The Dignity of Work
Office cleaner Lawrence Lipscomb gets a thank you from a passing executive, Washington DC, 2009
By Tim Thorlby
6 min read
In this blog I explore the importance of ‘dignity at work’. It is a phrase which is growing in usage, but what does it mean? I am going to draw on my own personal experience of working in the UK cleaning sector to highlight the issues from a practical point of view. I will also explore a biblical perspective on why it is relevant to all of us.
1 - When dignity goes missing
The ‘dignity of work’ may seem like a rather abstract concept to some – in which case, you may possibly be someone whose job already includes a fair amount of dignity. For others, the lack of dignity at work can a life-defining issue.
For a number of years I was Managing Director of Clean for Good, helping to develop and grow one of the UK’s most pioneering and ethical office cleaning companies. I got to work alongside a very diverse group of office cleaners and cleaning managers in central London – in one of the UK’s least valued occupations. I saw first-hand what the ‘dignity of work’ means in practice. I regularly met cleaners who had experienced numerous indignities at previous cleaning companies.
I recruited cleaners who had previously been paid below the legal minimum wage on a regular basis. The wage showing on their payslips was technically correct, the minimum wage, but the work they were required to do couldn’t possibly be done within their shifts so they had to work longer hours than they had agreed to - or they would lose their job. So, their actual hourly rate was often below the minimum wage. Malpractice is often cunning.
Wages were often incorrectly paid - hours were not added up correctly, overtime was missed, holiday not paid. Payslips often never arrived.
In one case, a lady had a couple of month’s wages withheld in an effort to retain her services (“if you leave, we won’t pay you this money”).
It’s not difficult to see how low wages, sharp practice and exploitation is undignified and can make a person feel powerless as well as unvalued.
This is not just about money though.
Some cleaners were set up to clean buildings early in the morning or late at night and only saw their managers every few months. No-one to check in with them, no-one to ask them to how they are, no-one to say thank you. Complete isolation at work. Not a terribly humane approach to work.
In some larger City buildings, cleaners were required to queue outside in the rain if they arrived slightly early for their shift. They were not considered suitable company for the pin-striped business people in reception. They were required to clean, but their employers wished them to be invisible and didn’t consider basic courtesies to be necessary; I wonder how that would make you feel?
I could go on; there is a long list.
Our company, Clean for Good, sought to provide an alternative approach that put ‘dignity at work’ front and central in the way that cleaning was sold to customers and managed internally. We tried to answer the question: what does the dignity of work look like in practice in the cleaning sector today? For us, it had three parts:
Fair pay, fair hours – as a Living Wage Employer, decent hourly wages are paid and things like occupational sick pay and a decent pension are offered. Not just statutory minimums (the ‘bottom of the barrel’ as I like to call it). Shifts are agreed which are fair and reasonable and deliverable. Care is taken on correct payment and delivering payslips on time. There are no zero-hours contracts or short-cuts.
Good people management – managers are given the time to actually meet, train and manage every member of the team on a regular basis, face to face. No-one is left to manage themselves. Management is not just seen as a cost but as an investment. Mistakes and issues are dealt with calmly and fairly, using proper processes. (This also leads to better service outcomes for customers – is that really a surprise?)
Ethical materials – the cleaning chemicals used are good ones – safe for workers, safe for the environment – not the cheap and nasty ones that give you a headache. The equipment is new and safe. Uniforms are provided, and paid for by the company. People are properly equipped to do their work.
This is not an exhaustive list but it gives you an idea.
Most jobs have a degree of dignity inherent within them – the value of the work and the possibility of pride and satisfaction when a job is done well.
This is greatly enhanced if an employer (or customer) matches this with respect, courtesy and honesty in their management practices. It is about more than being ‘nice’ to someone – it is about an ethic of honesty and fairness that permeates every aspect of the way that someone is employed, from their uniform to their payslip to the shifts they work and the tone of the conversation.
It is worth noting that all jobs – even those that look ‘easy’ – merit respect by others. We saw in the pandemic how the UK relies upon cleaners, couriers, supermarket staff and many others in supposedly ‘low skill’ occupations to keep everyday life ticking over; it turns out that their daily service is essential. My own experience has shown me that these are not really ‘low skill’ jobs at all – the reliability of turning up day after day to do work at anti-social times, the skill and efficiency with which tasks are undertaken, the commitment to fixing problems that arise, the cheerfulness of someone taking pride in a job done well – these are not trivial achievements.
2 – Slowing down to see the person
I recently came across another example of dignity at work which I rather liked.
Jumbo is the second largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands. In 2019 they piloted something slightly counter-cultural in one of their stores – a ‘slow checkout’ called a ‘chat checkout’ which would be staffed by a person not a self-service scanner and where customers were encouraged to stop and chat for a while (hence the ‘slow’). It was so popular they are now rolling it out to 200 stores across the country[1].
The initiative is part of a wider movement, prompted by the Government, to address loneliness and social isolation amongst the country’s growing elderly population. Each local authority has been building a local ‘coalition against loneliness’, finding practical ways to help connect people into their local communities.
The COO of Jumbo, Colette Cloosterman-van Eerd, noted that:
“As a family business and supermarket chain, we are at the heart of society. Our stores are an important meeting place for many people and we want to play a role in identifying and reducing loneliness….It is a small gesture, but very valuable, especially in a world that is digitizing and getting faster and faster.”
For me, this is an interesting example of where technology (in the form of self-service checkouts) may have successfully reduced a business’ operating costs and speeded up the service for customers, but it has also led to the loss of something important – human contact. This not only matters for their elderly customers – time for a chat – but actually for the supermarket workers too.
This initiative makes these supermarket jobs more sociable and more interesting for the workers, and it also reconnects them with their customers and adds an extra dimension to their work – not just stocking shelves with products but providing a more rounded service to the local community. It is not difficult to see the potential for greater job satisfaction in here. Working on these checkouts is popular with staff.
This is not an argument against technology - it clearly has profound value to society – but it is an argument for deploying technology thoughtfully and in ways which serve a business’ core purposes.
The best businesses never just think in terms of minimising all costs – they recognise that fulfilling their purpose as a business includes social and environmental obligations ‘fitted as standard’; whether it is providing a fuller service to customers or environmental protections, fair pay or more dignified work.
3 – Don’t blame the robots
I doubt that many of us need to think too hard to identify jobs or people who experience indignities at work. It is endemic within much low pay work, but can also rear its head further up the payscale too.
Where does the dignity go? Why are some jobs so undignified?
It is tempting to blame technology and the robots for reducing work to monotony and drudgery, for dehumanising work – “It’s the app! It’s the algorithm!” Whilst technology has certainly reduced the autonomy of some workers and reduced contact time with other people, I don’t think this is anywhere near a full answer, because it is quite clear that different employers are able to use the same technology quite differently.
In my experience, the dignity of work is undermined when investors or managers choose to prioritise cost-cutting or profit without any thought or regard for the impact on the workers. There may be no explicit intent to erode dignities but the thoughtlessness of the decision-making and its consequences are tantamount to the same thing. Nor is this just about technology either; the hollowing out of middle management in recent years to reduce operating costs, for example, has probably undermined the dignity of both managers and employees more than any App.
In the pursuit of profit, or cost-cutting, jobs have been created which are no longer fit for people any more. We lose dignity at work when we forget that jobs are done by people, not robots. It is not inevitable – there are employers who seem quite capable of operating differently – it is a choice, or sometimes, just neglect. Neither is attractive.
4 – A biblical perspective on the dignity of work
All work matters, from farming to advanced manufacturing, from social care of the elderly to cleaning, from business services to academic research. Jobs of the ‘head, hand and heart’ all matter[2] and not just for economic reasons; they possess inherent purpose and dignity not entirely measurable by wages or prices.
At the heart of any biblical understanding of ‘work’ is the very simple but essential idea that that all workers are people, not just economic units, that they have inherent value and therefore cannot just be employed or used as a means of benefiting others. We are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27) and are not to be objectified. The Old Testament Law goes further and makes it clear that ‘labour’ is not something that should just be freely bought and sold without limits; careful protection is needed to prevent the exploitation of people.
Any economic agreements or contracts are always subject to the more fundamental social covenants – the mutual obligations – that we have with each other within society. The market is important, but it is a tool which should serve society’s purposes, not the other way round. Any market-based contractual relationship which undermines our wider social relationships, our place in society or the dignity of the person, is a market failure.
For work to be considered ‘dignified’ I would say there are three essential elements[3]:
Fair pay – All work should be fairly paid. That means paid at a real living wage or more, with wages paid correctly and on time, and appropriate support for times of illness or family distress. Work should take us out of poverty and allow for a decent life. The Bible regularly and clearly upholds the entitlement of workers to be paid, paid on time and paid fairly.
Fair expectations – the nature of the work should be clearly understood, clearly bounded and undertaken freely. A job should be transparent in that a worker should be able to clearly see what they are committing to undertaking and there should be boundaries – not a charter for exploitation at the whim of a manager. The abuse of any kind of power, including managers of workers, is clearly condemned in the Bible.
Agency – all work should leave the worker with some room for decision-making and exercising judgement and using their skills and experience. All work should have at least some scope for development and flourishing. Work should not be monotonous and dehumanising, but allow for satisfaction. The vision for the people of Israel in the Old Testament was for each household to farm their own land and ‘sit beneath their own vine trees’ (Micah) – a vision of freedom and agency.
4 – Every job
Dignity at work is something which every worker should experience, whether it is the Prime Minister or the person emptying his bins.
Every employer can shape this through the design of job positions, working culture, as well as pay and conditions. It is not beyond us.
Ultimately, we have to decide what sort of businesses we want, what sort of marketplace we enjoy, what kind of society we want to prosper. When we begin to invest in the dignity of work once more then we are opening the door to a more human and more compassionate national life.
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. To read future blogs when they are published, you can subscribe for free alerts.
Notes
[1] For the news item see: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/a-checkout-line-where-slower-is-better-supermarket-jumbo/
[2] A case eloquently made by David Goodhart in his book: Head, Hand, Heart: The struggle for dignity and status in the 21st Century, (2020) Penguin
[3] This draws in part on the following paper: Matt N Williams (2022) A Biblical Response to Working Poverty, Jubilee Centre Insight Paper | Access here: https://www.beautifulenterprise.co.uk/jubilee-centre-reports