Initiating Recognition of the Dignity of Labour

This chapter sets out first of all to provide an overview of the origins of the relationship between the world of work and the idea and ideal of human dignity. A fundamental question to be explored at the outset is the way in which the nature of being human and human individuality came to be cast in a qualitative relation with the creation of material life. Beginning by considering developments in the last decades of the eighteenth century, we see how the experience of work comes to be regarded as having a direct impact on what it means to be human – the paradox being that human dignity could be confirmed by work or confounded by it. In the following generation, the founders of sociology explored the underlying reasons for the precarious state of human dignity in industrial capitalism. However, it was with the development of the sociology of work and employment that the role of dignity slowly surfaced as being of substantive importance both theoretically and empirically. It is only within the last two decades that dignity has featured in high profile in its own right in the study of work and employment. Richard Sennett has identified two predominant senses in which dignity has been used: one that focuses on the sanctity and integrity of the body and a second typified by the dignity of labour. Both are universal values, though the latter had to wait on the coming of modern capitalism to achieve this standing: ‘While society may respect the equal dignity of all human bodies, the dignity of labour leads in quite a different direction: a universal value with highly unequal consequences. Invoking dignity as a “universal value”, moreover, provides in itself no clue about how to practice an inclusive mutual respect’ (Sennett 2004, 58).