Each week, Olivier Babeau decrypts the spirit of the times for FigaroVox. He is president of the think-tank Institut Sapiens and, moreover, professor of management sciences at the University of Bordeaux. He recently published Praise of Hypocrisy (Éditions du Cerf, 2018).
Health has this in common with happiness that you don't really understand its value until you've lost it. This is the case with crises of existence: by depriving us of what we usually enjoy, they give us back the taste for those things once taken for granted. The unprecedented halt in economic activity that we are currently experiencing has the same sort of virtue: it is making us rediscover the true meaning of work.
It is time to remember that it is basically all workers who deserve the gratitude of society.Of course, we first realize how essential the health professions are. It is quite legitimate that many French people applaud every night those who take all the risks to treat us. Their dedication is to be commended. It is also evident that the people who contribute through their activity to produce, process and transport food play a precious role. It is also obvious that the activity of those who produce the electricity which enlightens us, who ensure the functioning of transport, who guarantee security, is no less essential.
Is that all? No. It is time to remember that it is basically all workers who deserve the gratitude of society. In our country strongly marked by the Marxist representation of work, the latter is assimilated to an alienation. Work in France is above all seen as an activity generating suffering, in direct connection with this dubious but traditional etymology of the word: the tripalium , an instrument of torture. Work is for us, by definition and above all, enslavement and exploitation. It is approached in the mode of conflict. His vocabulary is that of combat.
Social architecture is based on everyone's work.As the debate on pensions has shown, the obvious objective can only be to limit its duration as much as possible, to circumscribe its conditions firmly. In collective representation, professional life is a kind of painful parenthesis that must be closed as soon as possible, an abdication, alas, necessary in the face of "the forces of money" and the "reign of selfish interest" between two periods of selfless happiness: student life and retirement. Thanks to the current pandemic, we are realizing this simple but forgotten truth: social architecture is based on everyone's work.
The true meaning of work, whatever it is, is to render a service to society. So all work is a form of altruism. It is thanks to this sum of mutually rendered services that we eat our fill, are cared for and more generally that we enjoy the comfort of life offered by developed societies. The salary is the striking and stumbling-block counterpart (but there are obviously other forms of counterpart). It is all the utility and the magic of the market that to select the useful trades, to avoid the shortage or the overflow by means of the signal of the remuneration. Apart from the (numerous) cases where what economists call “externalities” that are not taken into account by the market mechanism, the absence of compensation paid by society indicates that work is useless… Nobody will ever pay a penny for watching me play soccer. Others, more gifted, are paid millions to do so.
You have to approach the idea of work in a way that is both non-confrontational and positive.This is one of the useful lessons from these extraordinary times. The best way to explain the need to work for a child is not to talk to him about “earning a living”, but rather to make him understand that we are all called, to the extent of our possibilities, to be useful. to society through our work. The means of our subsistence are only the fair counterpart. In doing so, we approach the idea of work in a way that is both non-confrontational and positive. A perspective that we have such a hard time adopting in France.
