Saturday I received an email asking me if I was planning on submitting comments to a review of employment standards. It was the first I'd heard of the review and the deadline was yesterday. What the hell, I worked all out for two days and sent something in by the deadline.
I won't copy my submission to the list because it's ten pages long and probably contains too much local reference to be of interest to a larger audience. There is a part of it that may have broader currency, though. I was dissecting the Ministry of Skills Development and Labour's discussion paper with particular attention to its use of the buzzwords "flexibility and competitiveness". Two notions occurred to me. One was that the juxtaposition of the terms implied a comically restricted version of the classical Marxian formula, "From each *employer* according to his ability; to each *employer* according to his or her need." The idea of the "Bosses' International" struck me as the absurd but utterly logical conclusion of the one-note, market-knows-best fundamentalism. The other notion was that the term "competitiveness" had more to do with "gung ho" team spirit than with price. This tied in with a courtly, even romantic idea of *service* quite at odds with the modern capitalist wage labour or cash nexus. Shakespeare highlighted the contrast in Act II, Scene III of As You Like It. In that scene the loyal Adam greets Orlando, "O, my gentle master! O my sweet master!" He warns Orlando of the ill intent of Orlando's treacherous older brother, Oliver, and offers him his life savings, "Here is the gold; And all this I give you. Let me be your servant:" Orlando responds with praise for Adam's old-fashioned loyalty and contrasts it with the typical sloth and selfishness of modern servants: O good old man, how well in thee appears The constant service of the antique world, When service sweat for duty, not for meed! Thou art not for the fashion of these times, Where none will sweat but for promotion, And having that, do choke their service up Meed is an archaic word meaning earned reward or wage. The idea of sweating for something other than remuneration may itself seem archaic outside of the contemporary example of sports and perhaps especially there. But the sports example at least nostalgically brings to mind the notion of competitiveness as a willingness to go all out for glory, honour, the home team or some such non-monetary pursuit. There is the lingering suspicion that work motivated solely by expectation of monetary reward will be performed more or less grudgingly. Gosh, I wonder why. Orlando's allusion to the *constant* service of the antique world is useful in highlighting the appeal of flexibility or just-in-time labour. The appeal is its variable cost. Now here's the deal: the employer should have no obligation to the employee other than the market price for the actual labour time required; meanwhile the employee should perform AS IF "for duty, not for meed." As standards go, such an arrangement sounds more like a double standard than an employment standard. I don't want to take credit for discovering the resonance of the Shakespeare scene. Sidney and Beatrice Webb mentioned it in a letter to the London Times dated one hundred years ago -- December 6, 1901 to be exact. They used it to illustrate the venerability and persistence of employers' complaints that contemporary workers don't show the same devotion to duty as in the old days. Ah, those *were* the days, my friend.
