WHAT IS WORK?

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 23, 28 January 1928, Page 20

WHAT IS WORK?

FACTORY WORKER AND,DILETTANTE COMPARED. , The working classes have grown very disrespectful, the, Home Secretary may have reflected, in these degenerate days, comments the "Manchester \GuaTdian." But the point is a nice one. What is work? Sir William Joynson-Hicks will probably fail to convince a mill worker that even a hard day spent in the "best club in England"—a place whore, as one who knew it well remarked'—"a man can neither work no rest," can be accurately defined as work.' Indeed, the comparison is a difficult one: to work, to one's own time, in a position of authority and dignity, in comfortable surroundings for a fourfigure salary, with the opportunity of seeing the immediate fruits of one's industry and the knowledge that' one is a very important person—how can this seem to be work to a "factory hand"? The Home Secretary may indeed work hard and for long hours, but such is the injustice which arises from the difference of position that he will never get the credit for it from men and women whose earnings (though for only eight hours? labour in a heated factory) cannot in any case produce more than a twentieth of his income. Industrialism has brought no greater evil than this—that it has divided the days of the vast majority of men and women into two parts— the working part and the living" part.. It is for this reason that men like William Morris denounced industrial civilisation and eulogised the Middle Ages, during which, they believed, the ordinary craftsman at least could find some happiness and some scope for his talents in his daily work. As it is, work to the Home Secretary means a full opportunity to use his powers and abilities in a task which he has voluntarily accepted; to the mill hand work is that portion of the day during which he it not his own master; the eight hours which ia devoured by economic necessity and controlled by an employer. As long as this division remains the Home Secretary and all the hard-working upper classes who can find jobs which satiafy their desires and ambitions are likely to be misunderstood by the great man of men and women to whom work and freedom seem necessarily contradictory conceptions.