Work ethic
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Work ethic is a value based on hard work and diligence.
It is also a belief in the moral benefit of work and its ability to enhance
character. An example would be the Protestant work ethic. A work ethic may include being reliable, having
initiative, or pursuing new skills.
Workers exhibiting a good work ethic
in theory should be selected for better positions, more responsibility and
ultimately promotion. Workers who fail to exhibit a good work ethic may be
regarded as failing to provide fair value for the wage the employer is paying
them and should not be promoted or placed in positions of greater
responsibility.
Support
Steven Malanga refers to "what
was once understood as the work ethic—not just hard work but also a set of
accompanying virtues,
whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets
too few now recall.[1]
Remember, that time is money.
He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits
idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion
or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really
spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides. Remember, that money is
the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its
offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again
is seven and threepence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more
there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker
and quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the
thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have
produced, even scores of pounds.[2]
Weber notes that this is not a
philosophy of mere greed, but a statement laden with moral language. Indeed,
Franklin claims that God revealed to him the usefulness of virtue.[3]
Many conservatives believe that laziness
is morally wrong, even reprehensible, because one is not doing their share of
the work and living off of the hard work of others, and for this reason oppose welfare
programs.
Criticism
Countercultural groups and communities, most notably freethinkers, have
challenged these values in recent decades, characterizing them as submissive to
authority
and social convention, and not valuable in and of themselves, but only if it
brings a positive result. An alternative perspective has arisen in recent
years, suggesting that the work ethic is being subverted in a broader, more
mainstream and more readily marketed-to proportion of society. This perspective
has given rise to the phrase "work smart".
In the 19th century, the Arts
and Crafts movement of William Morris
in the UK and Elbert Hubbard in the US noted how "alienation" of workers from
ownership of the tools of production and their work product was destructive of
the work ethic because in the expanding firms of that era, the workers saw no
point in doing more than the minimum.[citation needed]
The industrial engineer Frederick
Winslow Taylor revised the notion of work ethic to
include giving up control over the work process to management so that the
latter could study and "rationalize" the work process, and the notion
of work ethic thereafter included acknowledgment of management control.
Marxists, and some non-Marxist
sociologists[who?], think "work ethic" is not a useful sociological
concept. They argue having a "work ethic" in excess of management's
control doesn't appear rational in any mature industry where the employee can't
rationally hope to become more than a manager whose fate still depends on the
owner's decisions. The French Leftist philosopher
André Gorz
wrote:
"The work ethic has become
obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that
producing more will lead to a better way of life.
The connection between more and
better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already
more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met
not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or
even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air,
water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact.
Neither is it true any longer that
the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. In a
post-industrial society, not everyone has to work hard in order to
survive, though may be forced to anyway due to the economic system. The present
crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed:
'the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has
been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial,
administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these
sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of
production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The
work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and workbased society is
thrown into crisis."[4]
Others believe that the concept of
"hard work" is meant to delude the working class
into being loyal servants to the elite, and that working hard, in itself,
is not automatically an honorable thing, but only a means to creating more
wealth for the people at the top of the economic pyramid.
The entire wiki link on the subject can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_ethic
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