What do we work for?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Forget the advent calendar, it’s a ‘strike calendar’ we need to prepare for Christmas this year. Behind today’s window lurks not a festive chocolate but a list of public service stoppages; not a robin on picket fence, but a postie on a picket line.
Seasonal jokes aside, perhaps the heavy flurry of industrial action is a symptom of a deeper unease about the value we place on work.
Critics of the strikes believe we have lost a sense of duty in our public services, that the public service ethos no longer means very much, and that work today is largely contractual rather than covenantal. Supporters of the strikes say there is nothing self-interested about wanting to earn a fair wage and that it’s about recognising the value of public servants, over and above symbolic gestures like doorstep clapping.
Some think we’ve placed too much emphasis on wealth as a measure of worth and that work should be about seeking to do something well, regardless of the monetary reward. Others believe that argument is laden with class-based assumptions and point to the disproportionately high salaries of bosses compared to their low-wage employees who don’t have the choice to be romantic about the idea of a vocation.
What do we work for?
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good evening. It was to have been the first normal Christmas for three years. Instead, it feels like almost every kind of public service worker is lining up to make it as miserable as possible. |
| 0:15.8 | These include the nurses, so lauded during the pandemic, now set to go on strike nationally for the first time, |
| 0:21.8 | they say, as a last resort. The Royal College's website says they're striking to protect patients, |
| 0:27.6 | not the easiest argument to make, but the erosion of their living standards and the state of the |
| 0:32.4 | NHS leave them no choice, they say. The noise you hear is the row over whether public sector workers, including nurses, are badly paid, |
| 0:40.7 | especially if you include their generous pensions. |
| 0:43.8 | Many, nurses and ambulance crews in particular, are widely admired, |
| 0:47.8 | but there's no objective measure of social value, and in the past it didn't seem to matter so much. |
| 0:53.1 | There was the public service ethos, |
| 0:55.2 | a cachet in being seen to be working for the common good, a noble, if sometimes ill-defined, |
| 1:00.6 | idea of duty. Is our whole idea of work changing? Whatever you do, is it merely a means to an end, |
| 1:07.1 | a necessity to earn a living? Or is it more than that, something we need for our physical |
| 1:11.8 | and mental health and self-esteem and the good of society at large? Why do we work? Why should we |
| 1:17.9 | work? Our moral maze tonight. The panel, workers all, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic |
| 1:23.8 | and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh University, the feminist author Ella Weillan, |
| 1:27.9 | the historian Tim Stanley, and the priest and polemicist Charles Fraser. Mona Siddiqui, why do you work? |
| 1:34.8 | Well, I think, as you say, work does give you a sense of dignity and purpose. And I've been |
| 1:39.8 | lucky to have had various dimensions to my work, all of which I really enjoyed. But at the same time, |
| 1:45.1 | I'd be lying if I said that money didn't matter in the way that I felt valued. |
| 1:49.6 | Tim, Jim Salern. We have a moral duty to pay people what they are worth, but I think we also have a |
| 1:55.1 | moral duty to do our jobs well. As work has a moral worth, however quote unquote allegedly mundane, it might be. |
... |
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