This blog puts the case for a major BOWT (“Burden of Work Taxonomy”) research project which might take years to come to completion. It is being offered as the “missing link” which is needed to achieve social justice.

Probably the major cause of social disaffection in today’s society is the application of quite different tariffs of remuneration for different types of work. This source of disaffection affects politics in no uncertain terms… via strikes which blackmail the public, frighten the markets and provoke mutinies at Westminster.  The classic anomally is Nurses v. Hairdresssers…. the former being widely judged by unbiased observers as more important. Yet traditionally nurses are paid on a much lower tariff than hairdressers.  Another is the questionable high level of remuneration now being accorded to train drivers.  They do a “job” which reduces to four actions, “go”, “speed up”, “slow-down” and  “stop”.  This range of actions is, we know, capable quite easily of being automated, as in the case of the DLR, San Francesco and Taiwan, where trains are operated without drivers. That society tolerates such high levels of remuneration for a job which could quite easily be automated… is a wry comment on the vein of irrationality in today’s governance.

We urgently need a thorough inquiry into what makes a job “hard” —i.e. “the personal burden it involves”— and hence justifies its tariff. Jobs which project the heaviest personal burden should, of course, receive the best remuneration. But this cannot be adopted as considered social policy by any administration… until a properly rational, grounded concept of what this “burden” consists-of has been established. Of course there is a wide spectrum of cases in which different individuals experience the personal burden of a specific job more or less onerously. (Some people are lucky enough to have constitutions which allow them to feel little “burden”, compared with their peers, for doing the same challenging work. That is their luck.) The way to approach this is to use the concept of how an average person would be expected to experience it.  This is a concept like Rousseau’s Social Contract which enables one to make sense of the situation. 

One early element in such a research project would be to identify individuals who approximated most closely to the description of being an “average person”. 

Large numbers of workers who had changed from doing job A to doing job B might also be interviewed, because they would be able to articulate the different level of “burden” which they associated with job A versus job B. And by permuting “A” and “B” round thousands of jobs the outlines of a rational, grounded, taxonomy might begin to form. 

A conceptual framework should begin to materialise which amounts to the outlines of a rational Taxonomy of the relative “burden” attached to jobs of a wide range of kinds.  The “rationality” here centres around some plausible reasons (to be found) why job A is (for the average person) more burdensome than job B.  

There are still, of course, some remnants of a cynical, feral distrust of any application of “theory” to public practices. This was originally a natural repercussion after the huge fiasco of ‘New Maths for Schools’… which initially flaunted, glorified, and blindly accepted, its brazen, full-hearted, unconditional support from the (then) lionised higher maths elite. When it crashed, a severe backlash ensued. This was unavoidable: the very thought of listening to “high intellectual theorising” in public policy forums became a no-goer.  

But that particular feral taboo is now sixty years old, and its impact has been diminishing somewhat in recent years. Latterly some signs of a renewal of optimism about theory-based projects have emerged. One example of an ambitious new project is “artificial intelligence”.  (This has not felt so far any of the public fury which might emerge if it turns out to be mostly based on hot air.)  We have, at least, an optimistic year or two in hand to propose “renewal” projects while this fashionable positivity lasts. (It should be conceded that, on a less ambitious level, software developments have undoubtedly recently increased the degree of “recognition” and “comprehension” achieved by state-of-the-art computers. But this is much less than the word ‘intelligence’ implies.) 

So there is no reason why a BOWT project cannot be carried out today, given the copious computing power available.  It needs a very clear, secure, just, widely respected foundation.  (It also needs to be serviced by means of regular, on-going upgrades… based on secure, transparent evidence… regularly tested against the public’s considered judgment.) 

It is urgently needed, because the social fabric is gradually weakening, and thus it is becoming more and more open to being challenged by strikes launched by specific organised labour groups, which, thanks to no reason of their own devising, happen to be able to hold the rest of society to ransom. That this is, in effect, an anti-social kind of blackmail is a deep contradiction —suppressed by denial— in the position of most left-wing political parties. (This brazen denial of its blackmailing effect is also in total opposition to social justice.)   
What is needed might be described as a sophisticated, up to date, version of “time and motion” studies. But it will need to go further and take into account the backlog of earlier cumulative periods of personal difficulty and strain accepted by each person as part of their required training for their job. A Brain Surgeon, for example, needs years of training and practice to perform her or his job to the level of care expected. (Here too, it will be the “difficulty and strain” which would be experienced by the “average person” over possibly extra years of necessary training which will determine the final score.)  

There is only one good reason why job A should be paid at a higher rate than job B. It is that job A involves the average person being exposed to a higher degree of strain and burden… in effect the “hardness” of the job they do (encompassing both the present and earlier training).  The danger and energy-drain of a job also fall under this umbrella. This principle could become a (or “the”) primary tenet for social justice.  We are nowhere near this at the present time… though some large businesses like the Ford Motor Company have long since introduced Tariff Schemes which have covered bits of the spectrum of jobs on which society is dependent. 

There is a lot of preliminary work needed. This is needed to identify job categories which present the least unweildly obstacles to conceptualising a credible answer.  The size of the work-forces’ involved in each “job” is also a major factor.  If confidence in such a BOWT project is to be built, early successful examples are needed, and there is every reason to look for these “easy examples” first. Successful early examples involving considerable numbers of workers will also help to build momentum.

  A major campaign to set up this project is urgently needed, because the de facto situation is that there is no quasi-objective yardstick to tell negotiators when an industrial strike settlement is “just” or “unjust”.  (Even a probability assessment on this question would be better than nothing.) Evidently the train drivers’ union has managed over a period of years to crank their wages up —by taking public-painful, maverick “industrial action” — to a quite unjustifiable level.  

And the fact that this level of remuneration for train drivers is widely recognised as “unjustifiable”, self-evidently tells us that there is a potential for analytical research to create greater clarity and rationality vis-à-vis wage tariffs. 

So what would a “Quasi-Objective” yardstick look like?  

Well, thousands of subjective assessments can add up to a stable conclusion, and if thousands of particularly savvy, focused workers who had personal experience across different occupations said that job A was twice as “burdensome” and “demanding” as job B, their judgment should carry some weight. 

Of course a particular “job” can involve more or less intense local parameters, so each job needs to be first dissected into the key parameters which apply.  Here too the effect of many subjective judgments can point towards the key factors which (each partially) increase or decrease the burden and strain involved. 

The easiest examples should be tackled first. 

In other words, a “job” like hair cutting can come in various forms: does the client want to end up with more or less hair? Does she or he want more or less shortening or trimming? Do they want more or less curls to be left undisturbed, or re-established? This might require three different parameters, h, s, c. 

When a credible range of procedures has been achieved, a person’s job could be assessed by (a) establishing the local parameters which apply in a particular firm under particular conditions, (b) calculating the degree of “burden and strain” being typically experienced under each parameter.  

A project of this kind can be described as a ‘Burden of Work Taxonomy’ (BOWT) project. The aim would be to get a huge on-going (regularly updated) body  of subjective judgments, which, under careful analysis, could point towards (relatively) convergent and self-evident algorithms for worker remuneration.  The remuneration needs to mirror the burdensomeness of the job. But we need much work to establish the best way to measure the “burdensomeness” of different jobs. A high degree of democratic transparency is essential, because in today’s world the work people do, and the remuneration they enjoy, are often fiercely and proudly treated as signalling their personal worth. 

Some critics think that such a project would be a blank cheque for expanding the notorious “blob” identified by Michael Gove —which roots for bureaucratic red tape in commerce, education and industry. A poorly handled project of this kind would of course be at risk of provoking these adverse comments.  

So it needs strong funding and strong political, will to stand a chance of success. It also needs secure academic support, because, in the last analysis, such a project is a fishing exercise for subjective convergence…of a kind which may be reasonably expected to crystallise into a higher degree of general social coherence than we have formerly enjoyed. 

The potential for such a project is immense. Many thousands of researchers could be employed on building an expectation perspective (data base) which seeks to secure key clarifications which will contribute to a sense of social justice.   

It is an exercise in applying statistics to a socially sensitive problem, and the current appetite for major projects involving predictive maths is quite low.  This is a pity, because it is a project which could probably do more to improve social coherence and solidarity than anything else.  It is deplorable that the application of market-thinking to the rates of pay enjoyed by individuals is often treated on the same level as the market decision how much to charge customers for apples and pears. This is a de facto denial of the worth with which each individual should be treated in a civilised society.    

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL 1^st October 2024