Discuss Work & Negative Views about It. What Are the Qualities of Satisfying Work?

Roszak makes a point in his essay about jobs being our salvation, where he describe there is no end to a working life. Roszak describes the waste of time in people’s jobs and that most employees don’t even put all of their effort into them. He figures

When employed labor is involved, productivity in terms of time becomes important, because the employer generally pays the worker in terms of time. For many jobs, then a shift from task-orientation to timed labor occurs, as the laborer’s time becomes the employer’s money. Thus, a separation between work and leisure occurs, as

Karl Marx witnessed first hand the rise of the industrial revolution and the beginning of capitalism. He also became one of capitalisms biggest critics. Marx believed that society needed a better way of distrusting wealth but also a better way a finding people’s full human potential or what he called “species-essence”. Marx believed that what we do connects to who we are, for example, work is what makes us human. It fulfills our species essence, as he puts it. Work allows us to be creative and flourish. However, in the 19th century Europe work did the quit opposite, it destroyed workers, particularly those who had nothing to sell but their labor. To the mill and factory owners a worker was simply an abstract idea with a stomach that needed to be filled. The workers had no choice but to work for long hours for a pathetic wage. Even worse, their labor alienated them. Alienation is a disorienting sense of exclusion and separation. Factory labor, under capitalism, alienated the workers from the product of their labor. They made stuff they couldn’t afford to buy themselves. The products they made were shipped out to other places far way to make money

There is widespread acceptance of humanity’s recent evolution. The Industrial Revolution is commonly regarded as the origin of the capitalist working order. Since the early 19th century people have been focusing more and more on their job performance and less and less on their personal enjoyment. Even though some, in recent years, have started to promulgate a better work life balance, the recent economic crisis has not done much for this feeble equilibrium.

Lastly, the workforce has become a team effort. No one person can complete a task alone. If you are not able to work well with others, you will not last. While we are in the era of social media, you have to communicate with others at work and out of work. Plenty of time my mother had to leave dinner and schedule a meeting with her employee to fix an emergency situation. Before a cell phone, you did not have a way to communicate with an employee as quickly. So if you cannot work well with others and communicate you will find your job options

that continues to this day. As a result the of the revolution the relation of a worker to his

The work force has always been a topic of discussion for centuries, in today's 21st century society: illustrations, cartoons, newspapers, and social media all paint a picture off the middle class society working mindlessly for corporations that get rich off their backs. In the excerpt, “Estranged Labour” Karl Marx paints his own picture trew the use of his words of the working man of his time period. He describes man as being a shell that only survives by working on creating objects for higher class men. Marx's also discusses the unfair breakage between the lower and high class. The man working on objects in a factory dedicates his life to a high class society because of the mere fact of trying to survive. In this short essay I will discuss

Labor is not enjoyable to the worker which allows for a strong feeling of hostility towards the work and workplace as well as those in it. Hostile attitudes resulting from the aforementioned forms of estrangement are reflected in the worker’s outlook and attitude towards others. Since the products of the worker’s labor and its products are owned by someone else, hostility develops towards that person or group of people, too. Additionally, the worker is aware of the disadvantage the economic system puts him at so there is also hostility towards the system and anyone involved in it, especially those who benefit from it. There is also a disconnect because without a sense of self, which has been completely annihilated through alienation, relating self to others, even with co-workers who may be in the same or similar positions, becomes a challenge. Marx explains this concept as follows: “the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential

“Compare the difference between job satisfaction and organizational commitment.” Job satisfaction is how happy an individual is with his or her job, their supervisors, coworkers, and the job itself. According to our textbook, organizational commitment is “the strength of an individual’s identification with an organization.” (Nelson and Quick, p.61) In some cases, the individual may not enjoy or like certain areas of their job, which can affect job satisfaction also. “There are five dimensions which can lead to satisfaction on the job, they are challenging work, valued rewards, opportunities for advancement, competent supervision, and supportive coworkers.” (Nelson and Quick, p.58)

Decent work is defined as a job that has employment opportunities in a productive job with adequate earnings, a decent work in time with stability and job security that also provides a safe work environment where people can combine work, family and personal life (International Labour Organization, 2012). This definition is quite idealistic yet it paints a picture of the kind of decent work that would be ideal in society. However, these guidelines were put in place very recently after a long period of very significant change. As capitalist ideologies and beliefs started to perpetrate through society the introduction of class struggles has caused the world to become much more consumerist as western society became a “Realm of Consumption” (Otis, 2012). This has meant that work has had to become much more regimented in order to provide fast

Industrialisation is a process that started in Europe around 1750, producing revolutionary changes in societies. Contrary to expectations (Macionis & Plummer, 2005, p. 374) number of hours at work per week has increased in recent years. At the start of twentieth century, about 40% of workers in industrial world were employed in agriculture, at its end about 2% (Macionis & Plummer, 2005, p. 376). Numbers of women at work are increasing around the world, although their jobs have lower status; women participate with 30-40% in workforce. On the other hand, there is increasing unemployment for men (Macionis & Plummer, 2005, p. 379). Many today 's engineers and executives see their job security to be thing of the past (Macionis & Plummer, 2005, p. 382). For Durkheim, work played important role in forming of emotions that kept community together Van Krieken et al (2006 p. 178). In Western societies paid work is the most important kind of work. It is the main source of self-identity and status Van Krieken et al (2006 p. 179). Durkheim wrote that limits of what people want and expect are lifted, and people can never be happy, as their desires are unlimited Van Krieken et al (2006 p. 182). Thomson wrote that new forms of control were introduced in post-Fordism with flexible specialisation and computers. Workers are expected to demonstrate eagerness and conformity with corporate structure; efforts are made to speed up production Van

What is work? What a silly question; Everyone knows what work is. But do they? Everyday there is a story on the news about a recent suicide, the alarming rate of depression, and the frightening rate of discontent among workers. Work is a necessary evil as it is not fun or enjoyable, but rather needed for modern society to exist. However, Philip levine in “What Work is” elegantly purposes a dualistic aspect to the awful word. The idea that the work that really matters is not actually the career anyone has but rather the work that is done to maintain their relationships with those around them. What if instead of slaving away at some dead end job that may or may not pay well, people focused on what actually mattered to them? Levine proposes the idea that the careers people pursue are ultimately meaningless, and the intimately social connections that are far too often neglected are what actually provide sustenance and success. The poem “What Work is” is about a man standing in a line at Ford Highland Park(A ford factory in Detroit) hoping to get a job during the great depression. After the man mistakes another man further along the line as his brother, the man realizes that he can not remember the last time had told his brother that he loved his brother. The expectations put on people around the idea of success should stress on the work needed in creating a healthy social circle and happiness, rather than the importance of academia and their careers.

Good purposes and fulfilling activities are hard to specify impersonally in any case and any attempt to do so would insult individuals’ freedom to define such things for themselves. In this view, no single ideal of meaningful work could cover the variety of individual tastes and inclinations, nor accommodate the remarkable ability of people to invest their work with meaning even when the work has little to offer in the way of variety, authority, complexity, or social standing.

Work takes on greater importance in a society where people believe that they can master the material world and shape their own destinies, and less where they believe that they can not. An Ancient Greek philosopher said that the only stability in the world was within one's mind or soul, where ideas were secure from the unending changes that took place in the material world. In Ancient Greece, philosophers believed that a person's thoughts and ideas were more important than that person's work and that work in the material world lacked permanence. For the ancient Greeks, the status of particular occupations depended on the degree of freedom a person had, the perceived moral integrity of the occupation, and the amount of mental and physical work it required. Today we tend to feel that working in an office is better than working in a coal mine, regardless of which worker makes more money. Our language suggests that it is a privilege to work sitting down.

At the beginning of this course leisure was a topic I did not give much thought to and I felt like I did not have the time to spare to put much thought into. To me, all leisure meant was having free time to do whatever it is that I wanted to do. But after analyzing my life I noticed that I had surrounded my life with solely work and school and my “free time” was anytime I spent watching television and anytime I slept. However, after taking this course I learned that leisure meant more much than that. Now leisure to me means, as Richard Kraus states, leisure is “time which is not devoted to work or work-connected responsibilities or to other forms of discretionary or unobligated time,” (Olson et al., 2003, 12). The “time” in which Kraus