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= Job =
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Introduction
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Work or labor (labour in Commonwealth English) is the intentional
activity people perform to support the needs and desires of
themselves, other people, or organizations. In the context of
economics, work can be seen as the human activity that contributes
(along with other factors of production) towards the goods and
services within an economy.
Work has existed in all human societies, either as paid or unpaid
work, from gathering natural resources by hand in hunter-gatherer
groups to operating complex technologies that substitute for physical
or even mental effort within an agricultural, industrial, or
post-industrial society. One's regular participation or role in work
is an 'occupation', or 'job.' All but the simplest tasks in any work
require specific skills, tools, and other resources, such as material
for manufacturing goods. Humanity has developed a variety of
institutions for group coordination of work, such as government
programs, nonprofit organizations, cooperatives, and corporations.
Cultures and individuals across history have expressed a wide range of
attitudes towards work. Besides objective differences, one culture
may organize or attach social status to work roles through formalized
professions which may carry specialized job titles and provide people
with a career. Throughout history, work has been intimately connected
with other aspects of society and politics, such as power, class,
tradition, rights, and privileges. Accordingly, the division of labour
is a prominent topic across the social sciences as both an abstract
concept and a characteristic of individual cultures. Work may also
present a threat to individual human happiness and survival, either
through dirty, dangerous, and demeaning occupations or in extreme
cases, from death by overwork.
Some people have also engaged in critique of work and expressed a wish
to reduce or abolish it entirely, for example in Paul Lafargue in his
book 'The Right to Be Lazy,' David Graeber's 'Bullshit Jobs', or 'The
Abolition of Work' by Bob Black. Real world programs to eliminate the
economic necessity for lifelong work first emerged through the concept
of retirement, and have more recently been extended to all adults
through experimentation with universal basic income.
Description
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Work can take many different forms, as varied as the environments,
tools, skills, goals, and institutions around a worker. This term
refers to the general activity of performing tasks, whether they are
paid or unpaid, formal or informal. Work encompasses all types of
productive activities, including employment, household chores,
volunteering, and creative pursuits. It is a broad term that
encompasses any effort or activity directed towards achieving a
particular goal.
Because sustained effort is a necessary part of many human activities,
what qualifies as work is often a matter of context. Specialization is
one common feature that distinguishes work from other activities. For
example, a sport is a job for a professional athlete who earns their
livelihood from it, but a hobby for someone playing for fun in their
community. An element of advance planning or expectation is also
common, such as when a paramedic provides medical care while on duty
and fully equipped rather than performing first aid off-duty as a
bystander in an emergency. Self-care and basic habits like personal
grooming are also not typically considered work.
While a later gift, trade, or payment may retroactively affirm an
activity as productive, this can exclude work like volunteering or
activities within a family setting, like parenting or housekeeping. In
some cases, the distinction between work and other activities is
simply a matter of common sense within a community. However, an
alternative view is that labeling any activity as work is somewhat
subjective, as Mark Twain expressed in the "whitewashed fence" scene
of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'.
History
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Humans have varied their work habits and attitudes over time. As
humans are diurnal, they work mainly during the day, but some
occupations require night shift work. Hunter-gatherer societies vary
their "work" intensity according to the seasonal availability of
plants and the periodic migration of prey animals. The development of
agriculture led to more sustained work practices, but work still
changed with the seasons, with intense sustained effort during
harvests (for example) alternating with less focused periods such as
winters. In the early modern era, Protestantism and proto-capitalism
emphasized the moral and personal advantages of hard work.
The periodic re-invention of slavery encouraged more consistent work
activity in the working class, and capitalist industrialization
intensified demands on workers to keep up with the pace of machines.
Restrictions on the hours of work and the ages of workers followed,
with worker demands for time off increasing, but modern office work
retains traces of expectations of sustained, concentrated work, even
in affluent societies.
Forms of work take on changes over time in response to technological
and societal changes. According to a 2024 study, the majority of
current employment in the United States was in occupations that had
been introduced since 1940.
Kinds of work
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There are several ways to categorize and compare different kinds of
work. In economics, one popular approach is the three-sector model or
variations of it. In this view, an economy can be separated into three
broad categories:
* Primary sector, which extracts food, raw materials, and other
resources from the environment
* Secondary sector, which manufactures physical products, refines
materials, and provides utilities
* Tertiary sector, which provides services and helps administer the
economy
In complex economies with high specialization, these categories are
further subdivided into industries that produce a focused subset of
products or services. Some economists also propose additional sectors
such as a "knowledge-based" quaternary sector, but this division is
neither standardized nor universally accepted.
Another common way of contrasting work roles is ranking them according
to a criterion, such as the amount of skill, experience, or seniority
associated with a role. The progression from apprentice through
journeyman to master craftsman in the skilled trades is one example
with a long history and analogs in many cultures.
Societies also commonly rank different work roles by perceived status,
but this is more subjective and goes beyond clear progressions within
a single industry. Some industries may be seen as more prestigious
than others overall, even if they include roles with similar
functions. At the same time, a wide swathe of roles across all
industries may be afforded more status (e.g. managerial roles) or less
(like manual labor) based on characteristics such as a job being
low-paid or dirty, dangerous and demeaning.
Other social dynamics, like how labor is compensated, can even exclude
meaningful tasks from a society's conception of work. For example, in
modern market-economies where wage labor or piece work predominates,
unpaid work may be omitted from economic analysis or even cultural
ideas of what qualifies as work.
At a political level, different roles can fall under separate
institutions where workers have qualitatively different power or
rights. In the extreme, the least powerful members of society may be
stigmatized (as in untouchability) or even violently forced (via
slavery) into performing the least desirable work. Complementary to
this, elites may have exclusive access to the most prestigious work,
largely symbolic sinecures, or even a "life of leisure".
Unusual Occupations
In the diverse world of work, there exist some truly bizarre and
unusual occupations that often defy conventional expectations. These
unique jobs showcase the creativity and adaptability of humans in
their pursuit of livelihood.
Workers
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Individual workers require sufficient health and resources to succeed
in their tasks.
Physiology
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As living beings, humans require a baseline of good health, nutrition,
rest, and other physical needs in order to reliably exert themselves.
This is particularly true of physical labor that places direct demands
on the body, but even largely mental work can cause stress from
problems like long hours, excessive demands, or a hostile workplace.
Particularly intense forms of manual labor often lead workers to
develop physical strength necessary for their job. However, this
activity does not necessarily improve a worker's overall physical
fitness like exercise, due to problems like overwork or a small set of
repetitive motions. In these physical jobs, maintaining good posture
or movements with proper technique is also a crucial skill for
avoiding injury. Ironically, white-collar workers who are sedentary
throughout the workday may also suffer from long-term health issues
due to a lack of physical activity.
Training
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Learning the necessary skills for work is often a complex process in
its own right, requiring intentional training. In traditional
societies, know-how for different tasks can be passed to each new
generation through oral tradition and working under adult guidance.
For work that is more specialized and technically complex, however, a
more formal system of education is usually necessary. A complete
curriculum ensures that a worker in training has some exposure to all
major aspects of their specialty, in both theory and practice.
Equipment and technology
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Tool use has been a central aspect of human evolution and is also an
essential feature of work. Even in technologically advanced societies,
many workers' toolsets still include a number of smaller hand-tools,
designed to be held and operated by a single person, often without
supplementary power. This is especially true when tasks can be handled
by one or a few workers, do not require significant physical power,
and are somewhat self-paced, like in many services or handicraft
manufacturing.
For other tasks needing large amounts of power, such as in the
construction industry, or involving a highly-repetitive set of simple
actions, like in mass manufacturing, complex machines can carry out
much of the effort. The workers present will focus on more complex
tasks, operating controls, or performing maintenance. Over several
millennia, invention, scientific discovery, and engineering principles
have allowed humans to proceed from creating simple machines that
merely redirect or amplify force, through engines for harnessing
supplementary power sources, to today's complex, regulated systems
that automate many steps within a work process.
In the 20th century, the development of electronics and new
mathematical insights led to the creation and widespread adoption of
fast, general-purpose computers. Just as mechanization can substitute
for the physical labor of many human beings, computers allow for the
partial automation of mental work previously carried out by human
workers, such as calculations, document transcription, and basic
customer service requests. Research and development of related
technologies like machine learning and robotics continues into the
21st century.
Beyond tools and machines used to actively perform tasks, workers
benefit when other passive elements of their work and environment are
designed properly. This includes everything from personal items like
workwear and safety gear to features of the workspace itself like
furniture, lighting, air quality, and even the underlying
architecture.
Organizations
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Even if workers are personally ready to perform their jobs,
coordination is required for any effort outside of individual
subsistence to succeed. At the level of a small team working on a
single task, only cooperation and good communication may be necessary.
As the complexity of a work process increases though, requiring more
planning or more workers focused on specific tasks, a reliable
organization becomes more critical.
Economic organizations often reflect social thought common to their
time and place, such as ideas about human nature or hierarchy. These
unique organizations can also be historically significant, even
forming major pillars of an economic system. In European history, for
instance, the decline of guilds and rise of joint-stock companies goes
hand-in-hand with other changes, like the growth of centralized states
and capitalism.
In industrialized economies, labor unions are another significant
organization. In isolation, a worker that is easily replaceable in the
labor market has little power to demand better wages or conditions. By
banding together and interacting with business owners as a corporate
entity, the same workers can claim a larger share of the value created
by their labor. While a union does require workers to sacrifice some
autonomy in relation to their coworkers, it can grant workers more
control over the work process itself in addition to material benefits.
Institutions
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The need for planning and coordination extends beyond individual
organizations to society as a whole too. Every successful work project
requires effective resource allocation to provide necessities,
materials, and investment (such as equipment and facilities). In
smaller, traditional societies, these aspects can be mostly regulated
through custom, though as societies grow, more extensive methods
become necessary.
These complex institutions, however, still have roots in common human
activities. Even the free markets of modern capitalist societies rely
fundamentally on trade, while command economies, such as in many
communist states during the 20th century, rely on a highly
bureaucratic and hierarchical form of redistribution.
Other institutions can affect workers even more directly by delimiting
practical day-to-day life or basic legal rights. For example, a caste
system may restrict families to a narrow range of jobs, inherited from
parent to child. In serfdom, a peasant has more rights than a slave
but is attached to a specific piece of land and largely under the
power of the landholder, even requiring permission to physically
travel outside the land-holding. How institutions play out in
individual workers' lives can be complex too; in most societies where
wage-labor predominates, workers possess equal rights by law and
mobility in theory. Without social support or other resources,
however, the necessity of earning a livelihood may force a worker to
cede some rights and freedoms in fact.
Values
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Societies and subcultures may value work in general, or specific kinds
of it, differently. When social status or virtue is strongly
associated with leisure, then work can become indicative of low social
rank and have a lower value. Conversely, a society may hold strongly
to a work ethic where work is seen as virtuous. German sociologist Max
Weber hypothesized that European capitalism originated in a Protestant
work ethic, which emerged with the Reformation. Some Christian
theologians appeal to the Old Testament's Book of Genesis in regards
to work. According to Genesis 1, humans were created in the image of
God, and in Genesis 2, Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden to "work
it and keep it". Dorothy L. Sayers has argued that "work is the
natural exercise and function of man - the creature who is made in the
image of his Creator." Similarly, John Paul II said in that by his
work, man shares in the image of his creator.
Christian theologians see the fall of man as profoundly affecting
human work. In Genesis 3:17, God said to Adam, "cursed is the ground
because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your
life". Leland Ryken said that, because of the fall, "many of the tasks
we perform in a fallen world are inherently distasteful and
wearisome." Christian theologians interpret that through the fall,
work has become toil, but John Paul II says work is good for man in
spite of this toil, and that "perhaps, in a sense, because of it",
because work is something that corresponds to man's dignity and
through it, he achieves fulfilment as a human being. Drawing on
Aristotle, Ryken suggests that the moral ideal is the golden mean
between the two extremes of being lazy and a workaholic. Some
Christian theologians also draw on the doctrine of redemption to
discuss the concept of work. Oliver O'Donovan said that although work
is a gift of creation, it is "ennobled into mutual service in the
fellowship of Christ." Pope Francis is critical of the hope that
technological progress might diminish the need for work: "the goal
should not be that technological progress increasingly replace human
work, for this would be detrimental to humanity", and McKinsey
suggests work will change, but not end, as a result of automation and
the adoption of artificial intelligence.
For some, work may hold a spiritual value in addition to secular
notions. Especially in some monastic or mystical strands of several
religions, simple manual labor may be held in high regard as a way to
maintain the body, cultivate self-discipline and humility, and focus
the mind.
Current issues
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The contemporary world economy has brought many changes, overturning
some previously widespread labor issues. At the same time, some
longstanding issues remain relevant, and other new ones have emerged.
One issue that continues despite many improvements is slave labor and
human trafficking. Though ideas about universal rights and the
economic benefits of free labor have significantly diminished the
prevalence of outright slavery, it continues in lawless areas, or in
attenuated forms on the margins of many economies.
Another difficulty, which has emerged in most societies as a result of
urbanization and industrialization, is unemployment. While the shift
from a subsistence economy usually increases the overall productivity
of society and lifts many out of poverty, it removes a baseline of
material security from those who cannot find employment or other
support. Governments have tried a range of strategies to mitigate the
problem, such as improving the efficiency of job matching,
conditionally providing welfare benefits or unemployment insurance, or
even directly overriding the labor market through work-relief programs
or a job guarantee. Since a job forms a major part of many workers'
self-identity, unemployment can have severe psychological and social
consequences beyond the financial insecurity it causes.
One more issue, which may not directly interfere with the functioning
of an economy but can have significant indirect effects, is when
governments fail to account for work occurring out-of-view from the
public sphere. This may be important, uncompensated work occurring
every day in private life; or it may be criminal activity that
involves clear but furtive economic exchanges. By ignoring or failing
to understand these activities, economic policies can have
counter-intuitive effects and cause strains on the community and
society.
[[Child labour]]
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Due to various reasons such as the cheap labour, the poor economic
situation of the deprived classes, the weakness of laws and legal
supervision, the migration existence of child labour is very much
observed in different parts of the world.
According to the World Bank Globally rate of child labour have
decreased from 25% to 10% between 60s to the early years of the 21st
century. Nevertheless, giving the population of the world also
increased the total number of child labourers remains high, with
UNICEF and ILO acknowledging an estimated 168 million children aged
5-17 worldwide were involved in some sort of child labour in 2013.
Some scholars like Jean-Marie Baland and James A. Robinson suggests
any labour by children aged 18 years or less is wrong since this
encourages illiteracy, inhumane work and lower investment in human
capital. In other words, there are moral and economic reasons that
justify a blanket ban on labour from children aged 18 years or less,
everywhere in the world. On the other hand, some scholars like
Christiaan Grootaert and Kameel Ahmady believe that child labour is
the symptom of poverty. If laws ban most lawful work that enables the
poor to survive, the informal economy, illicit operations and
underground businesses will thrive.
See also
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In modern market-economies:
* Job guarantee
* Labour economics
* Trade union
* Volunteering
* Wage slavery
* Workaholic
Labor issues:
* Annual leave
* Informal economy
* Job strain
* Labor rights
* Leave of absence
* Minimum wage
* Occupational safety and health
* Paid time off
* Sick leave
* Unemployment
* Forced labor
* Unpaid work
* Working poor
* Workplace safety standards
Related concepts:
* Critique of work
* Effects of overtime
* Ergonomics
* Flow (psychology)
* Helping behavior
* Occupational burnout
* Occupational stress
* Post-work society
* Problem solving
* Refusal of work
License
=========
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License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job
