Article 23: The Right to Work – Is Freedom?

Every human right must be seen in a bigger, and historical, context, and will need to evolve to not fall behind the reasonable

Photo by Frederick Wallace on Unsplash

“ARBEIT MACHT FREI” – “work makes free”, was written over the gate to the concentration camp in Nazi Germany.

It was officially a prison in the shape of a work camp, where the prisoners would do some work as part of their punishment, eventually leading to their release as free people. So, the logic made sense, if only things had been as they were supposed to be.

Everybody knows, now, that the concentration camps also killed people. Even though they were taken to work on shifts in factories in the surroundings, with armed guards watching over them and the employers being very rough on them, at times killing them at the workplace, the whole operation of putting large parts of the population into such work camps grew over the heads of the Nazis, and so did their belief in their mission to “Germanize” Germany by cleaning it from other races than the considered true German race.

So, the camp didn’t always send people to work. It sometimes arranged for their death instead.

For the German society, “work camp” sounded good. People would become better people from working, it was considered – a way of thinking that appeared around the time when industrialization changed the structure of the world, making people re-saddle from being peasant slaves to becoming factory workers.

The concentration camps were an extreme case, and most companies today are better places to work than that.

But some of the elements are the same. Workers are often made to obey a strict schema of work tasks, obeying also to the whims of their boss, who can decide anything and everything he wants for the workers to do.

I know that most people don’t see it as being that bad. Maybe they never experienced such bad conditions, or maybe they believe that this is how all people must be trained to become valuable to the society, or something similar. You can even find people who will defend the boss’s right to physical punishment of disobeying workers.

Even in modern companies that have mostly white-collar employees, something like that can be seen. I saw a job announcement recently, where it was written as one of the required person treats that “you must be obeyant”.

I was almost falling down from my chair when reading that announcement! Obeyant is a word that was used in slavery and similar conditions, long ago. The dictionary on my computer doesn’t even know the word and wants me to change it.

I wish that workplaces wouldn’t have and display attitudes like the one that led to using such a word. Because, the word in itself isn’t the point. It is the mindset behind it, the fact that you, in that job, must do exactly what you are being told, without thinking or questioning, just obeying.

The UN’s human rights contain an article about the right to work:

Article 23

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Looking at this, I would immediately think that there would be more perspective in giving everybody the right to not work. Meaning, the right to say no to tasks, to be non-obeyant.

Of course, the society by large, and especially in the tough times just after the second world war, when the human rights were crafted, valued work. Everybody knew that in order to survive, they needed a job. Work was survival, and it was even more than that: it was the way forward, toward fulfilling the dream of a better life, not just mere survival.

It can be questioned, though, if work always means “better life”. I think that with the common attitude that managers can push “their” employees around, effectively depriving them of their freedom to think and speak up, a workplace is often doing more harm to the life of people, than good.

The idea of payment to be good enough to ensure a dignified life, is definitely a good idea. When I these days look for jobs and at a rare occasion get the chance to tell what kind of remuneration I need to survive, it is often rejected with a claim that it is too much. But that may be where the “other social protection” is supposed to step in, to supplement the meager salary?

Unfortunately, the society doesn’t accept any responsibility to supplement the low salary, to ensure a dignified life. The contrary is more common: that low-paid workers just have to accept a less worthy life, knowing that they are at the bottom of society and are being treated accordingly.

This means, back to the employer, who is – who? It is, in effect, a person, or a group of people, who are hired in at a level where they can decide the salary of the new employee. And they have a strange tendency to try pushing the salary down, as low as possible. Where is the dignity in that?

The trade unions are a right. I fully support that. But in Sweden, and in many other places, the trade union often becomes a power that rules over people, even if they are not a member. In fact, becoming a member can be seen as a duty, and some job announcements require it, others do not, but it is written between the lines that you will not get the job if you are not a member.

The ruling of the trade union means such as deciding on the salary. This, of course, can mean ensuring a certain minimum, “the protection of his interests”, but it can also prevent getting more than a certain maximum, when the agreement between the employer and the trade union has led to a situation where a pool of money, on top if the minimum, must be distributed according to some criteria. Needless to say, the trade union will not favor non-members over members in such a distribution.

That all doesn’t lead to “just and favourable conditions of work”.

Freedom is difficult. It doesn’t take many people in a room before some of them will begin ruling over the rest, often leading to conflicts and sorting mechanisms setting in, with some people leaving voluntarily, others being kicked out.

A workplace is often like that. So, letting it be a human right to go there, is somewhat of a doubtful gesture. Not necessarily to the benefit of the worker.

A modern version of article 23 could better stress the work conditions as having to be good and respectful, period, and that the remuneration would have to fulfill the needs of the employee, to ensure enough possibilities to pay the bills and be an equal in societal life. And importantly: to be entitled to think freely and not be treated as a slave, to not be expected to be obeyant.

The next step would then be to make the society provide this improved human right. A tough one, considering those who speaks for the boss’s right to beat the workers still exist.

Even the presence of human rights really is no guarantee for being treated nicely.