WORK 2007 Cover Essay

What is work?

“Get a job!”

To work for money to support yourself? Is that what work is for?

From the classical economic perspective, work is just a cost, something to be minimized in the production and consumption of goods and services. So better to have machines doing everything while we relax and consume.

So is some activity work only if you’d rather be doing something else? Many aboriginal cultures do not have a concept of work. They do not understand the question, “What would you rather be doing?” Is that a limitation on their economic imagination? Is it a sign of inefficiency?

Machines make workers more productive, hence saving us effort. But there are intuitive limits to the labor we should be saved from. Should we be saved from, for example, the labors of loving or understanding or of living? Should we have machines to undergo our moral challenges for us, to accept responsibility for our mistakes or our dreams?

A pre-industrial concept of work is not that of a necessary evil — a cost of production, the price of consumption — but the idea of a calling, a vocation. Work is what sets you free, what allows you to become what you are by finding your niche — finding a way to give value to your community, your tribe. On this view, to work for money is a perversion of economics, like praying for money is a perversion of piety, or as hating is a perversion of living.

A typical feature of utopian visions of society is the lack of a distinction between work and play. Play is spontaneously chosen, free, and engages the whole person, thus leading to greater wholeness and presence in the world. The ethical intuition behind these utopian visions is that a society cannot be just which requires the spiritual alienation of its citizens. When work is synonymous with making money, then unpaid work like mothering or volunteerism are not acknowledged as sources of wealth. When work is synonymous with play, the production of life’s necessities is a meditative joy, connecting us to our sisters and brothers and to the earth.

But then does the work of life require no sacrifice, no renunciation?

Between idleness and workaholism lies a golden mean. Where has it gone? Why has our economy banished it? Money is supposed to represent the value of your labor to society. It is a measuring stick, a tool. So why have we become money’s tool? When most people are working more hours for less money, what has happened to our measure? Where has our productivity gone and why is it being mismeasured?

In a period of energy scarcity, the question of work becomes decisive. Energy is the ability to do work, and much of our work in the last century was done for us by energy from the earth. The earth provided this work for free, and so we never considered the costs. We treated the earth’s work as pure profit for us, and so failed to notice that we were drawing down precious capital. Will we be able to pay the costs of our petroleum party?

Machines running on ancient sunlight continue to replace human labor, giving rise to unemployment and the concept of disposable people. Full employment, economists assure us, leads to inflation, which hurts the very people it is attempting to help. This lie conflates rising prices with the devaluation of money, thus concealing corporate greed as civic largess. If a right is something essential that needs to be protected in order to safeguard human flourishing, then work is a right, and an economic system which requires a measure of unemployment is not only irrational and unjust, but inefficient in the extreme.

There’s so much work to do, and so many workers to do it. So why is the work not being done and why is there so much unemployment? How will you become who you are by creating value in the world around you?

Justin Good, Ph. D.