DO WE REALLY UNDERSTAND THE WORK OF OTHERS?

How much do we understand other people’s jobs?

 

In the last generation there has been a huge shift from industry to services. In 1970, 8.6 million people from a UK population of 55 million worked in the production sector. By 2016, this had fallen to 3 million out of a population of 65 million. Eighty-five percent of UK workers are now in services.

 

There is an intangible quality to much service sector work, which is hard for other people to grasp and easy for them to disparage. Quantifying the output of people like nursery workers, security guards and home carers is not easy, and yet every role now seems to demand an audit; a way of measuring output and efficiency even if these attributes are not central to the role.

 

With so many jobs being created in new areas opened up by technology, only those with an understanding of the environment know what is required; and many jobs titles now are a series of abstract nouns put together in ways almost designed to confuse others. We grow further apart from the work of others even as technology connects us.

 

Charlie Colenutt, a former barrister turned freelance writer, has produced a fascinating account of the different jobs people have in Is This Working? (Picador, 2025). Sixty-nine people are asked to give an account of their work, what they do and how they feel about it: from call centre workers to chefs; data analysts to dairy farmers; secondary school teachers to supermarket workers.

 

Colenutt gives people space to express themselves and is an attentive listener, hardly ever interjecting into the story unless to highlight an issue. At the end he draws a small number of tentative conclusions, which in itself is refreshing. He does not impose an explanatory structure - disparate jobs are too complicated for that – but there is wisdom to what he says.

 

One overarching theme he cannot avoid is the way administration has crept into almost every job now, slowly at first and now like a torrent. People can’t just do their work, they have to complete checklists to confirm they have. These checklists take more and more time, which takes away from the purpose of the role and sometimes leads to the role being less well performed: carers have less face to face time with frail, older people; job centre workers with those who need to find a job; nurses who don’t have enough time as it is to do the job expected of them. As the church minister interviewed said: An awful lot of ministry today is like being an administrator. This represents the de-incarnation of vocational roles; the opposite of the incarnational feel of a vocational role.

 

Colenutt notes how life, for most people, is not a thought out, rational process; careers are not linear and often emerge in response to crisis and uncertainty: ill health, redundancy, workplace bullying. He notes we are less in control of our lives than we think and this has spiritual resonance. In biblical stories, church history and personal experience, God often presents himself most vividly in a life disrupted.

 

Also notable is the way satisfaction in a job is often obtained by making a clear and immediate difference to the lives of others or their lived environment: the plumber who fixes a shower for the people waiting downstairs; the mechanic who fixes the brakes for an anxious driver; the cleaner who makes the house sparkling for a mentally ill inhabitant. Good work creates its own satisfaction. A car panel repairer ‘looked at the work and the work looked good’: a compelling echo of God completing his work of creation.

 

By contrast, the further away an act of work is from the one who will benefit from it – or where it is not clear who will benefit from it – the less job satisfaction there appears to be. It is the derivatives trader who says: ‘I’m totally checked out to be honest’ unlike the cleaner who observes: ‘I get a real sense of fulfilment when I look back at a room I’ve cleaned.’

 

One man performs what Colenutt describes as an act of mental substitution, where he imagines his work being done for a family member he cares about, not the person he does not know in front of him, helping him to do the job well because this person is a loved family member to someone else. It is a slither of the encouragement in Colossians 3:23: Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord, and not for your own masters.

 

The reader is left with one prevailing thought: if human beings matter so much more than money, why are people who work with money paid so much more than those who work with human beings? The answers usually given to this are contorted, for there is no higher value than a human being who is made in the image of God, and no getting round this.