Ethos, Assessment, and the Value of Work: a Call to Repurpose
by Lael Ewy
The assessment was born of mass alienation. If you know what you’re doing, if you know your craft, your art, your field of study, you know if you’re doing well or not. Assessment makes no sense outside of education or an industrial culture in which those actually invested and involved in the process of making and doing don’t “need” to have a complete understanding, or even a basic understanding, of that process or its final result.
As Matthew B. Crawford has pointed out, there is an ethic of doing that comes from an intimate knowledge of the tools and the techniques of the job. It is to this ethos that I suggest we return.
When the company owns your labor, it also owns your interest in that labor, in the quality of the work and the values invested in the process. Thus “labor” becomes a commodity outside of the actual job instead of integral to the task. Marx understood this as a foundational principle, but few collectivist schemes have been able to reinvest it in the activities of the people. That is because it is inherent not to capitalism as Marx suggested but to industrialism: large scale production separates work from product and expertise from process. It creates fictive worlds in which things are created and services delivered outside of the scale of individual agency: we can see how we fit the nut to the bolt, but we can’t see how the machine really works, where the resources are gathered, how the marketing gets made.
Those forms of collectivism that have succeeded have done so within the confines of traditional and often religiously-bound communities, such as the Hutterites, whose faith calls them to the tasks but whose understanding of the roles of each within the whole keeps them tied together and satisfied. It feels good to do good work. It feels good to see how what you do is beneficial to those you count your own.
Even quite simple assembly-line tasks can be reinfused with the notions of ownership and craft, and this is where management can play a role, but managers themselves must also become reinvested in their own roles. No matter what, the larger understanding of how one’s actions affect the overall task must not merely be allowed but encouraged. Part of the task of the company must be the continual education of its employees, much of which must happen by the employees for each other.
Because the labor of the worker is the property of the company, intellectual and ethical investment with the product or service must also be accompanied by literal investment in the company; labor must also mean an actual share in the enterprise. Too long have executives purposefully and often maliciously enhanced the alienation of the laborer by denying her her share in the overall endeavor. It is easier, after all, to get rid of a worker who has been convinced, and who has convinced herself, that her time there is worth only her time and not her hopes, much less her heart and sweat and soul.
Too many companies are like the current Hawker-Beech in Wichita, which went from a family-run airplane company to one that no one seems to really own, no matter one’s position within it or the value of one’s stock. So distanced are the principals from the task that the product line has stagnated, the traditions fallen fallow, the executives baffled when their latest ploys have failed.
When the worker is not merely entitled to stop the line when she sees a flaw float by but feels an urgent need, when she anticipates how that flaw will happen given the conditions, the resources, the processes in place, then assessments will be redundant and production again a worthwhile endeavor: an act of creation and not a mere set of actions within a set of procedures set against the stone hearts of an industry’s distant and disinterested captains.
Comments are closed.