The work is the activity through which humans produce their own existence. This statement is in line with Karl Marx’s definition of what work would be. The idea is not that the human being exists because of work, but it is through him that he produces the means to stay alive. That said, the impact of work and its context have a great influence on the construction of the subject. Thus, there are areas of knowledge dedicated only to studying the different ways in which work relationships and their consequences in the lives of each of us are constituted.
It would not be difficult, then, to imagine that when labor relations change in the flow of our history, our social structures are also changed, especially the way our relationships were structured, positions in the social hierarchy, forms of segregation and, to a large extent, cultural aspects built around labor relations.
Work throughout history
Take for example the rapid process of change that hit European countries at the beginning of the 18th century, which today we call the First Industrial Revolution. Previously, labor relations were strongly agrarian, constituted within the family context. Parents’ work was generally passed on to their children, which guaranteed the construction of a strong identity linked to the work to which the subject was dedicated. The individual was connected to the land, where he earned his livelihood and that of his family. The economy was based on the exchange of services or concrete products, and not on the fictitious value added to a currency. In the same way, labor was also linked to the direct acquisition of consumer goods, and not to a variable amount of a salary paid with a currency of an equally variable value. The social structure was rigid, with little or no mobility for the subjects, that is, a peasant was born and died a peasant in the same way that a nobleman was born and died noble.
The changes brought about by the emergence of the industry have profoundly altered the sense established for work and for the subject’s relationship with him. The impersonality in the assembly lines that the adoption of Fordism brought, in which thousands of people huddled in the face of repetitive activity on an assembly line, without often even seeing the final result of their effort, became the main characteristic industrial work.
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The present and future work
The transformations in our work relations did not stop in the Industrial Revolution, because even today the character of our activities is changing. However, the forces that motivate these changes are different. The globalization is one of the most significant phenomena of human history and in the same way that changed our social relationships more intimate, also modified our working relationships. The possibility of being interconnected at all times has shortened distances and lengthened our work period. Formal paid work, which was previously enclosed between the walls of factories and offices, today chases us home and demands part of our free time, given the increasing competitiveness inherent in the labor market.
The great flexibility and the demand for an increasingly specialized workforce make the worker dedicate more and more of his life to professional development. This is one of the origins of the great social inequalities of contemporary society, since only those who have the time and money to dedicate themselves to the expensive and demanding professional training process, are able to move up the social and economic hierarchy.
The introduction of automation in the production of consumer goods has largely made human labor obsolete, increasing the size of the army of workers and decreasing the value of the labor force in countries with large populations, but with low specialization . As a result, the work situation only gets worse, as worrying about the employee’s well-being is expensive and, in the conception that prioritizes monetary profit, it is not an investment that guarantees immediate income.