WORK
Daily Telegraph - March 2007

This week the Pope and I had a rare convergence of opinion. “It is indispensable,” he said, in an apostolic exhortation, “that people not allow themselves to be enslaved by work or to idolise it, claiming to find in it the ultimate and definitive meaning of life.”

At last, papal endorsement for what I've been arguing since I was a teenager: hard work is not only overrated, it's wrong -- a conviction I both preach and practise, as my employment record and state of my home will confirm.

Yet, despite my best efforts, work is widely regarded as an inherently good thing and measure of character, an assumption that has become not only ubiquitous but has proved itself invulnerable to all criticism.

On a recent episode of Cheaters (this is what you do when you have an objection to work: watch late-night TV shows in which private detectives spring unfaithful fiancees and goad competing women into pulling each other's hair out), a man who hired a detective to spy on his bride-to-be was described as “good and hard-working”.

This is in contrast, presumably, to the slovenly harridan for whom he slaves and despite the fact he humiliated her in front of a world-wide TV audience and a gang of cheering nightclub rowdies.

It is not only the producers of reality TV shows, however, who encourage the belief that hard work is, by default, morally uplifting. This assumption permeates every strata of our society, up to our Prime Minister, fond of such lines as, “Ours is a society, as is the United States, that encourages people to work hard and to seek reward for that hard work.”

Slowly, insidiously, work is becoming the core value of the global community.

The problem is, it is not a value and is definitely not a guarantee of decency. It is possible, after all, to be a very diligent member of the Burmese secret police. I'm sure there were Nazis who never had a sick day and, if terrorism were a burger chain, Osama Bin Laden would be employee of the month.

From the proud home owner who shoots an intruder dead, to the bubble-headed North Shore matron who can't understand why the poor just don't do more overtime, “hard work” has become the preferred value of a lazy conscience.

Work is, for the most part and for most people, nothing but a necessary evil. There is nothing, in itself, ennobling about cleaning toilets or sitting in a factory packing dog food. The immigrant forced to do these jobs is not, contrary to popular opinion, glad for the opportunity; neither the five-year-old in India carrying bricks on her head, nor people like Chinese teenager Li Chun Mei who, five years ago, was effectively worked to death in a factory making Christmas toys.

Whoever said hard work never killed anybody was obviously not in a position to know any different.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008