Labour or work definition

The underlying problem is obviously very difficult. The specialized vocabularies of various sciences and branches of knowledge do not ordinarily attract description as jargon if they remain sufficiently specialized. The problem is usually the entry of such terms into more general talk and writing. This is very common in the obvious cases of law and administration, where the problem of relations between precise and general terms is often intractable. In branches of knowledge which bear on matters which already have a common general vocabulary the problem is even more acute, since the material reasons for specialized precision are less clear or are absent. It is interesting that it is mainly in relation to psychology and sociology, and studies derived from them, but also in relation to an opposing intellectual position such as Marxism, that some of the most regular dis missive uses of jargon are now found. It is true that specialized internal vocabularies can be developed, in any of these and other areas, to a fault. But it is also true that the use of a new term or the new definition of a concept is often the necessary form of a challenge to other ways of thinking or of indication of new and alternative ways. Every known general position, in matters of art and belief, has its defining terms, and the difference between these and the terms identified as jargon is often no more than one of relative date and familiarity. To run together the senses of jargon as specialized, unfamiliar, belonging to a hostile position, and unintelligible chatter is then at times indeed a jargon: a confident local habit which merely assumes its own intelligibility and generality. See DIALECT L Labour Among the two earliest examples of the use of labour in English are ‘bigin a laboure . . . and make a toure’ and ‘quit o labur, and o soru’ (both c. 1300). These two senses, of work and of pain or trouble, were already closely associated in fw labor, oF, laborem, L; the rw is uncertain but may be related to slipping or staggering under a burden. As a verb labour had a common sense of ploughing or working 128 l a b o u r the land, but it was also extended to other kinds of manual work and to any kind of difficult effort. A labourer was primarily a manual worker: ‘a wreched laborer that lyveth by hys hond’ (c. 1325). The sense of labour as pain was applied to childbirth from C16. The general sense of hard work and difficulty was well summed up in Milton’s So he with difficulty and labour hard Mov’d on, with difficulty and labour hee. (Paradise Lost, II) In the Authorized Version of the Bible, both senses were active: For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou be . . . (Psalm 128:2) The days of our years are threescore and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow. (Psalm 90:10) From C17, except in the special use for childbirth, labour gradually lost its habitual association with pain, though the general and applied senses of difficulty were still strong. The sense of labour as a general social activity came through more clearly, and with a more distinct sense of abstraction. Locke produced a defence of private property on the fact (in its context and bearings highly abstract) of having mixed our labour with the earth (those who most visibly bore the stains of this mixing usually had, in fact, no property). Labour was personified, as in Goldsmith’s The Traveller (1764): ‘Nature . . . Still grants her bliss at Labour’s earnest call’. But the most important change was the introduction of labour as a term in political economy: at first in an existing general sense, ‘the annual labour of every nation’ (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Intro.) but then as a measurable and calculable component: ‘Labour . . . is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’ (ibid., I, i). Where labour, in its most general use, had meant all productive work, it now came to mean that element of production which in combination with capital and materials produced commodities. This new specialized use belongs directly to the systematized understanding of capitalist (q.v.) productive relationships. Phrases like the ‘price of labour’ (Malthus, 1798) and the Labour 129 ‘supply of labour’ took on more precise and more specialized meanings. The effect was well summed up, later, by Beatrice Webb: With the word labour I was, of course, familiar. Coupled mysteriously with its mate capital, this abstract term was always turning up in my father’s conversation, and it occurred and reoccurred in the technical journals and reports of companies which lay on the library table. ‘Water plentiful and labour docile’, ‘The wages of labour are falling to their natural level’ . . . were phrases which puzzled me . . . I never visualized labour as separate men and women of different sorts and kinds . . . labour was an abstraction, which seemed to denote an arithmetically calculable mass of human beings, each individual a repetition of the other . . . (My Apprenticeship, Ch. 1) Yet, as the two phrases she quotes make clear, labour had by this time developed two modern senses: first the economic abstraction of the activity; secondly the social abstraction of that class of people who performed it. The first sense, as we have seen, is earlier. Labour was an abstracted component of production: between the labourer and the object of his labour, as in the older uses, capital had been isolated as a productive component and labour in the specialized and measurable sense was part of the same abstraction. This is the sense of Mrs Webb’s second phrase: ‘the wages of labour’. But her first phrase, ‘labour docile’, is clearly a description of a class. It is not easy to trace the precise emergence of this class description (cf. class). Obviously the habit of referring to the ‘supply of labour’ prepared the ground for it. But the broad social use in response to this kind of assumption may well belong equally, or more, to the defenders of labour, especially from the 1820s. Thus we find Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (1825), by ‘A Labourer’ (Thomas Hodgskin), where one ‘component’ was set against the other but in terms which identified both as social classes. Labour Rewarded (Thompson, 1827) was still, in its title, the activity, but J. F. Bray’s lectures of the 1830s, published as Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedies, had the full sense of a social class. This use was to become common, from this period. While labour, both as a component to be hired and as a ‘pool’ of persons available to be hired (cf. mC19 labour market), was habitually used in capitalist descriptions, this was increasingly countered 130 l a b o u r , l i b e r a l by a self-conscious and self-styled Labour Movement. There were many complex interactions with the more common word trades (which in that older sense gave us trade unions) and with the complex senses of work, worker and working class (see work and class), but the most general sense of a political and economic interest and movement came through in English as Labour. It was most specifically defined in Britain in the Labour Representation League (1869), the Labour Electoral Committee (1887), the Independent Labour Party (1893) and eventually, under its present name, the Labour Party (1906). It is interesting to watch the effects of these modern developments on the old general senses of labour. The special use in childbirth has continued, but otherwise the word is not often used outside its specific modern contexts. It survives in rather self-conscious phrases (‘rest from my labours’) and whenever used is at once understood. Laborious retains its old general sense. But the specializations of the capitalist period have come to predominate: labour costs, labour market, labour relations from one side; labour movement and the titular Labour Party from the other. Labourer, however, is still current, as a particular kind of worker, while work, with all its difficulties, has taken over almost all other general senses. See CAPITALISM, CLASS, WORK Liberal Liberal has, at first sight, so clear a political meaning that some of its further associations are puzzling. Yet the political meaning is comparatively modern, and much of the interesting history of the word is earlier. It began in a specific social distinction, to refer to a class of free men as distinct from others who were not free. It came into English in C14, from fw liberal, oF, liberalis, L, rw liber, L – free man. In its use in liberal arts – ‘artis liberalis’ (1375) – it was predominantly a class term: the skills and pursuits appropriate, as we should now say, to men of independent means and assured social position, as distinct from other skills and pursuits (cf. mechanical) appropriate to a lower class. But there was a significant development of a further sense, in which the pursuits had their own independence: ‘Liberal Sciencis . . . fre scyencis, as gramer, arte, fisike, astronomye, and otheris’ (1422). Yet as with any term which distinguishes some free men from others, a tension remained. The cultivated ideal of the liberal arts was matched by the sense of liberal as generous (‘in giffynge liberal’, 1387), but at the same time this was flanked by the negative sense of 266 w e s t e r n, wo r k industrial–nonindustrial, developed–underdeveloped societies and economies) for West–East as, in some views, a more significant division of the world. But of course North–South, developed from the political and economic form of the West–East contrast, has its own geographical complications. See CIVILIZATION, DEVELOPMENT Work Work is the modern English form of the noun weorc, oE and the verb wyrcan, oE. As our most general word for doing something, and for something done, its range of applications has of course been enormous. What is now most interesting is its predominant specialization to regular paid employment. This is not exclusive; we speak naturally of working in the garden. But, to take one significant example, an active woman, running a house and bringing up children, is distinguished from a woman who works: that is to say, takes paid employment. Again: ‘early man did not work at all in the true sense . . . real work, steady work, labour for one’s livelihood, came into being when agriculture was invented’ (1962). The basic sense of the word, to indicate activity and effort or achievement, has thus been modified, though unevenly and incompletely, by a definition of its imposed conditions, such as ‘steady’ or timed work, or working for a wage or salary: being hired. There is an interesting relation between work and labour (q.v.). Labour had a strong medieval sense of pain and toil; work, earlier, in one of its senses, had also the strong sense of toil. Toil itself was derived from a Latin rw for stirring and crushing, and came through first as a synonym for trouble and turmoil before it acquired its sense of arduous labour in C14. Labour and toil are still harder words than work, but manual workers were generalized as labourers from C13, and the supply of such work was generalized as labour from C17. Work was then still available for a more general sense of activity: ‘Fie upon this quiet life, I want worke’ (1 Henry IV, II, iv). But a labourer was also a worker from C14. Workman had come through from oE and was joined by workingman from C17. An effective class of workfolk was spoken about from at latest CIS, and of workpeople from C18: often, in the kind of records we have, in a familiar tone: ‘You cannot imagine what a parcel of cheating brutes the work people here are’ (1708). The specialization of one sense of working to the working class, in eC19 (see class), drew on these earlier effective class definitions. Work 267 The specialization of work to paid employment (see unemployment) is the result of the development of capitalist productive relations. To be in work or out of work was to be in a definite relationship with some other who had control of the means of productive effort. Work then partly shifted from the productive effort itself to the predominant social relationship. It is only in this sense that a woman running a house and bringing up children can be said to be not working. At the same time, because the general word is necessary, a person may be said to do his real work on his own, sometimes quite separately from his job. Time other than that spent in paid employment is significantly described as ‘your own time’, ‘free time’, or as ‘holiday’ (the old word for a day of religious festival), or as ‘leisure-time’. (Leisure came from a Latin word for permit (licere), and from C14 meant opportunity or free time; it is significant of the narrowing specialization of work that we now have ‘leisure-time activities’, often requiring considerable effort but not described as work, which belongs to our ‘paid time’.) The development of job is perhaps even more significant. Its origins are obscure; it has always been predominantly a colloquial word. There are uses as ‘lump’ or ‘piece’ from C14, and as ‘cartload’ from C16. From 1557 we have ‘certen Jobbes of woorke’. The sense of a limited piece of work came through strongly in C17, and jobbing and jobber, in senses we still have, came to mean doing occasional small ‘jobs of work’. The range of application is then very interesting. It is recorded in thieves’ slang from eC18, and is still active in this sense. It is recorded in the context of preferential treatment, moving towards sharp practice and corruption, from mC17; this is still just current in jobbery. Stocks were jobbed, from C17, by brokers and dealers who did not own them but made their money from them. Yet in spite of all these senses job has also come through as the now primary and virtually universal term for normal employment. By mC20 it had effectively completed a process of substitution for older terms, not only in manual work or in dealing, but in work previously described as situation, position, post, appointment and so on. These may still be formally used, but in practice nearly everyone describes them all jobs (from a as job in the Government or the Foreign Office – where people also have careers (q.v.) – to a job on the buses or in a university or on a building site). What has then happened is that a word formerly specifically reserved to limited and occasional employment (and surviving in this sense, as in a price for the job; in view of the word’s history the description of individual subcontracting in building as the lump might be significant) has become the common word for regular and normal employment. Certainly we say a regular job, but we 268 wo r k also distinguish a proper job from going around doing this and that – jobbing. The jobs problem is a problem of regular paid employment. It is extraordinarily difficult to trace this history. There is evidence that it first developed this modern sense in the United States. But the word has always been a description of a certain amount of work from the point of view of the person doing it. Even the criminal and corrupt senses have this essential element, before the word was picked up and used, often derogatorily, by others. Work is still centrally important, and in much everyday use means only labour or a job. But experience of every kind of work has qualified some of its more positive senses. Works, plural, is still neutral, but a work is relatively dignified. Labour, from its general sense of hard, difficult or painful work, became a term for a commodity and a class. As the latter it was adopted as a conscious term for a political movement which, among other things, asserted the dignity of labour. All these developments have interacted; many are still important. But running along at their base has been this short, colloquial and popular word job, with its significant practical range; the piece of work, the activity you get paid for, the thing you have to catch or to shift or to do, the ordinary working experience.