Geld: daarom werken wij

Als je dat tijdens een sollicitatie zou zeggen heb je een grote kans dat je niet aangenomen wordt.

I don't find this development paradoxical at all. Look at what has happened in the last 30 years:
1) Perfectly good jobs with social responsibility and social context have disappeared or are disappearing and have been replaced with faceless alternatives (telephone operator, milkman, small shop keeper, newsvendor, etc,)
2) Many jobs have been partially automated (roadmending, street sweeping, factory work, bank clerk, travel agent, farming, etc.)
3) Many companies/organisations which had a primarily social function have been privatised and left with a primarily profit making function (post office, telefone company, gas, water and electric, railways, busses, etc, (even artists and musicians!))
4) High street shops are replaced by chains of national stores and supermarkets, where no-one knows anyone else and the customer attempts to get purcahses over as quickly as possible at the lowest price whilst expertise and helpfulness disappear.
5) Housing is demolished to be replaced with anonymous and eponymous blocks that look and function like prisons - often what are scathingly referred to as anti-social housing areas are the target. Anti-social seeming to mean a group of people who know and trust each other and work, laugh, cry and play together; gentrification takes its place - people who have more contact with a network of faceless "friends" in other countries than with their nextdoor neighbours. Furthermore a house is seen more and more as an investment rather than a home.
6) Technology and automation have slowly have removed the direct contact with the work; instead of artisans there are people making widgets for an unknown thingamajig, call centres replace face-to-face contact. The srvice industry is now larger than real industry, so the majority of people aren't even creating value anymore, merely creating wealth.
7) Financial "news" has become an important aspect of newspapers and TV news; today we apparently need to know on a daily basis what the euro is worth compared to a dollar, whether the finacial markets have made a gain or a loss, whether house prices are rising or falling, what the inflation rate is, what the economic growth rate is/will be/was really; all news is turned to economic impacts: an earthquake in Japan, a volcano in Iceland, e-coli in cucumbers, a war in the ME, and so on.
8) Simple pleasures are being replaced by costly exercises in apparent fun; a weekend with the family becomes a skiing trip, a beer with your friends becomes an exercise in "in-drinking" and alcohol poisoning follwoed by Monday off-work with a hangover; writing a letter becomes never ending twitterage and garbage on a 200 euro phone which will be outmoded next year; digging the garden becomes garden architecture, and so it goes. Ultimately continuously shopping for items with ever shorter life spans (whether fashion or technology items or worse yet both) is becoming the only way to derive pleasure.

So, workers find money more important now than 30 years ago. Suprised? You shouldn't be.

Hebben ze dat ook bij ingenieurs onderzocht ? Die zijn namelijk compleet gestoord, als je de reacties op dit artikel leest: http://www.intermediair.nl/artikel/contract-en-arbeidsvoorwaarden/248944/daarom-verdient-een-ingenieur-niet-meer-dan-de-tuinman.html .

Andy,

Ik denk dat uw commentaar betrekking heeft op de volgende uitspraak:
...Tussen 1983 en nu is het salaris een steeds belangrijker rol gaan spelen, ten koste van de bijdrage aan de samenleving. ...

Maar er worden nog andere dingen beweerd:
...Tegelijkertijd is werk relatief minder belangrijk geworden in ons leven dan gezin of vrije tijd...

En, opmerkelijk genoeg:
...Nu is het verlies van werk niet meer zo erg. Dat wil zeggen, je verliest vooral die bron van inkomsten en niet een deel van je identiteit.'...

Dit suggereert dat mensen buiten het werk nog boeiende activiteiten ebben.
(En dan hoop ik maar dat deze activiteiten meer inhouden dan twitteren.)

Ik denk dat werkgegevers de medewerkers anders zijn gaan behandelen.
Bij jaarcontracten en reorganisaties wordt werk vanzelf minder belangrijk. .

Otje,

It's no suprise that work becomes less important than family or free time if the work itself does not offer any form of reward other than financial. Luckily volunteers show us that some people find social activities which are "work" are more rewarding than "free time" - which is what exactly?

As I suggested, the activities outside work are often "fun" and not actually offering long term enjoyment. or satisfaction. For example (trivially) drinking a dozen pils of an evening may be fun, but tomorrow it won't appear like that. For the same cost (and no effort) you could provide clean drinking water for a whole family in the 3rd world.....you could enjoy that thought until you die.