Did67 wrote:we must remain aware that it is at this price that we all have the material comfort we enjoy ...
I do not agree at all with this hasty deduction: the reduction of employees and their putting "under pressure" is intended to generate additional profits and not to increase customer satisfaction. Before this new and regrettable managerial approach, a larger and more available number of employees could only be more available and more efficient in terms of comfort that you mention.
Elsewhere you say that all value comes from work, however
what is worth cannot be quantified (okay, I admit, I pretend not to understand, but what a beautiful subject of meditation! (to add to that of Lietseu)).
In a world devoted to the tyranny of numbers, should we be surprised to be only a number and to be treated as such?
I generally agree with the analysis of
Christine although I wish to express it in a slightly different form.
I must first emphasize that manual labor * has long suffered from great discredit and, therefore, it seemed consistent with this judgment that poor working conditions were associated with it.
Non-manual work ** which formed the logically antithetical pole was then exempt from these constraints: the fact that the degradation of work as a value now concerns all social categories introduces major confusion in sociological benchmarks, hence the violence of the feeling.
To put it another way, there was a simple and therefore well understood user manual of societal functioning, many applied themselves to follow the rules, sometimes with some success, then these rules became less and less effective from then on. that they were more followed!
First disarray, soon followed by a second: these rules are now officially declared obsolete.
* Manual work is considered degrading, it seems to me, because it refers to nature and to its own nature (I recommend reading Terrasson on "The hatred of nature"). The morbid attraction exerted by the virtual economy compared to the real economy seems to me to proceed from a fairly similar approach.
** I cannot bring myself to qualify as "intellectual" work a work which is not manual but often requires much less thought!