However, the existence of a "new work ethic" has been challenged by many who say that it is an enormous exaggeration; those who take this view argue that the great majority of workers in the main sectors of industry remain relatively satisfied, and that those workers who have demonstrated dissatisfaction point to traditional "bread and butter" concerns (wages, hours, fringe benefits) as its cause.
Let us turn now to an investigation of actual experiences that have been reported, to see, first, if there is in fact a new work configuration, and, if so, whether its dimensions match those of the "new work ethic"-that is, whether they are appropriately interpreted by this formulation.
- Beginning in the antipoverty period of the sixties, blacks, minorities, and poor workers began to reject various types of "dead-end" jobs, "dirty" work, domestic work, etc., and demanded jobs that were "meaningful," served the community, provided training and education, respect, and the possibility for advancement.
- Teachers, government workers, social workers, counselors, and other professionals evidenced discontent with their lack of autonomy on the job, and with the bureaucratization that prevents them from using and improving their skills and knowledge. The rapid growth of unionization of these workers is perhaps, in part, a reflection of this discontent.
- Quite a number of women began to reject their traditional work roles-e.g., housework, child care, etc.-and demanded much more access to, and equality in, paid work outside of the home. This is evidenced, in part, by the tremendous increase of the number of women in the labor force-they now make up more than 40 per cent of the work force-and is reflected in the Women's Movement.
- There seems to be considerable desire on the part of at least a portion of workers to resist compulsory overtime. The heart of the 1973 settlement at the Big 3 automobile companies involved reduction in the work demands upon both the present labor force with the restrictions upon compulsory overtime work, and those close to retirement with the instituting of a full "30-and-out" retirement plan.
- There is also evidence reported by the American Management Association that some managers have expressed dissatisfaction with their work and the fact that they are being "robbed by computers" of their decision-making roles. Moreover, career change by professionals managers, and executives in their forties and fifties is now a common occurrence.
- Public opinion poll data indicate that the higher the educational level attained by workers, the more they express dissatisfaction with their jobs. It is clear that the level of education of those in the work force continues to rise.
Thus, while we cannot subscribe to the notion of a "new work ethic" in which, all forms of discontent are focused on the quest for increased participation, greater autonomy, etc., we note a wide range of dissatisfactions, including those that have led to the formulation of a new ethic. However, we do believe that the demand for a humanization of the work process, which is a relatively recent phenomenon in the industrial sector that has caught the attention of the media, will become increasingly popular due to shifts in the kind of work being done and in those who do it.
In recent years there has been an enormous increase in the proportion of service workers in the labor force. They are employed in such interpersonal occupations as sales and advertising, personal services, and government-provided services going far beyond health, education, and welfare to day care, family planning, mental health, and new services concerned with the dying, the handicapped, etc. Predictions indicate that this trend will continue.
While service work has been routinized and bureaucratized, the intrinsic nature of the work itself and preparation for it, particularly in the human service areas, have traditionally required more autonomy, relational skills, and self-expression. Moreover, historically, service work has been less hierarchically organized than work in the goods-producing sector. As Bellihas written, the latter is a world "in which men are treated as 'things' because one can more easily coordinate things than men." But, as Fuchs2 has pointed out, the service industries have traditionally operated on a smaller scale with more self-employment, and we would argue that work in this sector, where there is greater emphasis on serving and on relations between people, lends itself less readily to bureaucratization.
However, as the services have come to be organized on a larger scale, such as in school, health, and mental health systems, a conflict has arisen between the new hierarchical practices and the old tradition of humanized relationships. One of the rallying cries in the human service professions is that emerging bureaucracies are stifling the creativity that professional workers have been trained to bring to the job and expect once on it. To some extent, it is the traditional model of human service work that is implicitly affecting the new expectations about work in general.
In addition to the expansion in the service sector in general, there has been a change in the composition of the work force; it is increasingly younger, more educated, and includes considerably more women and minority group members. These groups are not only being employed in greater proportion in the old industrial sector, but their numbers are disproportionately great in the expanding service sector. The discontent that they expressed in national life in the 1960s, largely around consumer issues, seems to be reflected more and more in the work force itself. Consumer-oriented demands-focused in the sixties on the quality of life, the environment, community control, welfare rights, student participation, personal liberation, consumer boycotts, and alternative life-styles-now seem to be focused on the work place, and are reflected in concern about health and working conditions in the factory and greater participation and autonomy on the job in both the goods-producing and service sectors.
An additional source of the consumer orientation may be found in the role of leisure or non-work time in our society. By all measures leisure time has increased. Johnson has reported that the percentage of his life the average twenty-year-old workingman spends in the work force decreased from 93 per cent in 1900 to 84 per cent in 1968. While this has resulted in part from a greater life expectancy and longer retirement, there is also indication that increasing numbers of people are working part-time simply because they want to work less. More leisure time is also acquired by the increasing number of college students and others who choose to continue their education, by the affluent and near-affluent, and also by the unemployed whose leisure time is imposed.
The character of leisure time in our consumer-oriented society is quite different from the highly structured, repetitive character of much work. Such unbounded time allows for more autonomous decision making, is less subject to hierarchical supervisory relationships, promises the possibility of self-development, makes possible participation in self-selected volunteer activities that are not characterized by the usual work norms, and call for less direct pressure and competition (although naturally there is some spillover from the competitive work world). Many of these consumer-oriented, non-work values have been brought into the work place, particularly by women, youth, blacks and other minority groups.
Implications for Mental Health Workers
Social workers, counselors, and a variety of other mental health professionals and paraprofessionals have been deeply concerned by the bureaucratizing, routinizing features that have come to characterize their work structures. Andre Gorz has noted that these workers experience the possibility of putting their creative abilities to work; they feel over-trained, and underused. Their training, skills, and personality have been stifled on the job by over-control and top-down directives that leave little room for discretion, autonomy, and the use of an authentic serving, caring orientation. They are alienated from their work and of course from the consumers, their clientele. The servers and the served both suffer. If their mental health and their services are to be improved, the work process clearly must allow for much more decentralization, local autonomy, individualization, involvement, opportunities for growth and for responding to the consumer rather than to the bureaucrat.
In the industrial field, it is also becoming increasingly clear that the mental health hazards of alienating work include a great increase in drug use, alcoholism, absenteeism, accidents on the job, as well as depression, withdrawal, and all forms of mental disturbance.
Thus we are arguing that the reorganization of work to provide greater choice, autonomy, and decision making should lead to the decrease of mental disturbances and to the increase of mental health as people become less alienated.
This is true for all kinds of work in our society-white collar, blue collar, managerial, professional, industrial, and service-and for all groups-women, men, blacks, young people, students, professors, teachers, paraprofessionals, and so on. The problems of alienated work are not new to our day, but they are more pronounced due to the far greater expectations of large groups in the population. The mental health profession consequently has to give greater attention to the issues and problems around the nature of work, and the disturbances arising from it.
Conclusion
We have seen a shift in the kind of work done and in those who do it. It is not surprising, then, that there are new feelings about work. They derive from the great expansion of the service sector, with its people-serving, relational ethos; the entry of women, youths, and minority groups into the service work sector and to a lesser extent into industry, and from the consumer-oriented values they bring with them A into the work place; and from the increasing leisure time that Americans have at their disposal, which has led to new and different expectations about work roles. That something new is going on in the work place seems to be clear. Surely it is more than one group of social scientists stumbling over another.
