There's more to work than De Botton suggests

One of the problems with reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton is that like Chinese food, it’s fun to eat but you’re hungry half an hour later.

De Botton can be engaging and he writes with humour, but there’s little about the lived experience of work: the drama, passion, hates, successes, failures, rivalries, boredom, fears or insecurities - for this is the stuff of work.

Story one: At 22 I was on an English seismic crew and was responsible for setting and firing the explosive charges in southwest Queensland and in Broome in West Australia. It was hot, dusty work, living in tents. I loved every minute of it.

But this doesn’t tell you much about the nature of work. That’s because I have placed myself, like De Botton, in the centre of the story. It’s a tactical mistake when you claim to be writing an exposé because the narrative calls for objective criticism. Yet so often De Botton’s narrative reflections appear just that: reflections and opinions.

Story two: At 26 I worked for James Hardie in Sydney. I made underground cement telecom junction boxes. They were a mixture of cement and mica. The guy I replaced was dying in hospital with asbestosis. They had used asbestos in the machine I was operating before they switched to mica.

When I started I was called “poof-ta” by the predominantly Maori workers on the night shift. I had an arts degree and came from Adelaide. It was a reasonable assumption. The only way to win them over was to get as pissed as them at the end of the Friday night shift and show them my interpretation of the Haka.

They were in awe. They didn’t know whether to laugh or punch my face in. Mercifully they had a sense of humour and I was adopted as a “non-poof-ta”. That too was work.

The mica mixer was a non-demanding machine. It left me plenty of time to read books. I remember one summer crawling up through a manhole in the roof, up to one of the light towers, 100 feet above the factory. It had a spectacular view of the Parramatta River and Sydney.

Over the next three months I read the collected works of David Ireland up there amongst the moths and it changed my life.

I’ve placed myself in the middle of the story again and this time I’ve given it some working class élan. Yet nowhere does De Botton talk about ethnicity, class, camaraderie, unions, strikes, work safety or ridiculous management decisions.

Story three: 20 years later I was the program director at RMIT for the creative writing courses. I had come from journalism and communications. I built and staffed a new Masters of Creative Writing program and 20 new short courses. Over a seven-year period we tripled our income and hired new staff. But I was a manager too and I made plenty of mistakes.

Although we were a humanities school, a mathematician was appointed as the head of school. It was like appointing an accountant to do brain surgery but it was hardly his fault. He came with plus, minus, subtract and divide when the school needed vision. Twenty per cent of the staff were sacked or left.

De Botton fails to talk about workers who confuse privileges with rights and rights with responsibilities. He doesn’t mention the power of rumour mongering, narcissism, nepotism, the dynamics of cliques and factions, and the role of epiphany in finding a solution to complex problems. In fact, he doesn’t talk about creativity at all.

I saw astounding examples of bravery as individuals stood up in meetings and took management on. They spoke out against the bullying and scapegoating. I also saw shocking examples of cowardice, born from the fear of losing their jobs. De Botton doesn’t talk much of bravery or cowardice.

All of this is the stuff of the modern workplace. It is political, cultural, economic and sexual. Much of the polity centres around power, who has it, how it is used and to what end.

We are all social anthropologists in our own way. We go off to work, often without a second thought, that we are going to live for between eight and ten hours, in a very different cultural milieu from our home life. Our manners, mode of speech, dress and behavioural interactions are on display, commented on and assessed.

The great anthropologists Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski knew that to gain an understanding of primitive peoples in the Solomon Islands or the Pacific, one would have to live with them for months or possibly years. There are all sorts of problems with this but it is much better than using De Botton’s method of parachuting in and then leaving on the next plane.

There have been some excellent books on organisations. Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisations is still a classic as is Leon Gettler’s Organisations Behaving Badly. But for my salary the Australian writer Max Barry wrote the definitive satire on work in his novel Company, where the workers are guinea pigs in a massive experiment conducted by management.

In the The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work people are portrayed as insubstantial, spectral figures moving below the gantry of the industrial super state. There’s more to work than that.