Religion of Work and Welfare

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.4 • 997 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The religion of work and welfare: Laurie Taylor explores the way in which our understanding of jobs and joblessness has become entangled with religious ideologies. He's joined by Tom Boland, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University College, Cork, who argues that Western culture has ‘faith’ in the labour market as a test of the worth of each individual. For those who are out of work, welfare is now less a means of support than a means of purification and redemption where job seeking becomes a form of pilgrimage.

Also, Carolyn Chen, Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, explores how the restructuring of work is transforming religious and spiritual experience in late capitalism. She spent five years conducting an ethnographic study in Silicon Valley and found that tech companies have brought religion into the workplace, in ways that replace churches, temples, and synagogues in workers’ lives and satisfy needs for belonging, identity, purpose, and transcendence. What happens when work replaces religion and are there wider lessons for workers beyond the niche world of high tech?

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:44.7	BBC.co. UK. Hello well you've got a nice soft job remarked a guest at the
0:51.4	party I attended last Saturday you know just reading a couple of books and then talking about them on the radio.
0:56.4	It's not what you'd call real work, is it? Well, it was a remark which took me straight back to my teenageers.
1:02.2	To the time when I left school with only a couple of
1:04.3	mediocre A levels and a collection of rejection slips from universities and had to
1:09.0	face the prospect of, well, not having an actual, a real job. I knew this future had to be avoided I mean how could my parents retain any sense of family pride when they had to explain to the neighbors that their eldest son was well on the dole At the time this meant that any old job was better than none.
1:26.0	I might not be able to boast about the two years I spent carrying pressure
1:30.0	cookies up and down ladders in a mail order warehouse or expect any plaudits for my three years
1:35.4	as a sales clerk in the offices of a large Rayon company. But at least these dull unpromising
1:41.2	jobs meant that I left home at 8 in the morning and got home after 6 in the evening
1:46.3	just like all those people with more fulfilling work.
1:49.5	I was again reminded of this sense of real guilt by a new book which makes compelling
1:55.6	links between deep-seated religious concepts and our contemporary views of work
	...

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