Work ethics: efficiency

Efficiency is a relative measure.  What is efficient differs depending on position and ontology; what objects are considered inputs and outputs, and how are these weighted in the judgement of efficiency.  

Regardless, we do tend to regard efficiency as an objective, unarguable good.  Who can argue against an increase in efficiency?  This is the rhetorical question that is asked whenever workers oppose measures to increase their productivity.  But the efficiency being considered here is organisational efficiency, investor efficiency or proprietor efficiency.  These are not, necessarily the same as worker efficiency.  Superficially, it does appear that we are discussing worker efficiency in these disputes.  But that demands that we understand workers as being mere tools, machines without subjective position, and such would be a totalitarian understanding.   

But as efficiency is a relative measure, what does it mean to be an efficient worker.  In the age of Homo economicus, of atomised economic units standing in the stead of thinking, civilised men and women, to be an efficient worker from the position and interests of the worker means to maximise the wages received while minimising the amount of labour input.  As, in most employing organisations, wages are fixed according to rank, and as promotion hierarchies narrow as one rises through the ranks, the surest way that the majority of workers can maximise individual efficiency is to contribute as little labour as possible while remaining in employment.  In other words, to skive and to slack.

Is it ethical to encourage such behaviour?  It has always been acceptable for employers to encourage an increase organisational efficiency, in other words a decrease in the individual efficiency of the worker.  It has always been acceptable for this to be achieved by encouraging increased contribution of labour by means other than a parallel increase in material reward.  This is overt; the business press regularly carries advice to increase productivity by holding events such as Christmas parties, justified by the rationale that for a small material outlay a much larger contribution of labour will be returned.  This, of course, has a mirror.  And the reflection it shows is this; a newspaper encouraging and advising, in all seriousness, workers in mechanisms of reducing their labour contribution while maintaining the material return.  So is it ethical?  Well, such a newspaper article would be damned as irresponsible.  But it is entirely comparable, morally, to the behaviour and attitude of the employers.   

Homo economicus, the stripping away of the weight of all in human relations except the exchange of material goods and services, therefore does, as Marx and Engels suggest in The Communist Manifesto, lead to increased and overt conflict between employers and employees.  The antagonistic interests of these two groups is laid bare when it cannot be hidden, and even soothed, by aspects of human experience such as community.  This heightening of class awareness is not, one might suspect, the intention of the majority of the advocates of remaking men as Homo economicus.

But class interests have not been heightened, you say.  Yes, perhaps ‘class’ is the wrong word.  ‘Class position’ is perhaps far more appropriate, as there is a lack of the solidarity that is implicit when the word ‘class’ is used alone.  Homo economicus is, after all, an individual, with no ties but those of overt materiality.  And more, there is mitigating propaganda two fronts; the traditionalists and the employers.  The traditionalists tell us that it is virtuous to play the role of efficient robot, rather than efficient man or woman.  A good ‘work ethic’ they say, when they justify acceptance of exploitation, rather than, if we are to be Homo economicus, a determination to exploit others, including our employers, in our material relationships, the category of relationships that are the totality of that which ought be important.  And the employers?  They tell us that we are part of a family, or some such narrative, to encourage sacrifice on the part of the workers that they would not make.       

But what is wrong with this?  Both democracy and the market.  If you are a believer in either of these you must be an opponent of lies.  For the market to work as both a moral system and as a superior distributor of resources it must be a market in which rational, informed actors operate.  Democracy demands that each citizen operates from a position of educated awareness of the state of the world and of their positions in the world.  If the workers believe, say, that they are part of a family represented by the company for which they work, then they are not informed, and their rational action is misplaced by this misapprehension.  Families do not discard members who become sick or otherwise unproductive, and indeed, in the typical company a belief in the company as family with mutual obligations based on more than mere material exchange forms no part of executive decision-making, being purely an attitude to be enculturated in those to be exploited.

So, there are two options.  The first is to embrace the market and Homo economicus and encourage the workers to maximise their own efficiency, to engage as rational economic atoms.  The second is to embrace democracy and build socialism, to make our economic system, and therefore our society, one that genuinely encourages behaviour that is based on more than the nexus of cash exchange; not the attractive illusion peddled by employers and traditionalists, but a system of genuine mutuality.