The Working Centre is pleased to print this article by Ken Westhues, from a lecture given at the University of Western Ontario. Ken Westhues is a professor at the University of Waterloo and is a member of The Working Centre’s Board of Directors. This article focuses on the meaning and dignity of work and building relationships in the workplace, and takes a personal approach to a very large structural problem. It is printed here in order to stimulate interest in this subject.
Article by Ken Westhues
Published December 1990
The Main Social Problem
If you were to ask me which social problem most deserves definition, study, and political remedy, my answer is the decline over time and current shortage of a particular kind of relationship among Canadians in their everyday lives, especially at work.
For now at least let me call the relationship I am concerned about reciprocal. This word recalls the anthropological literature on gift- giving. It connotes not only exchange and mutuality but openness, dynamism, and productivity.
Reciprocity is by no means a utopian fantasy. A major house renovation a few years ago involved me in relationships with about 25 tradespeople, mundane dealings about hard work and cold cash. I can rank those relationships with no trouble at all by the degree of reciprocity achieved in each.
For twenty days I worked alongside Fritz and Larry, the carpenters. As joint owner with my wife of the house, I was the boss, but being less skilled I did the more menial jobs, often at their suggestion.
I would say, “We need to build the wall here.” Fritz would answer, “But that will make the closet too small.” Larry would interject, “But have you thought of putting it a little to the left?” Fritz would ask, “How do you want this finished?” I would answer, “What makes the best sense to you?” Sometimes they brought coffee. Sometimes I did. When to start the workday and when to end it, which jobs to do first and which later, which materials to buy and who would pick them up — all these were issues of quick, easy, joint decision.
The outcome was not just a home for my family more beautiful than expected, not just thousands of dollars for Fritz and Larry, but development of the skills of each of us and — if I can speak for them – some mutual personal enrichment for carrying on this certain agreement. All this without a contract, with only verbal agreement on the price, but with negotiation and renegotiation, give and take, day by day.
George, the electrician, walked with me through the house at the start, writing down everything I wanted done. We agreed on a price. Then his employees, Frank and Bill, came to do the work, carrying George’s list. They were nice fellows, not very communicative but regular as clocks. At precisely 10:15 they would drop their tools and go and sit in their truck for coffee break.
“Ah Wait,” I said, “you can’t put the stove outlet there.” They had surface mounted it so that the stove would not sit flush against the wall. “But the wall is concrete,” Frank said. ”Then we’ll have to put the outlet somewhere else,” I answered. “But it says on George’s list to put it there,” Frank replied, since the terms of his relationship to me and to George did not include the exercise of imagination when coming up against and unexpected concrete wall.
In the end I asked Frank why they had vented the bathroom exhaust fun into an enclosed pile of insulation in the attic. “Well on George’s list,” came the reply. Clearly the relationship between the electricians and me never quite captured the meaning of reciprocity. The wiring did more or less get done, money did change hands, but something was missing that diminished at once the quality of the tangible outcome and the quality of our lives.
Shoddy work is a major social problem, apparent not just in houses but in furniture, clothing, cars, and all kinds of services. The most commonly voiced solution is to reduce workers’ freedom and spontaneity by greater written specification of the terms of exchange and by increased surveillance. In the case of my electricians, for instance, the contract should have spelled out what to do when faced with an unanticipated concrete wall, and an inspector should have been on hand to make sure the exhaust fan was vented to the open air. Solutions of this kind are indeed in process of steady, even massive implementations in virtually all sectors of the economy.
A truck-driver neighbour astonished me not long ago, showing me the tamper-proof monitor on his truck that records for every moment of every day whether the truck is running and if so, at what speed.‘ This employee, hauling goods between Ontario cities, cannot stop for take-out coffee from a donut shop, cannot even reduce his speed for fear of crashing the truck in the rain, without his boss taking note of it at day’s end.
My argument here is that the common piecemeal solution is dead wrong: wrong in general, because it reduces the opportunities for reciprocity in everyday life; wrong in particular, because it has failed miserably ‘to solve the problem of shoddy work. My relationship with the carpenters, Fritz and Larry, is vivid evidence of a better way: better in general, because it makes us all more human and alive; better in particular, because it results in goods of higher quality.
Let me point out four interrelated developments that have made relatively free interactions like mine with Fritz and Larry the exception rather than the rule:
Concentration of Capital
First and most basic is the steady concentration of ownership of productive resources in fewer hands,
mainly the hands of large corporations. Clear title to the tools of one ’s trade is a licence to engage in reciprocal relationships at work. A century ago most Canadians had that license. Now it is held by barely ten percent. We have become a nation of utterly impoverished citizens, with respect to unused capital, whose only consolations are fat pay cheques and easy credit.
The main reason why I got along better with the carpenters than the electricians is painfully clear: the former were in business for themselves, owned their tools and truck, and thus had the freedom to deal with me person to person. The electricians could not quite behave as real human beings — they were tools in their boss’s hands. Hirelings have an awful time engaging in give and take, because they have nothing of their own to give– except perhaps in a private life unseen at work. Their time on the job belongs to the company. Because they are not in possession of themselves, they are not free to invest themselves in a meeting with somebody else.
There is neither originality nor controversy in my assertion that concentration of ownership is a notable fact of our time. Documentations of the trend are endless, as in two recent royal commissions here in Canada and in other studies regularly reported in the press. My purpose here is just to identify this problem, the reduction of the grandchildren and great- grandchildren of proud proprietors to a mass of people who “just work here“, as a spreading infection that, unless checked, will destroy our whole way of life, no matter how many lesser ailments we successfully attend to.
Increasing Scale
The second development, partially the result of monopolization of capital, is the increasing scale of social organization: the bending and fitting of previously more autonomous groups into larger wholes. One example is the planned coordination of various companies within the same corporate empire. Another, from the public sector, is the so-called rationalization by a government ministry of the various organizations – school, universities, welfare agencies,hospitals, or whatever – within its jurisdiction.
This process rests on a conceptualization of the subject groups as parts of a system, and then a demand for the sake of the system’s effective functioning, that each part contribute in some specified way to the overall objectives or corporate plan. Professors like me know this process well, through our dealings with what has become the Ontario university system, but it is equally apparent in other kinds of work, from manufacturing and retail sales to health and social services.
This process depends on relatively new technologies – telecommunications and the computer most notably – that enable effective monitoring of even far-flung subject groups by a central authority. It depends also, of course, on the central authority’ control of the operating budgets of the subject groups. But the main reason for the process is simply the lack of legal restraints on empire building by senior officials in both the public and private sectors.
Certain gains in efficiency do indeed result. There would be more such gains if the wasteful duplication of restaurants in present-day Canada, each with its own idiosyncratic menu, were eliminated, or if the curricula across all the Ontario universities were sensibly standardized.
The horrendous cost, however, is the reduction of the autonomy, the degrees of freedom, of what used to be separate businesses, agencies and schools, each one carving its own niche in the world; but what are now mere sub-units, subsidiaries, subdivisions, franchises or outlets, whose niches are carved for them by head office or Queen’s Park. Thus not only do fewer individuals enjoy proprietary rights to engage others in reciprocal relationships. More and more of them are locked into immense and intricate systems of interaction, so that even modest changes in the workplace rev quire approval from multiple ascending levels of distant authority.
The typical citizen’s whole working life becomes a matter of filling a series of predefined slots in some enormous system, where the parameters on spontaneity and surprise are necessarily narrow.
Bureaucratization
The third development, occurring in tandem with the first two, is bureaucratization. By this I do not mean the mire of counterproductive red tape and ritualism into which organizations sometimes sink. I mean the spread of bureaucracy at its best: the clear specification of goals and the subjection of individuals to written rules, policies and procedures, designed to achieve the goals. But what could be wrong with this? Is there not abundant evidence that bureaucracy in principle works well not just for the production of cars and stereos, but for the collection of taxes, the healing of illness, the political promoting of special interests, and the processing of library books?
If words could capture everything human beings want, if the goals of life on this planet could be spelled out and listed by relative priority, then a society consisting of well-functioning bureaucracies would be ideal. If the quality of life were reducible to the attainment of ten objectives – or a hundred or a thousand – then we could establish bureaucracies for these various ends and devote our energies to improving material and social technologies for reaching them. But life is not like that.
The reasons people come together in this way or that are never completely specifiable. Biological cravings, as for food or sex, are usually involved. So is previous learning: the reality of biography and history. So also the uniquely human ability to do something new. Why one is drawn to these other people but not those, this kind of interaction but not that, comes down to an ever shifting mix of motives that words capture only partially.
Bureaucracy straitjackets this process, and thus must be kept within bounds. Bureaucrats cannot behave as whole people, but only as functionaries. They meet one another, and those the bureaucracy is supposed to serve, within the confine of rules that are fixed in print and non-negotiable. They must go by the book. Their jobs depend on it. What was, in the case of my electricians, “George’s list” precludes reciprocity.
There is a further way in which bureaucracy kills reciprocity: it requires a hierarchy of authority, a chain of command, a pecking order such that those from whom one takes orders are different from those to whom one gives orders. Reciprocity, by contrast, requires countervailing power, the giving and receiving of orders from the same folks. In the very moment that one person is deemed superior and the other inferior, reciprocity between them is forfeited.
For many years after my dad’s death, my mother worked as a home nurse and housekeeper for partially disabled women a little older than she. At the start, one of these woman assumed an extraordinary air of superiority, as if Mom was her lackey. “The only difference between you and me,” Mom told her, “is that you happen to have money and I don’t. If I had money and you didn’t, we could change places.” The necessary footing for any reciprocal relationship (as that one of my Mom’s turned out to be) is a common acknowledgement of fundamental equality, the right of each party to make a difference in each other party’s life. Pecking orders contradict this equality and this most basic of human rights.
Professionalization
The fourth and last corrosive trend I want to identify is professionalization, the proliferation of exclusive claims to jobs (and the rewards attached) by organizations of certified practitioners of the various field – as if, for instance, only M.D.’s could give good medical advice, only psychologists could counsel the depressed effectively, only sociologists could intelligently discuss social facts, or (as I discovered last fall) only certified foresters could properly trim and cut down trees.
The chief origin of this mad rush to professionalize is the concentration of wealth: once dispossessed of financial capital, people seize upon their scholastic credentials, so-called intellectual capital, as their means of getting access to the necessities and luxuries of life. The idea is to acquire certification in some field for which demand will be high, and then play the credential for all it is worth on the job market.
Professionalization has many benefits, many costs. My purpose here is just to identify one major cost, its discouragement of reciprocal relationships. Such relationships rest on an assumption that each party possesses some relevant knowledge and thus is entitled to speak as well as listen, to take part in ongoing negotiations about what should be done. Interaction thus becomes a process of mutual education and joint activity, and its outcome depends on the particular, even unique, meeting of minds between the parties involved.
From our first conversation, I was persuaded that Fritz was indeed a master carpenter. In turn, he was willing to grant that I had some knowledge of carpentry, and in addition, that I knew the idiosyncrasies of my family’s needs and tastes with respect to our home. Thus could we become each other’s teacher, each other’s student, co-workers in the task at hand. This was possible only because each of us not only claimed to possess relevant knowledge of which the other was ignorant, but also accepted the other’s identical claim.
But Fritz is an artisan, not a professional. Because the latter belongs to an exclusive club, a club with scholastic credentials, legal privileges, and a nonpublic language, a club the client is not qualified to join, the baseline assumption is that one party has relevant knowledge, while the other has merely a problem the first will solve. Professional status is a formidable wedge between the two parties, a dividing line between assumed expertise and assumed ignorance.
To be sure, professional-client relations sometimes transcend this polarity as when the professional admits not knowing what to do, solicits the other’s advice, and is as ready to be called by his or her first name as to address the client, patient, or student in this way.
The formal terms of the relation, however, urge the professional to assume a posture of over-confidence, distance and superiority, to say in effect, “Don’t you worry, turn things over time, let me handle it, do as l say, and all will be well.” The quintessential professional-client relation occurs between an emergency-room physician and an unconscious victim of some bad accident. The one party acts, so we hope, with great skill, while the other is acted upon for his or her own good.
All of life, however, need not be structured like the emergency-room of a hospital. To the extent that it is, the very idea of reciprocity is lost in civic culture. Life becomes a series of capitulations to professionals of different kinds, punctuated only by occasions to subjugate, treat, and manage others in the conduct of one’s own profession. The individual comes to imagine only two kinds of relationships, the kind in which I call the shots while another submits, and the kind in which another calls the shots while I submit.
But life need not be this way. A person in need of another’s help usually knows a fair bit about whatever the problem is, understands the problem in the context of his or her own biography, and has definition of his or her own about what is good and bad. The person in need of another’s help can he a helper, the student has something to teach the teacher, the patient can enlighten the physician, the welfare recipient can change the social worker’s life. All this is blocked by a caste-like separation of the one who has the credential from the one who does not.
The Main Social Problem
The main social problem, to repeat, is simply that the kind of meeting of which humans are uniquely capable –generative, constructive, productive meetings that enrich and enliven all who partake of them — are becoming less common in the workplaces of Canada.
Because of this, we face particular problems in the quality of the goods and services that define our standard of living, problems indeed in the quality of life itself.
And because people lack the experience of real human relationships at work, because reciprocity is declining in small matters, the prospect diminishes that we will be able to resolve effectively and democratically the big issues facing us: environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, nuclear war and the most basic.
Reciprocity
By reciprocity in human relationships I mean six easily measurable characteristics:
First, the parties to a reciprocal relationship enjoy freedom that the range of possible outcomes cannot be precisely specified in advance. Not only the particular result, but even the alternatives are theirs to formulate. What will come of their meeting is indeterminate, up to them.
Second, there need not be utter equality of power or resources, but each of the parties makes a difference in the other. One does not command while the other submits, but each has countervailing power, acting upon the other in such a way that each changes somehow on account of the other.
Third, any tangible product of the relationship is thus dependent on the parties’ own interaction – with respect to its identity, size, shape, colour, also the quantity produced, the timing of production, and so on.
Fourth, if the purpose of the relationship and rules governing it are written down, there is shared awareness that words on paper do not capture the fullness of the relationship, that they are subject to revision by the parties themselves, and that trust supersedes formalities.
Fifth, the relationship thus assumes a character of spontaneity, give and take, and ongoing negotiation. The parties take turns sometimes, and surprise one another.
Sixth, and finally, each of the parties is personally involved. Not that all facets of one’s identity are expressed, but the ones that are fit together with the rest. Each party”believes in” what is being done, and does not compartmentalize or separate it from some “private life”of his or her main. Thus each has the feeling in due course of having somehow grown as a person through this relationship.
