Alienation Revisited

Is the American worker-blue-collar and white-collar alike-bored with his job and alienated? So it is often said, most recently by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which reported that only 25% of the workers it polled were satisfied and would choose the same kind of job again.

Actually, both the polls and the interpretation are misleading, according to Irving Kristol, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University. "About 85% of American workers, when asked whether they are satisfied with their jobs, answer in the affirmative," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "[HEW] tries to show that they don't mean what they say. Thus if an employee tells an interviewer that he finds his work satisfying but also that he would like to change his job for something better, [HEW] concludes that he is 'alienated' from his work. One gets the firm impression that the authors of this study believe that to have unfulfilled aspirations, to daydream, to engage in wishful thinking, or to express regret for lost opportunities (real or imaginary) is less than human. It also apparently never occurs to them that it is Utopian to expect ordinary working people to be as content as the most successful surgeon or lawyer. Why should they be? How could they be? Where and when have they ever been?"

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