The Corrosion of Character: The personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism
Richard Sennett, W.W. Norton, 1998
Review by Gordon Preece
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

POST-MODERN WORKERS SEEM to have two main feelings: at best a sense of risk or insecurity; at worst a sense of betrayal. The modern covenant of mutual, life-long loyalty between employers and employees is gone. So is life-long vocation or career, as people have portfolio careers and short-term contracting or 'temping' becomes permanent. High expectations get deflated as many are in jobs way below their education. Waiting tables is no longer a way to pay your way through university, but through life. Many professionals who enter, for example, medicine or law with youthful idealism, find themselves increasingly reduced to technicians and acting accountants. Others, having served employers faithfully for years, find themselves, like Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, "thrown away like a piece of fruit".

The collapse of the old work covenant's securities (even if boringly predictable and paternalistic) is what conservative economists William Wolman and Anne Colamosca call The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work. They describe how the post-World War II marriage of labour and capital based on mutual need has led to "the great post-Cold War divorce". New computer and communications technologies enable investment capital to wander the globe promiscuously looking for those willing to sell their bodies (and increasingly minds) most cheaply. It's not just manufacturing jobs that are fleeing to the Third World, but highly skilled and educated jobs as the burgeoning middle classes of India, China and Russia offer their labour cheaper and for longer than westerners.

There is little corporate loyalty to a locality any more. We live in a virtual, not a virtuous work-world. The slogan of "what's good for General Motors is good for America" proved untrue for America when GM deserted Flint, Michigan, for Mexico. It is even more untrue when you remember the mythology of the GM Holden as Australia's own car. This sense of being lied to, as the family or national farm and firm is sold off, fuels much of the rise of One Nation party.

Governments compete to offer low wages, company taxes and minimal labour laws to entice desperately needed capital into bed. But capital can take flight overnight as we saw when the IMF-induced Asian economic meltdown turned economic tigers into pussycats, boosting global un- or under-employment to one billion, a third of the global workforce.

So much for the macro or global level. On the micro or local level the breakdown of the old paternalistic covenant between employers offering lifelong security in exchange for employee loyalty is most obvious in the move towards short-term contracts. We live in a contracting society. By this I mean that as we suffer social erosion in a range of civil institutions such as marriage, family, schools, work, community groups and churches. So we rely less on trust, shared conventions, promises and covenants and more on the legalistic letter of contracts. While necessary, contracts are much less holistic, personal and long-term than covenants. They minimise the commitment of the more powerful, the employers. Contracts use the language of strangers but a capitalist society based on short-term contracts without the social capital of trust, promises and covenants undercuts the very family values so dear to many conservative Christians.

Commitments to marriage, mortgage and childcare need secure income. Predictable work is essential to plan our days and lives and make commitments. But this is becoming increasingly unpredictable for many who feel their lives are determined by market or employer whims.
The quest for quick returns to capital, to shareholders and CEOs means that the idea of the long-term has long gone. The new gods of globalisation, change and flexibility often leave insecurity, unhappiness and inequality in their wake. How does the rhetoric of family stability and security-espoused by every political persuasion from John Howard to Tony Blair-square with a working environment where people are disposable?

As Richard Sennett writes, unstable workplace experiences make for unstable homes and societies. "Transposed to the family realm, 'no long-term' means: keep moving, don't commit yourself and don't sacrifice". If you have a post- or hyper-modern economy, littered with broken rungs from the old career ladder and luck as the only apparent link between effort and reward, you may get a recipe for wrecking families, friendships and churches.

Before painting too bleak a picture, we should see that some welcome the contractualisation and casualisation of work (now one in three jobs is part-time or casual) as an alternative to being locked into an organisation, 14 hour days and "box-ticking performance appraisals". As Julia Szego, a locum lawyer and freelance writer, said the Melbourne Age: "all my peers are running off to careers as counsellors or New Age quacks with crystal balls. There's soul searching and aptitude testing. We're convinced that somewhere between the schoolyard and the office building with the talking lift, we've missed the correct turn-off. Everyone I know seems to be going part-time, casual and short-term, so they can write the TV script, do the photography course, finish their masters". For them, work life is like a movie project, or a string of projects strung out like pearls.

That works well if you are paid like a movie star, are in demand and have no dependents, but for others, the pearls are too far and few between, too small or of poor quality. For many there is no string holding the short-term projects or contracts together. They feel like they are the string being stretched further and further. As a child "of the clever country", John Ryan (currently in his fourth job) also, in The Age, writes: "But when employment experts speak glowingly about how people . . . can multi-skill within and across our 'job portfolios', my skin crawls. These terms have a clear meaning for my generation: multi-skilling means inadequate training in what used to be three people's jobs and . . . 'job portfolio' means four employment declarations, no accumulated sick pay or holiday leave and $12.76 of superannuation a year. My friends and I are educated and can find work, so we're luckier than many. But as we begin to nudge 30, there is a creeping pessimism about financial and professional security . . . And more and more the job we finally get takes us nowhere".

John describes life in a risk society-the sense that it all falls back on us, the risk of unemployment, providing for retirement, everyone an entrepreneur, having to constantly sell themselves on the global labour market. And there's the growing fear in the pit of the stomach, long known by the American middle class, that you're just one pink slip or sickness away from the street.
People committed to 'Christian and family values' need to focus more widely than their own family and seek to reform the workplace. But how do we move from a 'Judas economy' to a 'Jesus economy'? Jesus, after all, wasn't an economist. But he knew betrayal and survival on seasonal, short-term work as a carpenter and life with nowhere to lay his head.

Jesus' divine economy wasn't based on short-term contracts but long-term covenants (in all relationships) from God to children. People are valued not because of their productivity, but because of their humanity. Social and economic structures are evaluated whether they help friendships to flourish, good marriages and families to be made, strangers to be welcomed. He challenges us to break out of the adversarial employer-employee culture. At an individual, friendship, marital, familial, small group, congregational, denominational, ecumenical, national and global level, we need to move towards a Jesus economy of covenantal relationships. And practically, we need to work toward making the different modules of work fit as neatly as possible with our others (including domestic, church and volunteer work), and those of our loved ones, like Lego. This will not be without cost, but the relational rewards of the Jesus economy are well worth it.

Gordon Preece is Director of Ridley College Centre for Applied Christian Ethics and author of Changing Work Values, (Acorn Press, 1996).