Our Current Dilemma: The Changing
Workplace
Take This Job and Shove It"
— Title of a popular song
Our spirituality is reflected in our character. But what is the connection between our character and our daily work? In the split-world view, there is no connection. If work is a curse, we must develop our character outside of our work. If work is a savior, then we will be more interested in self-fulfillment than in character building.
In it's original meaning, the word character is synonymous with imprint. Long ago, noblemen attested their agreement by pressing the imprint of their signer rings into a seal of wax. Their mark stood for the integrity of their character and served as their bond.
Gail Sheehy, in her best-selling book, Character: America's Search for Leadership,1 follows this idea by tracing the biographical imprint from the lives of six candidates for the United States presidency in 1988, and from that imprint, infers their character. There is a predictability of character based upon the imprint of personal history. Although we see redemptive exceptions, Sheehy's book gives us the general rule: past integrity is the best predictor of future integrity.
When we think about the development of Christian character, we emphasize the imprinting influence to spiritual experience. Of course, we put the highest premium upon "born
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again" as being the essence of character development. To that experience, we add the influence of being "filled with the Spirit," the nurture of our spiritual discipline, the relational support of the body of Christ, and the honing of social holiness in deeds of justice, mercy, and love. Little attention, however, is given to a changing culture which also shapes our character and influences our spirituality.
The world of work is a foremost example. Students of our culture read changes in the workplace like a barometer on a national character. Michael Maccoby, author of The Gamesman and Leader, writes: "It is in the workplace that social and national characters are normally forged and new models of leadership are most often tested."2
If Maccoby is right, then what are the far-reaching implications of Studs Terkel's discovery that most Americans are working on jobs that are "too small for their spirits"? More specifically, how does a changing workplace imprint our character and influence our spirituality?
THE CHANGING WORKPLACE
Our traditional ideas about the nature of work are being turned upside down today. Most evident is the decline of heavy industry with its dependence upon the human resources of semiskilled labor and the physical resources of steel, oil, and coal. The implications are far-reaching. Unemployment in heavy industry lines run high and there is no promise that the workers will be rehired. Labor unions, which gained by organizing workers in heavy industry, are struggling to stay alive. Of necessity their negotiations are shifting from guaranteed employment to guaranteed retraining.
Paralleling the decline in heavy industry is the spectacular rise of high technology with its lightning-fast hardware and its ingenious software. High tech has literally taken over the workplace.
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Early in the 1980s, the majority of expenditures in our gross national product shifted from the "heavy" industries of manufacturing to the "light" industries of information and communication. Of course, the implications for the nature of our daily work are nothing short of revolutionary. Information and communication industries run on brains, not fossil fuels, they work with ideas, not raw materials, and they demand sophisticated intellectual skills, not manual labor.
Still another change in the American workplace is the number of woman on the job. Not only is the number of women working outside the home at an all-time high, but for the first time a majority of mothers are employed. Time will tell how women in the workplace will change the nature of work and how working mothers will affect the structure of the family. At present, we know that women are striving for equal pay and status on the job. As they do, they show the stress symptoms of upward mobility. Also, as they climb the organizational ladder to top level positions, they meet men coming down the ladder because executive status and success have failed to bring them satisfaction.
THE TRAUMA OF CHANGE
While the trends of the changing workplace are societal, the resulting trauma is personal. We may sigh when we read the statistics of unemployment, but our souls are shaken to the core when we hear the stories of displaced, dislocated, disillusioned, and distressed workers.
Displaced workers are persons whose life skills are now obsolete. Typical is a fifty-five-year-old employee of the automobile industry, who lost his job on the assembly line. He spoke so pitifully, "I'm too young to die and too old to learn a new trade." The future bodes no better. It is predicted that young persons entering the job market today will change careers
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three or four times during a lifetime, due to changes in the nature of work. Retraining will become standard, not just for skilled labor, but for professional persons as well. The need for skilled labor will change as technology expands; the need for professionals will fluctuate as fields such as law, business, and medicine are saturated.
Dislocated workers are persons who have lived and worked for a lifetime in a "company town." Then, the industry cuts back or shuts down, leaving them no alternative but to move, go on unemployment, or create a new job for themselves. When the Boeing Aircraft Company lost the SST contract in 1969 and laid off 60,000 workers, a billboard appeared at the edge of the town reading:
"WILL THE LAST ONE TO LEAVE
PLEASE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS!"
This billboard could have been erected at the city limits of hundreds of company towns across the country. With escalating costs at home and cheap labor abroad, American industry has shifted much of its business overseas to remain competitive. Controversial legislation has been enacted requiring a company to give prior notice of a move and compensation for the displaced worker. But the trauma remains. Many workers cannot move, others cannot be retrained, and all suffer the loss of meaningful work, which is vital to human dignity.
Disillusioned workers are people on the job who have lost the vision for their work. We have already noted the eighty percent of Americans who hate to get up and go to work on Monday morning, a majority who wish that they could work at something else, and one-quarter who suffer from severe symptoms of job stress. Another survey shows that fifty percent of public school teachers admit that they are "dead-ended" and "burned out."
Management usually gets the blame for disillusioned workers. Bosses who offer the privilege of employee participation
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in management decisions are usually cited as antidotes for disillusionment. Little is said about the changing nature of the workplace or the value of the work itself. Public school teachers will tell you that the conditions for learning have changed drastically, especially urban schools, which are plagued by students who come from drug - and crime-ridden areas without parental support or motivation for schooling.
In yet another sphere, seminary enrollments are being sustained by "second-career seminarians." By and large, these students are Christians who have pursued a secular career for ten years or more and achieved satisfactions of salary, security, and success. Some may have been running from the call to ministry, but most have been called out of their secular professions to prepare for ordination. They too might be listed among the disillusioned workers, but their disillusionment was not frustration or failure in their work. Rather, they realized that the rewards of their secular professions did not satisfy their spiritual longings. Literally, they want to give themselves away, and they do. To resign from a job, give up a salary, sell a home, move one's family, and enter intensive graduate study is sacrifice similar to that made by Abraham, who went out from Haran under the call of God, "not knowing where he was going" (Hebrews 11:8). One might argue that second-career seminarians are victims of the split-world view, which makes a secular career spiritually inferior to the ordained ministry. Knowing these students as I do, I think not. The truth of the matter is that radical self-interest has so captured the aspirations of Christian students today that the number opting for the ordained ministry and seminary education immediately after college is very low. This is especially true for the best and the brightest of our college graduates. Nothing is wrong with the careers they choose, but they choose them for the wrong reasons.
Students at evangelical Christian colleges, for example, place high value on the goal of self-realization, according to
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James Davison Hunter, in his book Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation.3 Again, nothing is wrong with self-realization, if it is grounded in the truth that it cannot be gained outside the will of God and the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. As a longtime college president, I have witnessed the conflicts which our students face. They try to balance the psychological subtleties of self-realization with the call of Christ for self-sacrifice. They are dissatisfied with the dead end of affluence that they see in adults, but they still struggle against the natural desire to be successful, secure, and satisfied in a career which the culture rewards. Hence, they forsake the liberal arts as well as philosophy and religion to choose professional majors which lead directly to a "cash career." The issue is not a matter of a sacred/secular choice. Rather it is the motivation of self-realization versus self-sacrifice. Later, seeing for themselves the disillusionment of self-realization, they respond to the call of God. In contrast with their counterparts who are disillusioned by the nature or conditions of their work, their disillusionment is related to the motive, the value, and the goal of their work.
Distressed workers are victims of the most severe kind of work-related trauma. High-stress jobs are are those in which the employee is faced with exacting psychological demands over which he or she has no control. In fact, the formula for job stress can be written S=D/C.
Stress equals demand over control. Air traffic controllers are reputed to be persons in high-stress jobs. The psychological demand is very high at the same time that there are so many factors out of their control. While the psychological demand of their work is relatively low, at least from external sources, they also have a high degree of freedom and control over those demands. Of course, whatever our work, our psychological makeup will be a factor in raising and lowering our perception of these
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demands. Some people handle stress with ease. Some people carry undue stress with them. For example, on a simple task of low demand with high control, a perfectionist might raise the demand unrealistically and thus generate crippling stress.
One out of four Americans is job-distressed. They also live daily with the debilitating symptoms of absenteeism, heart disease, substance abuse, divorce, or broken relationships. If the economic losses to the employer are added to the social costs of such symptoms, billions of dollars are lost to distressed workers every year. Families, however, pay the greatest cost. Studies of trends among working parents are revealing that day-care centers, latchkey kids, family-crisis clinics, and help for troubled youth are highest in priority. Without doubt, provision for daycare services for working parents will be at the center of public domain in the decade of the 1990s. Whether the need will be met by the government voucher or as a fringe benefit in private business, it must be regarded as a dramatic consequence of the changing workplace.
Changes in the workplace will be yet more traumatic in the future. Shudders run up and down the spine at the thought of a nation divided between the "haves" who hold the limited number of high-tech jobs and the "have-nots" who labor in the service and support force at lower pay. Competition for lower-level jobs will be fierce among single-parent women, ethnic minorities, senior citizens, youth, and downwardly mobile men. Ironically, just at the time when women are winning equal pay for equal work, changes in the nature of the workplace may force them down. The economic results are already evident. Statistics on unemployment and poverty show a widening gap between the rich and the poor. The bottom is dropping out of the lower-middle class as blue-collar workers are displaced by technology; and the bottom is being swelled by the ranks of unskilled and semiskilled women, immigrants, and elderly citizens who are becoming the "new poor" in our wealthy western world.
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THE FUTURE OF WORK
What of the future? First, we can expect the dehumanization of the workplace to continue. The threat that the Industrial Revolution brought upon workers whose skilled hands were replaced by automation will be magnified in the Age of Information when the skills of the brain are replaced by computers. High-tech work will call out the need for high-touch churches. Relational theology will have to come of age in the biblical doctrine of holiness, as spelled out in the dimensions of personal and social wholeness. Likewise, the cardinal doctrines of Creation, the Fall, and Redemption will have to come together in a biblical doctrine of work.
Second, the occupational gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" will continue to widen. A shrinking middle class and an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor are frightening trends that also threaten the church. Growing congregations whose success is based upon compatibility in education, income, status, and color are already an embarrassment to us. As the occupational, economic, and social gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" widens, will the spiritual gap also widen? The church must gear up now to close that gap.
Third, the psychology of the changing workplace will produce new symptoms of distress among workers. In addition to aggravating the symptoms of displacement, disillusionment, and distress among workers, the Age of Information will have its own work-related ailments. Loneliness was relatively unknown until the rise of the industrial age when mechanization broke down the social support of the village, the home, and the church. Loneliness became a plague that continues to spread among us. Susan Gordon identifies loneliness as a characteristic of the new American character.4
Add to this the threat of a computer-regulated life, just at the time when the social supports of the home, the church,
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and the school are crumbling. What symptoms will follow? Alienation? Loneliness? Or will it be ennui — the loss of human meaning which will speed the dehumanized worker into drugs, therapy, cults, and ecstatic religions? The "sanctity of the person" may well join the "sanctity of life" as one of the most crucial issues for our Brave New World in the twenty-first century. Right in the middle of these issues is our question, "What is the spirituality of work?"
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SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS
ON OUR CHANGING WORKPLACE
And whatever you do in word or deed, do
all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving
thanks to God the Father through Him.
Colossians 3:17
* * * * * * *
A PROVOCATIVE QUESTION
Have you ever suffered from job stress? What symptoms caused you the most difficulty? How did the stress affect your personal relationships, especially with friends and family? How did you recover?
A PRACTICAL EXERCISE
We have support groups in the church for many personal and interpersonal problems. Why not a support group for persons who are displaced, dislocated, disillusioned, or distressed in their work? Or, more positively, a group of persons who are interested in discussing, "Spirituality and Daily Work"? What would be the goals for the group and the agenda for the first meeting?
PERSONAL PRAYER
O Christ, may my soul grow large and may my daily work grow with it. Amen
Chapter Three || Table of Contents
1. Gail Sheehy, Character: America's Search for Leadership (New York: Morrow, 1988).
2. Michael Maccoby, The Leader (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 16.
3. James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 65-71.
4. Quoted in Harold C. Warlick, Jr., Conquering Loneliness (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1979), 18.
