 1776[1976]
[iv] Murphy, 1993, op.cit. p. 7n19.
[v] Murphy, 1993, ibid. p.8.
[vi] Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality: University of California, 1998
[vii] Leon Feinstein, Inequality in the early cognitive development of British children in the 1970 cohort. Economica, Vol. 70, pp. 73-97, 2003
[viii] Stephen Aldridge, Life Chances and Social Mobility, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Cabinet Office 2004; Robert Erikson, Robert and John H.Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: a Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992
[ix] Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility, Polity, 1996; Andrew Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class, Cambridge University Press, 2005
[x] Annette Lareau Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life, University of California Press, 2003; Valerie Walkerdine and Helen Lucey Democracy in the Kitchen, Virago, 1989
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