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There is widespread agreement that the most serious and debilitating contemporary social problem in the developed capitalist world is the problem of enforced or involuntary unemployment. The growth in mass unemployment in the 1970s and 80s has produced a renewal of the demand by the labour and trade union movement1 for the implementation of a ‘right to work’; presumably in the belief that the official recognition and legal enforcement of such a right would lead to the increased availability of jobs. This campaigning slogan has sometimes emanated from the most unlikely sources. In his introduction to a published account of the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupation and work-in, entitled The Right to Work, Mr Harold Wilson (then, significantly, in opposition) declared that ‘what the men of the Clyde proclaimed, and what I went to Clydeside to assert, was “the right to work”. And that principle cannot, and must not, be denied.’
1 This phrase embraces, in Ireland and Great Britain, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the Trades Union Congress, their affiliated unions, the respective Labour Parties and Communist Parties, the British Co-operative Movement, the Fabian Society, and other avowedly socialist parties and sects such as the Workers' Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, and the Militant Tendency.
2 Buchan, (1972) 9–10.Google Scholar
3 Paine, (1969) 268.Google Scholar Paine's visionary social security programme (detailed in Part 2, Chapter 5) still makes very interesting reading.
4 For example, despite its title Buchan, (1972)Google Scholar contains not a word of analysis of ‘the right to work’. The author contents himself with asserting, by way of conclusion, that as a result of the work-in ‘“The Right to Work” is now recognized as a basic human right’ (146).
5 Among the few exceptions see Campbell, (1983) 171–92Google Scholar, Attfield, (1984)Google Scholar, Smart, (1985).Google Scholar On the general concept of work there are, of course, the many discussions of Marx's theory of alienated labour.
6 While I shall use, for the purposes of orientation, what I take to be a generally accepted and relatively uncontroversial topography of rights, I must say that I have every sympathy with Locke (1985) when he says ‘I do not really know what a right is, or where it comes from; I find the voluminous literature on the topic almost wholly unrewarding, and the manifold distinctions and divisions of rights, into natural and acquired, positive and negative, active and passive, special and general, claims and liberties, privileges and powers, permissions and entitlements, almost wholly unilluminating’ (175). An exception to this general charge is the collection of essays in Pennock, & Chapman, (1981).Google Scholar
7 See Brownlie, (1971) 111.Google Scholar
8 To say this is not, of course, to deny that other animals have rights—only that they have the same rights as humans.
9 For a traditional ‘natural law’ approach to these questions see Maritain, (1943).Google Scholar The rights under discussion are the kind of rights that H. L. A. Hart has labelled ‘general rights’, as distinct from the ‘special rights’ which arise out of ‘special conditions’ (see Hart, (1955)).Google Scholar Although Hart's ‘general rights’ have moral priority over any contract or convention, the status of ‘person’ is not, for him, as universal as it might at first appear. For Hart, general rights can legitimately be claimed not by all human beings, but by ‘all men capable of choice’. Another adherent of this will-autonomy theory, Stanley Benn, offers a list of requirements of ‘autarchy’, defined as ‘the condition of being a chooser’ (see Benn, (1975/1976) 116).Google Scholar Campbell, (1985)Google Scholar discusses this approach and quite correctly challenges it. Such a restricted view of personhood has serious implications for the rights not just of ‘mentally ill persons’, but also of children everywhere and of adults debilitated by material deprivations such as acute malnourishment. Going on the harrowing television pictures at the height of the Ethiopian famine, I doubt if many of the thousands of inhabitants of the relief camps would have satisfied Benn's requirements of ‘autarchy’.
10 Brownlie, (1971) 108–9.Google Scholar
11 Brownlie, (1971) 201.Google Scholar
12 A fuller treatment of this would have to consider the issue of the closed shop and, what is not quite the same thing, the union membership agreement. The most common argument in favour of such agreements is that it is wrong that so-called ‘freeloaders’ should be permitted to reap the benefits, cost-free, of the collective bargaining conducted by the union. In essence, however, whenever the matter has been legally tested, the right to be exempt from union membership, for reasons of ‘deeply held personal conviction’ (which does not have to be reasonable), has prevailed over properly validated union membership agreements. For further discussion, see Macfarlane, (1981) 49–57Google Scholar, Hyman, (1984) 96Google Scholar, and Dunn, & Gennard, (1984).Google Scholar
13 Unions have also negotiated agreements for ‘waiting time’ payments in many industries in which piece-rate workers are sometimes forced (through no fault of their own) to wait for work from other workers further up the production line. Even in an industry in which compulsory redundancy is illegal, however, the number of registered dockers declined between 1970 and 1987 from 45,542 to 10,123, through retirements and voluntary redundancies.
14 See Studs Terkel's marvellous and disturbing book (1974). This is a kaleidoscope of some one hundred and fifty tape-recorded conversations with Americans about their work, at all levels of the employment hierarchy. While there are glimpses of pride and satisfaction in a job well done, the overwhelming impression is that most people hate their work. The first thing that nearly all pools winners do is give it up! The romantic and heroic vision of a Diego Rivera does not correspond to the harsh, squalid reality of working in a steel mill, in an office or restaurant, or even in a boardroom. For a less racy account of people's experience of work (and non-work), see Littler, (1985).Google Scholar
15 See Rauch, (1983) 139–40Google Scholar; also Cullen, (1979) 66–70.Google Scholar Marx's analysis of alienated labour pervades his whole work, but see especially his (1977) 77–87.
16 I'm sure Alan Gabbey was correct to challenge me, in discussion, to produce the empirical evidence for my claim that there is such a human need. Like all such claims about general human needs, tendencies, proclivities, etc., this one is based on a wide range of observations I have accumulated fairly haphazardly and reflected on in the course of my lifetime: the sources of these observations include myself (introspection), friends, acquaintances and strangers I have talked to and observed, works of fiction I have read, works of history, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology too. This is my evidence, and it certainly is empirical, although it is difficult to document satisfactorily. It is germane to point out that, in this particular case, it gives special prominence to conversations (written as well as oral) with working people, unemployed people, counsellors of unemployed people, etc. It includes counter-examples; and if a sufficient number of significant counter-examples were to come to my attention, I should certainly abandon my generalization. The sum total of these observations and reflections does not produce an empirical proof like a proof in physics or chemistry; but then I'm sure no one would be so foolish as to look for such a proof when inquiring into human behaviour. As Hannah Arendt put it so well: trying to define precisely our own nature would be like jumping over our own shadows.
17 The locus classicus for Hegel's discussion of the ontological significance of work is his Phenomenology of Spirit, especially the section on the dialectic of lordship and bondage (see Hegel, (1977) 115–19).Google Scholar
18 Paul, Pope John II (1981) 33.Google Scholar
19 Eric Bogle has written a very poignant song, about the time his father, a railwayman, was made redundant, entitled ‘They had no use for him’.
20 For a brief discussion of the connection between work and self-respect, see Smart (1985) 37–8. The most eloquent account in recent years of the loss of dignity and self-esteem suffered by the unemployed is Seabrook (1982). The testimony of the unemployed themselves, which makes up most of the book, is spellbinding and deeply moving. The author's commentary, however—often sanctimonious and imbued with romantic nostalgia for ‘the good old days' of dignified but relentless toil and working-class solidarity—is less satisfactory.
21 Jenkins, & Sherman, (1979) 141.Google Scholar
22 Townsend, (1979).Google Scholar
23 In 1985, 199,000 families in Great Britain were granted family income supplement, to bring their wages up to the official poverty line (see Becker, & MacPherson, (1986) 15–18).Google Scholar
24 See Austin, (1954) 285n.Google Scholar
25 For an illuminating discussion of the likely cost and employment effects of shorter working hours, with lots of interesting figures, see Hill (1987). The author shows that between 1980 and 1985 the proportion of manufacturing employees working overtime in British industry increased from 29–5 to 34–5Google Scholar per cent, with each employee who worked overtime doing so to the extent of nine hours per week on average, while over the same period the size of the employed labour force in manufacturing actually fell by over eighteen per cent; and argues that a reduction of hours worked per person would lead to a compensating rise in productivity per hour. He concludes that worksharing could be used to spread the benefits of greatly increased output per person and per hour amongst a greater number of employed persons. A strong case for the imposition of shorter working time by law, without loss of pay, is presented by Coates & Topham (1986) 245–53; on the need for a statutory minimum wage, see 240–4.
26 A particularly ambitious example of trade union planning for socially useful employment was the corporate plan developed as an alternative to longredundancy by the shop stewards of Lucas Aerospace about ten years ago: they developed proposals for some 150 new products, from new kidney machines to the road rail car that has been taken up by British Rail in prototype (see Wainwright, & Elliot, (1982)).Google Scholar On the general topic, see Coates, (1978).Google Scholar
27 See Knights, & Willmott, (1986)Google Scholar, and Cockburn, (1985).Google Scholar
28 I am very grateful to Ann Hope, David Lamb, and Alan Ryan for their comments on earlier versions of the paper.