An alarming report has just
been published, ‘Human Enhancement and the Future of Work.’
Worries about the report are
compounded by an article in today’s Financial Times including comments
from the Work Foundation’s Ian Brinkley.
Brinkley is quoted as saying, “The
idea of using enhancements to help older people and the disabled back into work
is uncontroversial…”
Really, Ian? I can’t believe your
former colleagues at the TUC would go along with this way of thinking.
Dangerous assumptions lurk in
Brinkley’s singling out of ‘older people and the disabled’ being potentially in
need of performance enhancing drugs.
Let us presume for one moment that
the pace of work in the twentieth century were to justify such pharmaceutical
interventions – is such relentless ratcheting up of pressure to pass without
comment?
Is there no more in life than value
for money appraisals with speed up drugs and greater focus demanded beyond the
limits of natural human abilities?
Let’s be clear about it – anyone
with a medical condition should be prescribed whatever treatment his or her
doctor considers necessary. But the idea that healthy older or disabled people
should be assumed to be ‘correctible’, or ‘improvable’ to acceptable levels of
performance by the administration of medication is offensive and deeply
worrying.
Let’s be fair to Ian – he accepts
that “…employers insisting
on the use of drugs for disabled and older workers would be a bridge too far.”
I should hope so!
But once we start down this road it
will be very hard to draw the lines. Who is to say who is insisting and who is
just making a quiet suggestion in a friendly chat?
Methinks this subject demands
careful unpacking.
On one level, using drugs to
enhance performance could be said to be part of the world we already know – who
hasn’t written a student essay to meet a deadline under the influence of a few
cups of black coffee, for example? So there are no absolutes in this discussion
but there are big differences in the kinds of drugs.
We are not talking of a tea time
pick me up.
Let’s not go into drugs in sport,
but the world of cycling has seen a time when performance enhancement using EPO,
blood doping, human growth hormone and various steroids and stimulants was
pretty close to the surface of normality for a while.
It was an awful, duplicitous,
cheating world destroying lives and creating a veneer of falsehood in what
should be a simple, enjoyable human challenge – to work and compete as honestly
and fairly as we can to win.
Quite rightly, the idea of drug
cheats in sport outrages one’s common sense of decency and fairness. The same
principle applies at work. If X is promoted above me because he or she takes
drugs, what message does that create? Once this genie is out of the bottle
there is no putting it back.
Moreover, the drug has not been
invented yet that does not have some kind of adverse effect on the human body
and life expectancy.
For sure, famous artists and
writers have worked under the influence of narcotics. (Byron was an opium
eater. Shelley on laudanum; Hemingway stewed under an alcoholic haze; Gaugin,
Van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec got their jollies on absinth.)
On the other hand, whether any of
these substances actually enhanced
their performances is a moot point.
They were the lifestyle choices of
the individuals concerned which with the benefit of hindsight most of us see as
misguided and decadent.
We now know more of the devastating
health consequences of most of these drugs. We don’t need to be persuaded that
heroin (an opiate) is a dangerous and health threatening drug for example, even
though Byron probably wrote Don
Juan with its molecules buzzing round his brain.
We don’t really know what side
effects long term use of drugs will lead to until it is be too late - perhaps
some twenty years down the line. What else might we expect if this brave new
world becomes the reality?
Willingness to use drugs might
become essential if one is to enter certain professions or occupations.
Older workers might for example, be
encouraged to carry on working night shifts under the influence of drugs, with
unknown potential consequences for their health.
Instead of taking a stand for better
work life balance, unions (who knows?) and employers could be tempted down the
road of recommending performance enhancers to enable workers to cope with long
hours and stressful jobs.
The expectation that an older
person can take drugs to succeed at work is a short step away from the idea
that he or she might need them to get a job in the first place.
People struggling in the labour
market might feel obliged to dose up before interviews.
And once we are on this slippery
slope, how far to slide before the point where the welfare to work industry recommends them to job seekers,
and then perhaps expects
them to use them?
If we believe that technology will
in time conquer all, we might even accept that performance enhancing drugs will
inevitably feature in the workplace of the future.
But is all this without
controversy, as Brinkley suggests? I don’t think so. Maybe it is part of an awful nightmare
around the corner but we should fight against it at all costs.
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