Does our attitude to work change how employers see the workplace?

 This may or may not be true (there is a deal of rose-colouring going on in some looks back at old time blue collar work) but it is still an important question posed by sociologist, Tim Strangleman:

But we also ask critical questions as to why, not so long ago, ordinary working-class people could enjoy conditions at work that gave them dignity, confidence, and hope that their lives were getting better, decade by decade, and that the children’s lives would be better still. It poses questions for all of us as workers, as voters, stock holders, and citizens: why is treating workers well seen as a cost on the balance sheet to be controlled rather than the right thing to do?

Some will point to the declining influence of trade unions (and their accompanying descent into political muck-raking rather than serving their members), others will say that we no longer have any 'jobs for life' and are obsessed with the idea of career as an endless progression rather than work as a noble, uplifting means to sustain ourselves and our communities.

"I've never done one job for three years. This is the first time I've done this and I feel it's time for me to move on to different challenges,"

I guess it's easy for a rich and successful actor like Peter Capaldi to say this but it signals that staying in a job - not a progression, not a career, just a job - for any length of time represents some sort of failure. There's also a sort of assumption that the only route to fulfilment is through a career. Having a great allotment, breeding champion racing pigeons or playing club cricket let alone raising a decent, caring family no longer rank up there with being, as the reluctant cannibal's dad achieved, "chief assistant to the assistant chief".

This isn't to belittle ambition or to push aside the importance of that dignity, confidence and hope but to ask about the order of carts and horses: does the decline of 'treating workers well' result from the sense of disloyalty and the view that work is a means of a career end not a purposeful thing in and of itself? Or, to push into this further, is the 'human resources' department with its annual appraisals, personal development plans and centralised personnel management the reason senior managements no longer consider worker benefits and the work environment as a source of corporate pride. Here's Strangleman talking about Guinness's brewery at Park Royal in London:

Along with earning decent wages and good pensions when they were relatively rare features of blue-collar life in the UK, Park Royal workers also had access to a range of sports facilities and cultural activities onsite, subsidised by the company itself. On top of that, Guinness had hired Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the premier architect of the day, to design the buildings. The grounds were laid out by some of the top contemporary landscape gardeners, who planted hundreds of different tree species and thousands of shrubs. All this not because the company had too, but because they felt it was the right thing to do, because they wanted to.

I'm sure there are employers with this enlightened outlook (Naked Wines have a slide) but there has been a systemisation of worker relations, the domination of rules and an HR-driven obsession with progression. The idea that we should treat a workforce like a community has gone and that managements should invest in that community, for all that not every employer was like Guinness, has long gone replaced with that stifling centralised HR bureaucracy we have all grown to love along with a wholly utilitarian relationship between the individual and their work.

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