There can be no sweet without sweat
There can be no sweet without sweatBy Editor
Saturday March 01, 2008 [03:00]
If our country is to move forward, honest and hard work is demanded of all of us. And employees have a strict duty to give their employers efficient and conscientious work for which they have the right to a just salary or wage.
For our brothers and sisters who are Christians, work provides an opportunity for each one of them to show that they are images of God. This is because they believe that God is creator and they show forth God’s image when they continue creation through their work, their labour, their engagement in shaping the future of our country.
But the dignity of work must be recognised with just wages and safe conditions. All those who employ others should give employees an honest salary and then ask them for more substantial support.
We should condemn all forms of businesses that place profit before persons and are based on the ruthless exploitation of one man by another. All workers have the right to receive a just salary or wage. And every effort should be made that the enterprise becomes a community of persons.
This is the way both employers and employees and their representatives in the labour movement should approach work. Failure to adhere to these principles causes a lot of problems in the working place.
Low salaries or wages lead to demoralisation of the workers. And where this prevails, moral decay sets in. Malingering, pilfering, thieving and all sorts of vices creep in.
Productivity declines. And when this happens, it becomes increasingly impossible for salaries or wages and working conditions to be improved. It is a vicious cycle.
Therefore, we have to simultaneously avoid two things: laziness among the workers, and injustice, unfairness from employers.
A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack of either desire or power to strive after great things, is as little worth of a nation as of an individual.
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbour; who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail; but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present, merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom this purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, he shows he deserves his good fortune.
But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labour as a period not of preparation but of mere enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer on the earth’s surface; and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a satisfactory life, and above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is a nation that has no history.
Thrice, happy is the nation that has got a glorious history forged through hard work and sacrifices. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
We say all these things because we are not seeing much work being done to improve the working and living conditions of the working people of this country.
It is difficult to understand why our opposition members of parliament whom, some of them, not many years ago participated in putting up and pushing through Parliament legislation whose net effect was the castration of our trade unions, paving way for the owners of capital to rape and humiliate the workers of this country. There is very little that the Ministry of Labour, under the current laws and conditions, can do to meaningfully improve the conditions of our workers.
It is also not good for our brothers and sisters who have taken up leadership in the trade unions to do very little other then cry for mercy and hope this will help improve the conditions of their members. It seems we want to achieve good things without working for them; without putting up a good fight as if the workers of this country have ever achieved anything for themselves without a grueling fight.
What can be achieved with men who fear the strenuous life, who seek victory without a fight and who fear the only national life which is really worth leading?
They seem to believe in that cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and greed which recognises in commercialism the be-all and end-all of national life, instead of idealising that, though an indispensable element, it is after all but one of the many elements that go to make up true national greatness.
No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard work, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied on material prosperity alone.
Our country calls not for the life of ease, but for the life of strenuous endeavour. Let us therefore boldly face the life of hard work, resolve to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods.
This is the way we believe we should look at our labour issues. This is the only way we can build for our workers’ better conditions. We say this because you cannot build a nation without building the people.
This is the way we should look at the work of our labour movement and our trade union leaders. This is the way we should look at the duties of the Ministry of Labour and the rights of our workers and the obligations of those who employ others. It is often said that there can be no sweet without sweat.
Labels: LABOUR
posted by MrK @ 7:01 AM
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