Scenario 1: Pete
At our church drop-in meal recently, one of our regular guests Pete* was telling me about how he lost his job. He was a lorry driver and loved the work until the company was taken over by a bigger firm.
In order to maximise profit, the new firm introduced a radically different shift pattern and demanded a lot more flexibility from the drivers. It meant it was far harder for employees to have any regular pattern to life and it was almost impossible to be committed to anything outside work.
Pete started to become stressed, isolated from friends and mental health problems began to plague him. He began to hate the job and ended up quitting.
Now Pete is on benefits. He misses work but the options for someone like him in his early 60s are thin. The system also gives him almost no incentives to work. As Pete said to me forlornly:
‘This is the reason why I now need to come to places like this’
Pete enjoys coming to the meal. ‘I like the atmos and the community – it’s good for me to come out and see people’ but I knew what he meant. It seems so wrong that someone with so much to give feels so discarded from the world of work.
Scenario 2: The Haynes family
The same week I visited a family of asylum seekers, the Haynes*, who had just been moved into our neighbourhood. They had been flagged up to our church via a Refugee Action group on Facebook because they knew no one in our area and had no access to any funds for the next 3 days.
We took them a £50 Tesco voucher from our church pastoral fund and Mrs Haynes invited us in. She told us that they had fled a Caribbean island due to being at risk of their lives. But they had been waiting for a decision in the asylum system for 9 years and in that whole time neither she or her husband were allowed to work.
Her husband had been an experienced electrician but she said that these 9 years of inactivity had destroyed his motivation and confidence. She said
‘We fled for our lives but actually our lives have been destroyed here. My husband is just a shadow of who he was.’
We talked and prayed with her and met her three daughters but her husband remained upstairs. Mrs Haynes desperation for his situation was palpable.
Again, it felt so wrong. How on earth can investigations take so long? The UK asylum system seems to be bureaucratic blend of injustice and incompetence. And for all this time, tax-payer’s money is wasted on rent and food vouchers while people with skills and ambition end up rotting in a hopelessness. It’s an appalling misuse of public money.
Scenario 3: Homeless hostels & supported housing
The denial of access to work is also a huge problem in the world of hostels and supported housing where many homeless people live. The high rents, mainly paid by Housing Benefit, mean that it almost impossible for many people to transition into paid employment.
Many of the large hostels in cities were originally established as low cost accommodation for working men. But they have become the opposite: expensive institutions full of people who are blocked from taking up work.
If they do want to take a job, many have to leave their accommodation. This is terrible because the transition into work is hard – its just the point when they need the most support.
The vested interests of Housing Associations, charities and landlords to charge high rents runs directly counter to the welfare of vulnerable people who are supposed to be being helped by this accommodation.
And this creates a vicious circle because the enforced boredom, low expectations and lack of purpose means that mental health declines and addictions take a stronger hold. As the late MP, Frank Field MP wrote, this kind of benefits system is
“a full frontal attack on a working class moral economy that believes in work, effort, savings and honesty”.
(The charity where I work, Hope into Action, has a Transition into Employment fund which gives bursaries to our tenants to make their rent more affordable at the point when they move into paid work).
Work humanises us
Paid work is a fundamental way that humans meet their needs. Work provides far more than just material resources. It provides relationships with workmates and colleagues. And it gives a sense of identity by providing meaning and purpose. In short, work humanises us.
But in each of these scenarios, the structures of the market, state and welfare systems are robbing people of the opportunity of fulfilling work. We must work to fight this dehumanising denial of work.
In his brilliant book Morality, the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks wrote:
‘When morality is outsourced to either the market or the state, society has no substance, only systems. And systems are not enough. The market and the state are about wealth and power, and they are hugely beneficial to the wealthy and powerful, but not always to the poor and powerless.’
* Names have been changed
- Reclaiming social justice from toxic identity politics
- ‘Grace, Truth & the Common Good’ – lecture in memory of Frank Field
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Tragic.
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Agreed
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your essay reminds me of this Labor Day reflection by Jim Farrell that I have always treasured reading on the American Labor Day
Labor Day by Prof. Jim Farrell
Most American holidays are holidays from work, and Labor Day is no exception. But Labor Day is also the holiday of work, the day on which Americans take off work to contemplate it. Today, in the workrooms of the magnificent (but wholly imaginary) American Studies Museum, Dr. America muses on the meanings of work in America today.
In American life, people spend more time at work than at any other activity except sleeping– if sleeping can be considered an activity. Given the centrality of work in our culture, you might expect that Americans would pay more attention to it. But Americans don’t think much of work, in either sense of that phrase. We don’t like work, and we don’t like thinking about it either. We prefer to concentrate on our leisure life, which is the compensation we get through the compensation we get for the job.
In America, actually, most of us are happy to have a job, which is a position for which we get paid. A job is a piece of work. In fact, in the 19th century, the term “job work” meant “piecework.” The word “job” comes from a Middle English word meaning lump, and is related to our word “gob.”
A job may give us gobs of money, but it doesn’t necessarily make meaning for us. In the 18th century, essayist Samuel Johnson defined a job as “petty, piddling work,” and for many of us, the definition still fits. That’s why the country music lyric sings so enthusiastically “Take this job and shove it.”
Better than a job is a career, which is the upward climb from job to job over time. A career is a person’s advancement within social boundaries, and its upward trajectory often leads to social and geographical mobility and the uprooting of communities. A “career culture” fosters ambitious, calculating individualists who want to get ahead–leaving the rest of us, by definition, behind. A career gives us something to talk about, but it doesn’t necessarily give us an occupation we can take pride in. At the end of the week, we still say, in America’s great interdenominational prayer, “Thank God it’s Friday.” We don’t pray a similar prayer on Monday, when we say we have to go back to work. Not many of us ever enthuse that we get to go to work.
A richer conception than job or career is the ancient Judaeo-Christian ideal of vocation, literally a calling from God to help create the Kingdom of God on earth. Vocation gives us a way of thinking about the cosmic and communitarian aspects of work, and it invites us to think about the gift of creation, the creation of our own gifts, and the ways in which our gifts might be applied to the ongoing purposes of the creation. A vocation is a call from God, to use our gifts for God’s glory, and for the good of the community–including the poor. Unlike a job or a career, which is mainly a private matter, a calling can never be purely private. Nor can it be vocational in the narrow sense of the word, as when we speak of vocational training. A vocation is God’s call to work in the world, not just at work, but in all of the settings where we live our lives. If we believe in vocation, we are all at work now, because we are all engaged in thinking about our work in the world. Perhaps, therefore, instead of saying that we are “at work” or “on vacation,” we should say that we are “on vocation.”
In his book, The Reinvention of Work, theologian Matthew Fox helps us to think about the spirit of work with what he calls a “Spirituality of Work Questionnaire.” Here are some of his questions worth pondering on Labor Day:
Is my work real work or just a job? How does my work connect to the Great Work of the universe? Is my work actively creating good for others? Who profits from my work?
Is my work smaller than my soul? How big is my soul? How big is my work? What can I do to bring the two together?
If I were to leave my work today, what difference would it make to my spiritual growth? To the spiritual development of my colleagues at work? To the spiritual development of my family and friends?
What am I doing to reinvent the profession in which I work?
We might also ask of any work we do:
What good is this work?
What in the world is it good for?
What good is it for the world?
From the American Studies Museum, this is Dr. America (Prof. Jim Farrell of St. Olaf), reinventing museumwork for the 21st century.
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thanks Jeff – appreciate you sharing this deep reflection
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– Great article.
– The issue of asylum seekers and right to work is complicated, and subject to much misrepresentation on both sides of the debate. I wrote a whole report on it here in July 2023: https://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-sound-of-silence-July-2023.pdf
– In the UK any asylum seeker whose claim has not been determined after 12 months does have a right to work, but only in certain jobs.
– More particularly though, finding a non-exploitative employer who is willing, and wanting, to employ someone whose immigration, and therefore lawful work, status could change at any moment when their asylum claim determined, is hard.
– 9 years is of course unconscionable. But it is also of course not the norm. I would defend the UK asylum system somewhat. The last government interfered badly in its running. But In terms of a fair hearing and asylum grant rate the statistics would show that we are one of the best countries to claim asylum in.
– Unfortunately, the current drive to get through the claims backlog and bring down the wait times has arguably made it worse for those with more complex claims who tend to stay at the bottom of the – too hard will get to that later – pile while the more straightforward yes/no’s are disposed of to get the stats looking better.
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thanks Jonathan – as ever its great to have your informed perspective on such matters. I have had a quick scan of your report but will read it more fully later! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and wisdom
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