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DIGNITY AT THE WORKPLACE.
WHAT IS PROTECTED AND WHO HAS TO PROTECT IT?
——o—
CsıLLA LEHOCZKY-KOLLONAY"
SHORT VIEW ON THE TWISTS AND TURNS OF THE VIEW OF WORK
IN THE SOCIETY — WITH MESSAGES FOR TODAY
At the beginning of history, labour, especially physical labour done for others
under supervision, was not a term of dignity, rather a concept of inferiority and
even disgrace. Slaves and serfs — connected to the lower birth status or defeat —
were identified with the concept of labour, meaning physical labour, becoming
a term of humiliation. Looking at the late medieval Europe — besides domestic
forms of work under the power of another person, semi-serfdom — labour becomes
also a form of criminal punishment, wedged in the concept of chastisement
mechanisms: coercion imposed not only for criminal acts but also for any conduct
— begging, truancy of just being poor — going against the ruling norms of the
unjust societies.
Michael Foucault in his renowned work on “Discipline and punish — The birth
of the prison” described a system of the middle ages — penitentiary forced labour
and prison factory.” He goes back to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: an architecture,
that allows a watchman to observe inmates from a central tower without the
inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched in a given moment. This
mechanism that “automatizes and disinvidualizes power”? is applicable not only
in prisons but, among others, also in workshops to supervise workers. As Foucault
adds, it must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of
defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.* The 18" and 19
century the depersonalizing, objectifying effect of the industrialisation treating
working persons as a commodity has not seen workshops as a place of dignity,
either. Apart from pious statements by the Catholic church (some far-sighted, but
professor emerita of Central European University
2 The Hôpital General — (Rasphuis), Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, New York, NY,
Vintage Books, 1995, 30, 120-121.
Foucault, Discipline and punish, 202.
Foucault, Discipline and punish, 205.
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