The Job - Is It Time To View Work As A Human Right?

Engraving encouraging industry                                                      English, 1749

When a man sat at his loom in 17th century England, he wasn't too worried about having a job and a life, meager as they may have been, because he owned his craft and the labor of his hands. Move forward a hundred years and the weaver's life was, as with the political revolutions of that age, a world turned upside down. His worth was no longer in the cloth he made but in the labor of his hands. His pay no longer came directly from the buyer but from the merchant who bought his labor.

For the worker the Industrial Revolution brought both hardship and liberation in the wave of romanticism that swept across the early 19th century West.  By the end of that century the new freedom and sense of selfhood had redefined citizenship and statehood. The United States, a constitutional republic, was identified more as a democracy.  Our weaver's descendants more often than not found themselves on our teeming shore and organized into the earliest labor unions. Those unions would have their greatest national influence  in the first half of the 20th century.

Today, as unions continue their slow decline, the battleground has shifted from the conditions and benefits derived from the work to the work itself. There's no question a discussion about the current economy will end in a discussion about jobs and the origin of jobs. Work has never been a human right, but has the time arrived philosophically to think in those terms?  After all we've come a long way from Marx and Engels. Walter Russell Mead explores this question in his blog at The American Interest.

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.