Hi there so this is a communications class called “Critical studies in Advertising and Consumer culture” and for this you will need to Watch the first 30 minutes of American Factory https://thoughtmaybe.com/american-factory/
Why did the previous factory close in Ohio? Describe the circumstances and the impact. What replaced it and what difficulties did it encounter? Provide details from the film.
Apply the reading  ” Work, consumerism and the new poor. By Zygmunt Bauman” to the film.
COMS 3308B
Screening Response #4
Watch the first 30 minutes of American Factory (posted on Brightspace in the Inclusions and
Exclusions module). Respond to the questions. Submit by Sunday, MARCH 2ND by 11 pm on the
Dropbox.
1. Why did the previous factory close in Ohio? Describe the circumstances and the impact.
What replaced it and what difficulties did it encounter? Provide details from the film.
2. Apply the Bauman reading to the film.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
Introduction to the first edition
The poor will be always with us: this much we can learn from popular
wisdom. What popular wisdom is not as confident and outspoken about is
the tricky question of how the poor are made to be poor and come to be
seen as poor, and how much the way they are made and seen depends on
the way we all – ordinary people, neither rich nor poor – live our daily
lives and praise or deprecate the fashion in which we and the others live
them.
This is a regrettable omission: not just because the poor need and
deserve all the attention we may give them, but also because it so happens
that it is in the image of the poor that we tend to invest our hidden fears
and anxieties, and so looking closely on the way we do this may tell us
quite a few important things about our own condition. This book attempts
therefore to answer these ‘how’ questions, and so to tell the often overlooked, glossed over or wilfully concealed part of the story of modern
poverty. While attempting to find such answers, it may also add a bit to our
self-knowledge.
The poor will be always with us, but what it means to be poor depends
on the kind of ‘us’ they are ‘with’. It is not the same to be poor in a society
which needs every single adult member to engage in productive labour as it
is to be poor in a society which, thanks to the enormous powers accumulated by centuries of labour, may well produce everything needed
without the participation of a large and growing section of its members. It
is one thing to be poor in a society of producers and universal employment;
it is quite a different thing to be poor in a society of consumers, in which
life-projects are built around consumer choice rather than work, professional skills or jobs. If ‘being poor’ once derived its meaning from the
condition of being unemployed, today it draws its meaning primarily from
the plight of a flawed consumer. This is one difference which truly makes a
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:06.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
2
Work, consumerism and the new poor
difference to the way living in poverty is experienced and to the chances
and prospects of redemption from its misery.
This book attempts to trace this change which took place over the
duration of modern history, and to make an inventory of its consequences.
On the way, it also tries to consider to what extent the well-remembered
and tested means of fighting back the advancing poverty and mitigating its
hardships are fit (or unfit, as the case may be) to grasp and tackle the
problems of poverty in its present form.
The first chapter recalls the origins of the work ethic, which from the
beginning of modern times was hoped to attract the poor to regular factory
work, to eradicate poverty and assure social peace – all in one go. In
practice, it served to train and discipline people, instilling in them the
obedience necessary to make the new factory regime work.
The story told in the second chapter is of the gradual yet relentless
passage from the early to the later stage of modern society: from a ‘society
of producers’ to a ‘society of consumers’, and accordingly from a society
guided by the work ethic to one ruled by the aesthetic of consumption. In
the society of consumers, mass production does not require any more mass
labour and so the poor, once a ‘reserve army of labour’, are re-cast as
‘flawed consumers’. This leaves them without a useful social function –
actual or potential – with far-reaching consequences for the social standing
of the poor and their chances of improvement.
The third chapter traces the rise and fall of the welfare state. It shows the
intimate connection between the transformations described in the previous
chapter, the sudden emergence of public consensus in favour of collective
responsibility for individual misfortune, and the equally abrupt emergence
of the present consensus against that principle.
The fourth chapter is concerned with the consequences of all that: a new
way in which the poor are socially produced and culturally defined. The
recently fashionable concept of the ‘underclass’ is scrutinized and found to
act mainly as a tool of the ‘power-assisted’ condensation of widely different
forms and causes of deprivation into the image of one inferior category of
people afflicted with faults common to them all and therefore presenting
one ‘social problem’.
Finally, the likely futures of the poor and poverty are considered, as well
as the possibility of giving the work ethic a new meaning, more relevant to
the present condition of developed societies. Can poverty be fought and
conquered with the help of orthodox means, made to measure for a society
no longer in existence? Or should we seek new solutions, such as the
‘decoupling’ of the right to livelihood from the selling of labour, and the
extension of the socially recognized concept of work beyond that recognized by the labour market? And just how urgent is it to confront such
questions and try to find practical answers to them?
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:06.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
PART I
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
1
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
The meaning of work: producing the
work ethic
What is the work ethic? It is, in a nutshell, one commandment with two
outspoken premises and two tacit presumptions.
The first outspoken premise is that in order to get something which one
needs to stay alive and happy, one must do something which is seen by
others as valuable and worthy of being paid for; there are no ‘free lunches’,
it is always quid pro quo, ‘tit for tat’; you need to give first, in order to be
given later.
The second outspoken premise is that it is wrong – morally mischievous
as well as silly – to be satisfied with what one has already got and so to settle
for less rather than more; that it is unworthy and unreasonable to stop
stretching and straining oneself once what one has seems to be satisfying;
that it is undignified to rest, unless one rests in order to gather force for
more work. In other words working is a value in its own right, a noble and
ennobling activity.
The commandment follows: you should go on working even if you do
not see what that could bring you which you do not have already or don’t
think you need. To work is good, not to work is evil.
The tacit presumption without which neither of these premises nor the
commandment would seem as obvious as they do is that most people have
their working capacity to sell, and indeed may earn their living selling it
and getting what they deserve in exchange; whatever they possess is a
reward for their past work and their willingness to go on working. Work is
the normal state of all humans; not working is abnormal. Most people fulfil
their duty, and it would be unfair to ask them to share their benefits or
profits with others, who could also fulfil their duties but for one reason
or another fail to do so.
The other tacit presumption is that it is only such labour that has a value
recognized by others – labour which commands salaries or wages, which
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
6
Work, consumerism and the new poor
can be sold and is likely to be bought – that has the moral value the work
ethic commends. This is, albeit a simple, summary of the form which the
work ethic assumed historically in our kind of society, registered under
the name of ‘modernity’.
Whenever you hear people talking about ethics, you should be pretty
sure that someone somewhere is dissatisfied with the way some other
people behave and would rather have them behaving differently. Hardly
ever has this advice made more sense than in the case of the work ethic.
Since it erupted into the European consciousness in the early stages of
industrialization, and in its many avatars throughout the twisted itinerary
of modernity and ‘modernization’, the work ethic served politicians,
philosophers and preachers alike as a clarion call to, or an excuse for,
attempts to uproot, by hook or by crook, the popular habit which they saw
as the prime obstacle to the new brave world they intended to build: the
allegedly widespread inclination to avoid, if one could, the ostensible
blessings of factory employment, and to resist docile submission to the
rhythm of life set by the foreman, the clock and the machine.
The morbid and dangerous habit that the work ethic was meant to fight,
destroy and eradicate at the time it entered the public debate, was rooted in
the traditional human inclination to consider one’s own needs as given and
to desire no more than to satisfy them. Once their habitual needs had been
met, the ‘traditionalist’ workers saw no rhyme nor reason to go on
working, or for that matter to earn more money; what for, after all? There
were so many other interesting and decent things to do, things one could
not buy but could well overlook, neglect or lose if one was running after
money from dawn to dusk. The threshold of decent life was set low, was
fixed and forbidden to cross, and there was no urge to climb higher once
that threshold was reached. This is, at any rate, how the entrepreneurs of
the time, and the economists who zealously made sense of their troubles, as
well as the moral preachers eager to improve things, painted the picture.
Historical memory is held in safe keeping and history is written by
victors. No wonder that this composite painting entered the classic canon
of history telling, becoming the official record of the valiant battle waged
and won by pioneers of modern reason against the irrational, ignorant,
totally unreasonable and completely inexcusable popular resistance to
progress. According to that record, the stake of the war was to make the
blind see light, to force the silly and retarded to use intelligence, and to
teach people how to wish for a better life, to desire things new and
improved, and by desiring them to self-improve, to become better persons.
Or, if need be, to compel the recalcitrant to act as if they had such desires.
As it happened, the true course of events was exactly the opposite to
what the early entrepreneurs implied in their complaints against shiftless
and laggard factory hands, and what the economists and sociologists took
later for the tested truth of history. It was in fact the advent of the factory
system that spelled the collapse of the love affair between the craftsman and
his work which the ‘work ethic’ postulated. The moral crusade recorded as
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
7
the battle for the introduction of the work ethic (or as the training in the
application of the ‘performance principle’) was in fact an attempt to
resuscitate basically pre-industrial work attitudes under new conditions
which no longer made them meaningful. The moral crusade aimed at the
re-creation, inside the factory under owner-controlled discipline, of
the commitment to the wholehearted, dedicated workmanship and the
‘state of the art’ task performance which once upon a time came to the
craftsman naturally when he himself was in control of his work.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
Getting people to work
When John Stuart Mill complained that ‘we look in vain among the
working classes in general for the just pride which will choose to give good
work for good wages; for the most part, the sole endeavour is to receive as
much and return as little in the shape of service as possible’,1 he bewailed in
fact the too rapid conversion of the craftsmen-turned-workers to the
market’s unemotional, cost-and-effect rationality, and the too fast shedding
of the last remnants of pre-modern workmanship instincts. Paradoxically,
the appeals to the work ethic seem in this context to cover up the erstwhile
drive to exempt factory employees from the rule of market rationality which
seemed to have a deleterious effect on their dedication to the task. Under
the guise of the work ethic, a discipline ethic was promoted: don’t mind
pride or honour, sense or purpose – work with all your strength, day by
day and hour by hour, even if you see no rhyme nor reason to exert
yourself and are unable to adumbrate the meaning of the exertion.
The true problem which the pioneers of modernization confronted was
the need to force people, used to putting meaning into their work through
setting its goals and controlling its course, to expend their skill and their
work capacity in the implementation of tasks which were now set and
controlled by others and hence meaningless for their performers. The way
to solve this problem was a blind drill aimed at habitualizing the workers to
an unthinking obedience, while at the same time being denied pride in a
job well done and performing a task the sense of which escaped them. As
Werner Sombart commented, the new factory system needed parthumans: soulless little wheels in a complex mechanism. The battle was
waged against the other, now useless, ‘human parts’ – human interests and
ambitions irrelevant for productive effort and needlessly interfering with
the parts deployed in production. The work ethic was, basically, about the
surrender of freedom.
That true meaning, which the moral preachings masqueraded as the
‘work ethic’ had for the people on the receiving end of the crusade, was
vividly portrayed in a statement left by an anonymous hosier in 1806:
I found the utmost distaste on the part of the men, to any regular
hours or regular habits . . . The men themselves were considerably
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
8
Work, consumerism and the new poor
dissatisfied, because they could not go in and out as they pleased, and
have what holidays they pleased, and go on just as they had been used
to do; and were subject, during after-hours, to the ill-natured
observations of other workmen, to such an extent as completely to
disgust them with the whole system, and I was obliged to break it up. 2
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
For all intents and purposes, the work-ethic crusade was a battle for
control and subordination. It was a power struggle in everything but name,
a battle to force the working people to accept, in the name of the ethical
nobility of working life, a life neither noble nor responding to their own
standards of moral decency.
The crusade was also aimed at detaching things people did from what
they saw as worthy of doing and thus as sensible things to do; detaching the
work itself from any tangible and understandable purpose it might have
served. If fully implemented and absorbed by the logic of life, the work
ethic would have replaced all other human activities, such as reflecting,
evaluating, choosing and goal-setting, by ‘going through the motions’. The
motions, moreover, were dictated by rhythms not of one’s own making.
No wonder that the critics of up-and-coming modernity, in the name of
the preservation of what they conceived as the truly human values, spoke
in support of the ‘right to laziness’.
If implemented, the work ethic would have also separated productive
effort from human needs; for the first time in history, it would have given
priority to ‘what can be done’ over the ‘what needs to be done’. It would
render the satisfaction of human needs irrelevant to the logic, and most
importantly to the limits, of productive effort; it would make possible the
modern paradox of ‘growth for the growth sake’.
. . . a result of the introduction of machinery and of large-scale organisation was the subjection of the workers to a deadening mechanical
and administrative routine. Some of the earlier processes of production afforded the workers genuine opportunities for the expression of
their personalities in their work, and some of them even permitted the
embodiment of artistic conceptions affording pleasure to the craftsmen . . . The anonymous author of An Authentic Account of the Riots of
Birmingham (1799) explains the participation of workers in the riots by
saying that the nature of their employments is such that ‘they are
taught to act, not to think’.3
In the poignant summary by J.L. and Barbara Hammonds:
. . . the upper classes allowed no values to the workpeople but those
which the slave-owner appreciates in the slave. The working man was
to be industrious and attentive, not to think for himself, to owe
loyalty and attachment to his master alone, to recognise that his
proper place in the economy of the state was the place of the slave in
the economy of the sugar plantation. Take many virtues we admire
in a man, and they become vices in a slave.4
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
9
Indeed, in the chorus of exhortations to submit, placidly and unthinkingly, to the impersonal, inhuman and mechanical rhythm of factory work,
there was a curious blend of such an essentially pre-industrial and antimodern mentality of slave economy and the new bold vision of the
wonderful, miraculously plentiful world which once the fetters of traditional ways were broken was bound to emerge as a result of human
invention, and above all of human mastery over nature.
As Wolf Lepenies observed, the language in which ‘nature’ (that is, all
things already shaped through divine creation, things ‘given’, unprocessed
and untouched by human reason and skills) was talked about from the end
of the seventeenth century on was saturated with military concepts and
metaphors.5 Francis Bacon left nothing to the imagination: nature ought to
be conquered and set to work hard so that it could serve human interests
and comfort better than it ever could when left alone. Descartes compared
the progress of reason to a string of victorious battles waged against nature,
while Diderot called the practitioners and the theorists to unite in the name
of the conquest and subjugation of nature; Karl Marx defined historical
progress as the unstoppable march towards human dominion over nature.
No difference of opinion here, whatever their other disagreements, with
Claude Saint-Simon or August Comte.
Once the ultimate goal had been spelled out, the sole significance
ascribed to practical undertakings was the shortening of the distance which
still separated people of the time from the final triumph over nature. The
authority of other criteria could be successfully contested and gradually yet
relentlessly rendered null and void. Among the progressively dismissed
criteria of evaluation, the precepts of pity, compassion and care figured
most prominently. Pity for the victims weakened the resolve, made the
compassionate slow down the pace of change, and whatever arrested or
slackened progress could not be moral. On the other hand, whatever
served the ultimate conquest of nature was good and ‘in the last account’
ethical, serving ‘in the long run’ the improvement of mankind. The
craftsmen’s defence of their traditional rights, the resistance to the rational,
effective and efficient regime of mechanized work which the pre-industrial
poor had shown, were seen as another obstacle among the many which
nature in its bland stupor had stood in the way of progress as if to stave off
its imminent defeat. That resistance had to be broken with as little
compunction as all nature’s other shrewd contrivances had already been
broken, debunked and defused, or merely swept out of the way.
The leading lights of the glorious world which was to be built with
human wits and skills – the designers of machines and the pioneers of their
use – had no doubts that the real carriers of progress were the creative
minds of the inventors. James Watt argued in 1785 that all the others,
whose physical exertion was needed to make the inventors’ ideas into flesh,
‘are to be considered in no other light than as mere acting mechanical
powers . . . it is scarcely necessary that they should use their reason’. 6 While
Richard Arkwright complained that:
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
10
Work, consumerism and the new poor
it was difficult to train human beings ‘to renounce their desultory
habits of work, and identify themselves with the unvarying regularity
of the complex automaton’. To be efficiently used, the complex
automaton required to be constantly watched; and few countrymen
or women relished the idea of spending ten or more hours a day shut
up in a factory watching a machine.
Their resistance to join in the concerted effort of humanity was itself the
oft quoted proof of the moral laxity of the poor and the moral virtue of a
tough and rigid, no-punches-held factory discipline. Getting the poor and
‘voluntarily idle’ to work was not just an economic, but a moral task. The
enlightened opinions of the time, differing as they might have been from
each other in all other respects, had little to quarrel about on this point.
Blackwood’s Magazine wrote that ‘the influence by the master over the man,
is of itself a point gained in the direction of moral improvement’,7 while
the Edinburgh Review acidly remarked, about the ongoing cultural crusade,
that:
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
. . . it is not in [the charity] spirit that the new schemes of benevolence
are conceived . . . They are celebrated as the beginning of a new moral
order . . . in which the possessors of property are to resume their place
as the paternal guardians of those less fortunate . . . to extinguish, not
indeed poverty – that hardly seems to be thought desirable – but the
more abject forms of vice, destitution, and physical wretchedness.8
P. Gaskell, the author and social activist who went down in history as
one of the most philanthropic, warm-hearted and compassionate friends of
the poor, held, despite this, little doubt that the objects of his compassion
‘differ but little in inherent qualities from the uncultivated child of nature’ 9
and that they needed other, more mature people to watch their moves and
take responsibility for their actions. Among the contributors to the learned
opinion the agreement was common that the present or would-be
labourers were not capable of managing their lives on their own. No more
than silly, unruly children were they able to govern themselves, to tell what
was right and what was wrong, what was good for them and what harmful,
let alone to see what might prove in the long run to be ‘in their best
interest’. They were but a raw human material to be processed and given
the right shape; at least for some considerable time to come they were
bound to remain on the receiving end of social change – to be the objects,
not the subjects, of the ongoing rational overhaul of human society. The
work ethic was one of the pivotal items on the sweeping moral/educational agenda, and the tasks it set for the men of thought and action alike
constituted the core of what came to be dubbed later by the eulogists of
modern departures the ‘civilizing process’.
Like every other set of ethical precepts for proper, decent, meritorious
conduct, the work ethic was simultaneously a constructive vision and a
prescription for a demolishing job. It denied legitimacy to the habits,
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
11
preferences or desires entertained by the human targets of the ethical
crusade. It painted the pattern for the right kind of behaviour, but above all
it cast suspicion upon everything that the people earmarked for ethical
training might have been doing while unschooled and unforced. Their
inclinations could not be trusted; free to act as they wished and left to their
own whims or predilections, they would rather starve than make an effort,
wallow in filth rather than care about self-improvement, put a momentary,
ephemeric diversion above more distant yet steady happiness, and all in all
prefer doing nothing to doing work. All these morbid, uncontrolled
impulses were part of the ‘tradition’ the emerging industry had to stand up
to, fight against, and in the end exterminate. As Max Weber (in Michael
Rose’s apt summary) was to point out, looking back on the job already
performed, the work ethic ‘amounted to an attack’ on the ‘traditionalism of
ordinary workers’ who ‘had operated with a fixed image of their material
needs which led them to prefer leisure and to forego opportunities to
increase their income by working harder or longer’. Traditionalism ‘was
disparaged’.10
Indeed, for the pioneers of the brave new world of modernity, ‘tradition’ was a dirty word. It stood for the morally disgraceful and
condemnable inclinations that the work ethic rose up against: the inclinations of the creatures of habit to settle today for what they had yesterday,
for eschewing ‘the more’ and neglecting the better if getting it called for an
extra effort (in fact, for surrendering to a crude, cruel, off-putting and
incomprehensible, alien regime). The officially named enemies in the war
declared by the work ethic against the ‘traditionalism’ of the pre-industrial
poor were ostensibly the modesty of human needs and the mediocrity of
human wants. The actual battles – most ferocious and merciless battles –
were waged against the reluctance of would-be factory hands to suffer the
discomfort and indignity of a work regime they neither desired nor
understood, and most certainly would not have chosen by their own
volition.
Work or perish
The work ethic was meant to kill two birds with one stone: resolve the
labour-supply problems of burgeoning industry, and dispose of one of
the most vexing nuisances the post-traditional society had to encounter –
the necessity to provide for the needs of those who for one reason or
another could not catch up with the change of circumstances, make ends
meet and eke out their own existence under the new conditions. Not
everyone could be pushed through the treadmills of factory labour; there
were invalids, the weak, sick and old who by no stretch of imagination
could be envisaged as coping with the harsh demands of industrial
employment. Brian Inglis portrayed the mood of the time:
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
12
Work, consumerism and the new poor
. . . the case gained ground that the destitute were expendable, whether or not they were to blame for their condition. Had there been
any way simply to get rid of them, without risk to society, Ricardo
and Malthus would certainly have recommended it, and governments
would equally certainly have given it their favourable attention,
provided that it did not entail any increase in taxation.11
But no such method ‘simply to get rid of them’ was available, and in its
absence another, less perfect, solution needed to be found. The precept of
work – any work, on any condition – as the sole decent, morally passable
way of gaining one’s right to live went a long way towards finding it. No
one spelled out this ‘second best’ strategy in more blunt and candid terms
than Thomas Carlyle in his 1837 essay on Chartism:
If paupers are made miserable, paupers will needs decline in
multitude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers: stop up the granarycrevices, afflict with continual mewing, alarm, and going-off of traps,
your ‘chargeable labourers’ disappear, and cease from the establishment. A still briefer method is that of arsenic; perhaps even a milder,
where otherwise permissible.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her monumental study of the idea of poverty,
unpacks this view in the following fashion:
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
Paupers, like rats, could indeed be eliminated by this method, or at
least driven out of sight. All that was required was the determination
to treat them like rats, on the assumption that the ‘poor and luckless
are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated’.12
In the efforts to cause the paupers to ‘decline in multitude’ the contribution of the work ethic was indeed priceless. That ethic asserted, after
all, the moral superiority of any kind of life, however miserable, providing
it was supported by the wages of labour. Armed with such an ethical
canon, the well-wishing reformers could proclaim the principle of ‘less
eligibility’ of all ‘unearned’ assistance which society might have offered its
poor, and consider that principle a deeply moral step towards a more
humane society. ‘Less eligibility’ meant that the conditions purveyed to
people relying on relief instead of wages must make their life yet less
attractive than the life of the poorest and the most wretched among the
hired labourers. It was hoped that the more the life of the non-working
poor were degraded and the deeper they descended into destitution, the
more tempting or at least the less unendurable would appear to them the
lot of those working poor who had sold their labour in exchange for
the most miserable of wages; and so the cause of the work ethic would be
helped and its triumph brought nearer.
These and similar considerations must have been high in the minds of
the ‘Poor Law’ reformers of the 1820s and 1830s, who after protracted and
at times acrimonious debate came to a virtually unanimous decision to
Bauman, Zygmunt.. Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, McGraw-Hill Education, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/oculcarleton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=287901.
Created from oculcarleton-ebooks on 2024-03-03 01:49:13.
Copyright © 2004. McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved.
The meaning of work: producing the work ethic
13
confine