WHAT IS WORK?

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6545, 29 February 1928, Page 11

WHAT IS WORK?

FACTORY WORKER AND DILETTANTE COMPARED The working classes have grown very disrespectful, the Home Secretary may have reflected in these degenerate days (comments the Manchester Guardian), But tho point is a nice one. What is work? Sir William Joynson-Hicks will probably fail to convince a mill .worker that even a hard day spent in the “best club in England,’’ a pines where as one who knew it well remarked, “a man can neither work or rest,” can be accurately defined as rest. Indeed, the comparison is a difficult one : to work to one’s own time, in a position of authority and dignity, in comfortable surroundings for a fourfigure salary, with the .opportunity of seeing the immediate fruits of one’s industry and the knowledge that one is a very important person—how can this seem to be work to a “factory hand’’ 1 The Homo Secretary may indeed work hard and for long hours, but such is the injustice that arises from tho difference of position that he will never get the credit for it from mon and women whose earnings (though for eight hours’ labour- in a heated factory), cannot in any ease produce nioro than a twentieth of his income. Industrialism has brought no greater evil than this—-that it has devided tho days of the vast majority of men and; women into two parts- the working part and tho living part. It is for thia reason that men like William Morris denounced industrial civilisation andoulogised tho Middle Ages, during which, they believed, tho ordinary craftsman at least could find some happiness and some scope for his talents in his daily work. As it is, work to tho Homo Secretary means a full opportunity to uso his powers and abilities in a task which he has voluntarily accepted ; to the mill hand work, is that portion of tho day during which he is not his own master ; tho eight hours which is devoured by, economic necessity and controlled by an employer. As long as this division remains the Home Secretary and all the ! hard-working upper classes who can find jobs which satisfy their desires and ambitions aro likely to be misunderstood by tho great mass of men and women to whom -work and freedom seem ncccssarilly contradictory conceptions.