Sociology of the Work Place - Project 1 - Essay Example

The Alienation of Labor in the Present-Day Age What is work to me? Is my work the dream that I have had when I was a child? Is my work my career? Let’s consider first the history of work. In its origin, work was never work. Firth (2002) says, “In the Book of Genesis, God is very specific about what work is for. Work is a punishment for having eaten of the tree of knowledge. The serpent tempts Eve, Eve tempts Adam, all hell breaks loose, and before we know it, we are all doomed like Adam…” (p. 16). In Karl Marx’s “Estranged Labour”, he described man’s work as alienation onto itself.

Man works for various reasons: for sustenance and survival, for his family, prestige, and many other reasons. But he becomes alienated to his work because of the conditions imposed in the working place. In our world today, all things are done by capital to make the workingman ‘likable’ to his job. But still, everything is not enough. We find discomfort, pressure, dislike for our job. This is so because work has always been a form of punishment to the body. We always feel the pressure. During Marx’s time, the industrial revolution, the workingman was being punished.

Karl Marx says the object is the product or the commodity the worker has produced. Objectification is the “loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation”. The worker is reduced into an object, or he becomes a slave to the object he has created. He is alienated to his product or object; he is estranged to his own commodity. The pressure becomes intense, and the working man is reduced to the lowest serf. Inhuman conditions, avarice and selfishness of the capitalist, and all the more, man’s inhumanity to man, made labor a form of punishment.

Firth (2002) says, “…our experience of work is conditioned largely by how we think about it.” Even now, in the age of high technology and the internet, we experience the pressure and the hard realities of work. For me, I feel not only pressure but real hardship in my work because of the fastness, the demands of perfection, and the steep competition of the modern world. In the office, we are pressured with quotas, quotas and more quotas. You have to meet an amount of sales. You have to do the paper work up to the wee hours of the morning, submit your report on time, please your employer, your customer, and so on, and so forth.

It becomes an overwork, a redundancy of activities. This is alienation. The worker is alienated to the products of his labour. He is being alienated because of the activities inside the production site. He hates his work; he only does it for survival, because he has nothing to eat if he won’t work. He is not satisfied with his labour, it is “a labour of self-sacrifice, or mortification” (Marx’s Estranged Labour). In “The Consequences of Caring”, a study was done to examine workers, and on how they control their emotions (Wharton and Erickson, 2008).

This should be done to eliminate, or at least minimize, the worker’s alienation to labor. If not, the trend continues, and man will continue to hate work. In “The Implications of Making Work-Family Policies Viable”, the author conducts surveys and recommendations on the high levels of interest in work-family policies. Many families feel the pressure and have left family behind because of the influx of women into the workforce. In conclusion, I should say that we have to work to be happy.

But the more we work, the more we are unhappy. Man puts all of himself – time, effort, energy, talent, etc. – for the realization of the commodity or object, for it to increase in value. But as the worker increases more effort, he is reduced to an object in the process, and the object is more valued than himself. That’s why it is called ‘alien’, because it is outside, not himself, the commodity becomes bigger, more important than the worker. The bigger and more important the commodity, the smaller the workingman becomes.

The more he works hard, the more he loses for himself. His life becomes not his own now, but to the object he has made. Man is oppressed by work. References Book: Firth, D. (2002). Life and Work Express. United Kingdom: Capstone Publishing. Websites: Blunden, Andy. Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Transcribed in 2000 for Marxists.org. Retrieved October 5, 2008, from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm Wharton, A. S. and Erickson, R. J.(2008).

Abstract: The Consequences of Caring. 1999-2008. Wiley Inter Science. Retrieved October 5, 2008, from http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119240601/abstract Wharton, A. S. The Implications of Making Work-Family Policies Viable. Retrieved October 5, 2008, from http://research.wsu.edu/missions_dc/society-com-enterprise/amy-wharton.html