Most of us, if we’re honest, have an uneasy relationship with work.
Depending on what you do, how you do it and who you do it for, work can be emancipatory or it can be utterly soul-wrecking. For many it’s a bit of both, or it occupies a grey area of our lives, contained within boundaries we have had to erect for it.
It might seem churlish to describe work on these terms. We need to work in order to survive – and the reality or even just the prospect of joblessness has been brought into sharp relief by the devastation caused by the Covid crisis.
Philip Larkin famously discussed work as the Toad that squats upon him: “six days a week it soils, with its sickening poison”.
Now, miserable old sod that he was, Larkin might have been onto something – hence the popularity of his poem Toads, and its follow-up, Toads Revisited.
Most labour is not inspiring or emancipatory – it is drudge work carried out because you have entered into a contract with your employer whereby they extract surplus from your efforts over and above what you’re being paid to do and call that profit. For many throughout the world, it is dirty, dangerous and life-threatening.
That is also the basis for the economic system that we live under. Capitalism can only exist through exploiting labour – there is no other way of looking at this. In the voluntary sector we are fortunate in many ways – not least of all in that we have the opportunity and the means to do things differently.
We live and work in the same economic system as the public and private sectors, but the unique nature of what we do and how we are funded allows some space to move and gives us the opportunity to at least budge the Toad somewhat. It’ll still be there looking at us, glassy-eyed every Monday morning, but maybe we can begin to approach it on better terms – who knows, maybe even fondly.
The voluntary sector trades in social capital and part of the means of calculating that is not just outcomes for service users or beneficiaries, but how we treat those who create the product – our workers and volunteers.
We are uniquely placed to provide a lead to the other sectors of society in how things can be done better. And impressively, the changes forced upon us by the Covid crisis have allowed us to do just that.
As we show in this month’s TFN, the voluntary sector is leading the way in pioneering methods of flexible working which suit both employers and the employed. We have shown that some management shibboleths (the necessity of being tied to an office and a desk after enduring the trials of the daily commute, for example) were constructs of an era now gone, but clung onto nevertheless.
As the lights come on at four, at the end of another year, to nick a line from Larkin again, we have shown a fleetness of foot that the lolloping Toad struggles to keep up with.
Let’s see more of that in 2021. How we work in the voluntary sector reflects the best of what we do and are trying to do.
Let’s keep confounding the Toad.
Graham Martin is editor of TFN.
