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| Coffee Time |
Unions worked hard to limit the number of hours a worker
could be compelled to work in a week; forty seems to be the current standard. But
hours worked is not a reliable measure by which an employee’s worth to
an employer is determined. It might be if we were all equally skilled, equally
motivated, equally self-directed and if we all had the same commitment to honesty
and fairness.
Working on a commission basis, i.e. piece work, measures
worth by productivity, i.e. you’re paid X dollars for each widget you assemble,
each vacuum cleaner you sell. But how do you pay a teacher, a pastor or a
politician by the piece?
Merit pay has been suggested, whereby a teacher, for
instance would be paid a bonus or no-bonus based on students’ standardized test
scores. That has too many pitfalls to be seriously or broadly applied.
Typically, individuals and families exchange a portion of
their strength, skill, experience and time for housing, groceries, a car and
fuel, clothing and leisure-time options. We call it work or a job.
The description of paid employment has and is evolving through automation,
robotics, changing needs and wants, and more and more people will find
themselves unemployed in the traditional sense and more and more of the capable
will join those unable to work or hold a job: the elderly,
the children, the handicapped. How will we distribute food, shelter and myriad
necessities in the years to come? Who’s working on a paradigm for the future if and
when “get a job” ceases to make sense?
What if I should become a church pastor whose job
description and pay scale are negotiated with the council of a local church? Is
that “a job?” Is it clear as I begin my tenure how many hours of work I owe in
order to match the salary I draw? Am I “on the clock” from 9:00 to 5:00 Wednesday
through Sunday and “off the clock” at all other times? Will I be remunerated
for my productivity, $150 per sermon, $50 per home visit? I’ve seen enough
pastors over time to know how quickly this would turn out to be an absurd way of exchanging
work for means.
There must be a sweet spot where distributing living sustenance
to people is neither the “from each according to his ability, to each according
to his need” of a Marxist ideology nor the conservative strident resistance to
change, as in defending the age-old simplification inherent in, “work … or
starve!” It’s safe to say that as long as we have jobs, that stealing
time by employees and stealing labour by employers will remain crimes … and will
remain endemic.
Every community needs its members’ contributions of time,
skills and energies in order to prosper; this is probably true. Every
individual has more or less of time, skills and energies to contribute. But every
individual needs good food and a warm, comfortable, safe place to sleep.
A measure of how much dollar value any individual’s work is worth
is, by its nature, arbitrary and inexact. In the end, without general good
will, a cooperative (as opposed to a competitive) ethic, genuine empathy and
compassion, some will be rewarded with way more abundance than their work
deserves …
… and others will sleep on a park bench, hungry.
