In recent weeks the hard-heads of finance and business have struck back, questioning the findings of the royal commission, stressing the responsibility of businesses, their boards and superannuation trustees to run profitable businesses for shareholders, and dismissing any attempt to define the responsibility of companies to others, whether it be their clients, ecological goals or equality. These critics have a clear vision of business and the relative places of shareholders, workers, customers and public within it.
At the heart of this vision is the understanding of work in terms of transaction. In the labour market workers contract with the firm to work for a wage, and the relationship between the worker and firm, between wage and work, is governed by the balance between cost and benefit. If workers are productive they are promoted and their remuneration increases accordingly.
In transactions, it is expected that each party will assess the relationship with reference to what is in its own interests. The conditions offered to workers and to customers will also be calibrated in terms of cost and benefit. Any gifts made to them are assessed by the returns that are expected from them. They are an expression of enlightened self-interest. The profits of the company are at the disposal of those who have put money into it and those whom they employ to run it. If any virtue is honoured in all this, it is transactional justice.
This view has the merit of a severe logic. It removes from companies the unpredictable and distracting human dimension and uses the simple metaphor of the market to confine the discussion of work to quantifiable and concrete activities. It enables focus. Yet it leaves out of consideration the qualities that are most valued in work, and are essential for the long-term success of any organisation.
I saw this demonstrated in two recent workplace events that were wholly played in the key of gift, not of transaction. The first was a farewell for a friend at a non-government organisation. People who spoke of her described her as a gift to the organisation and to themselves.
She herself spoke with gratitude of the gift her colleagues were to her, of the gift it was to work for the betterment of vulnerable people, of the gift she found in knowing that the toil involved helped people, and of the gift she had received through the supervisors who had supported and mentored her. She received the tributes paid her as a gift, laughing with delight even at those awkwardly phrased.
The second event took place in a bank. It celebrated the anniversary of a program that offered internships to immigrants who had relevant qualifications and experience abroad but could not find work in Australia. Through mentoring and accompaniment of bank staff most participants found permanent work.
"The logic of gift is cyclical and generative. The energy in it does not flow from mutual self-seeking, as it would if the working relationship were defined as a transaction, but from something better described as love."
The celebration displayed the skills and personal qualities of the participants. Both they and the bank staff involved in the program spoke repeatedly of the gift they had found in each other and in their work together. It displayed their delight and gratitude and the meaning they had found in their work.
Each of these workplace events put on display a number of relationships. Only some could be described as transactions, and even in these the transactional element was highly qualified. People certainly worked for a salary and expected it to be just, but when they spoke of their work, their satisfaction was rooted in other relationships that lay outside the financial.
In the two events the relationships between people, and the people themselves, were seen as a gift. The natural response to people whom one sees as a gift is one of mutual gratitude. This pervaded the atmosphere of the events. Shared gratitude flows naturally into shared delight in each other's company and the commitments.
The delight is also experienced as a gift that renews one's energy for work and for building deeper relationships through it. Thus the logic of gift is cyclical and generative. The energy in it does not flow from mutual self-seeking, as it would if the working relationship were defined as a transaction, but from something better described as love.
This quality suggests that it is in the interests of companies, as well as of the people who compose them, to see the relationships that constitute work more broadly than the image of transaction allows. In a good enterprise work is a form of self-transcendence through relationships with other workers, with the people whom they serve directly and with the broader society.
The spirit and relationships between staff and the contribution of the firm to build good relationships in society are as important as the purely financial relationships, and indeed are necessary to sustain the latter.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Tom Merton / Getty Creative