## 1. Conceptual Distinctions: Work, Labor, Employment, Leisure



It is not difficult to enumerate examples of work. Hence, Samuel
Clark:



> 
> by *work* I mean the familiar things we do in fields,
> factories, offices, schools, shops, building sites, call centres,
> homes, and so on, to make a life and a living. Examples of work in our
> commercial society include driving a taxi, selling washing machines,
> managing a group of software developers, running a till in a
> supermarket, attaching screens to smartphones on an assembly line,
> fielding customer complaints in a call centre, and teaching in a
> school (Clark 2017: 62).
> 



Some contemporary commentators have observed that human life is
increasingly understood in work-like terms: parenthood is often
described as a job, those with romantic difficulties are invited to
'work on' their relationships, those suffering from the
deaths of others are advised to undertake 'grief work,'
and what was once exercise is now 'working out' (Malesic
2017). The diversity of undertakings we designate as
'work', and the apparent dissimilarities among them, have
led some philosophers to conclude that work resists any definition
(Muirhead 2007: 4, Svendsen 2015) or is at best a loose concept in
which different instances of work share a 'family
resemblance' (Pence 2001: 96-97).



The porousness of the notion of work notwithstanding, some progress in
defining work seems possible by first considering the variety of ways
in which work is organized. For one, although many contemporary
discussions of work focus primarily on *employment*, not all
work takes the form of employment. It is therefore important not to
assimilate work to employment, because not every philosophically
interesting claim that is true of employment is true of work as such,
and vice versa. In an employment relationship, an individual worker
sells their labor to another in exchange for compensation (usually
money), with the purchaser of their labor serving as a kind of
intermediary between the worker and those who ultimately enjoy the
goods that the worker helps to produce (consumers). The intermediary,
the *employer*, typically serves to manage (or appoints those
who manage) the hired workers -- the employees--, setting
most of the terms of what goods are thereby to be produced, how the
process of production will be organized, etc. Such an arrangement is
what we typically understand as having a *job*.



But a worker can produce goods without their production being mediated
in this way. In some cases, a worker is a *proprietor*, someone
who owns the enterprise as well as participating in the production of
the goods produced by that enterprise (for example, a restaurant owner
who is also its head chef). This arrangement may also be termed
*self-employment*, and differs from arrangements in which
proprietors are not workers in the enterprise but merely capitalize it
or invest in it. And some proprietors are also employers, that is,
they hire other workers to contribute their labor to the process of
production. Arguably, entrepreneurship or self-employment, rather than
having a job, has been the predominant form of work throughout human
history, and it continues to be prevalent. Over half of all workers
are self-employed in parts of the world such as Africa and South Asia,
and the number of self-employed individuals has been rising in many
regions of the globe (International Labor Organization 2019). In
contrast, jobs -- more or less permanent employment relationships
-- are more a byproduct of industrial modernity than we realise
(Suzman 2021).



Employees and proprietors are most often in a transactional
relationship with consumers; they produce goods that consumers buy
using their income. But this need not be the case. Physicians at a
'free clinic' are not paid by their patients but by a
government agency, charity, etc. Nevertheless, such employees expect
to earn income from their work from some source. But some instances of
work go unpaid or uncompensated altogether. Slaves work, as do
prisoners in some cases, but their work is often not compensated. So
too for those who volunteer for charities or who provide unpaid
*care work*, attending to the needs of children, the aged, or
the ill.



Thus, work need not involve working *for* others, nor need it
be materially compensated. These observations are useful inasmuch as
they indicate that certain conditions we might presume to be essential
to work (being employed, being monetarily compensated) are not in fact
essential to it. Still, these observations only inform as to what work
is not. Can we say more exactly what work *is*?



Part of the difficulty in defining work is that whether a
person's actions constitute work seems to depend both on how her
actions shape the world as well on the person's attitudes
concerning those actions. On the one hand, the activity of work is
causal in that it modifies the world in some non-accidental way. As
Bertrand Russell (1932) remarked, "work is of two kinds: first,
altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface
relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do
so." But work involves altering the world in presumptively
worthwhile ways. In this respect, work is closely tied to the
production of what Raymond Geuss (2021:5) has called
'objective' value, value residing in
"external" products that can be "measured and valued
independently of anything one might know about the process through
which that product came to be or the people who made it." By
working, we generate goods (material objects but also experiences,
states of mind, etc.) that others can value and enjoy in their own
right. In most cases of work (for example, when employed), a person is
compensated not for the performance of labor as such but because their
labor contributes to the production of goods that have such
'objective' value. Note, however, that although work
involves producing what others *can* enjoy or consume,
sometimes the objective value resulting from work is not in fact
enjoyed by others or by anyone at all. A self-sufficient farmer works
by producing food solely for their own use, in which case the worker
(rather than others) ends up consuming the objective value of their
work. Likewise, the farmer who works to produce vegetables for market
that ultimately go unsold has produced something whose objective value
goes unconsumed.



Geuss has suggested a further characteristic of work, that it is
"necessary" for individuals and for "societies as a
whole" (2021:18). Given current and historical patterns of human
life, work has been necessary to meet human needs. However, if some
prognostications about automation and artificial intelligence prove
true (see section 4 on 'The Future of Work'), then the
scarcity that has defined the human condition up to now may be
eliminated, obviating the necessity of work at both the individual and
societal level. Moreover, as Geuss observes, some work aims to produce
goods that answer to human wants rather than human needs or
necessities (that is, to produce luxuries), and some individuals
manage to escape the necessity of work thanks to their antecedent
wealth.



Still, work appears to have as one of its essential features that it
be an activity that increases the objective (or perhaps
intersubjective) value in the world. Some human activities are
therefore arguably not work because they generate value for the actor
instead of for others. For instance, work stands in contrast to
*leisure*. Leisure is not simply idleness or the absence of
work, nor is it the absence of activity altogether (Pieper 1952,
Walzer 1983: 184-87, Adorno 2001, Haney and Kline 2010). When at
leisure, individuals engage in activities that produce goods for their
own enjoyment largely indifferent to the objective value that these
activities might generate for others. The goods resulting from a
person's leisure are bound up with the fact that she generates
them through her activity. We cannot hire others to sunbathe for us or
enjoy a musical performance for us because the value of such leisure
activities is contingent upon our performing the activities. Leisure
thus produces subjective value that we 'make' for
ourselves, value that (unlike the objective value generated from work)
cannot be transferred to or exchanged with others. It might also be
possible to create the objective value associated with working despite
being at leisure. A professional athlete, for instance, might be
motivated to play her sport as a form of leisure but produce (and be
monetarily compensated for the production of) objective value for
others (spectators who enjoy the sport). Perhaps such examples are
instances of work *and* leisure or working *by way of*
leisure.



Some accounts of work emphasize not the nature of the value work
produces but the individual's attitudes concerning work. For
instance, many definitions of work emphasize that work is experienced
as exertion or strain (Budd 2011:2, Veltman 2016:24-25, Geuss
2021: 9-13). Work, on this view, is inevitably
*laborious.* No doubt work is often strenuous. But defining
work in this way seems to rule out work that is sufficiently
pleasurable to the worker as to hardly feel like a burden. An actor
may so enjoy performing that it hardly feels like a strain at all.
Nevertheless, the performance is work inasmuch as the actor must
deliberately orient their activities to realize the objective value
the performance may have for others. Her acting will not succeed in
producing this objective value unless she is guided by a concern to
produce the value by recalling and delivering her lines, etc. In fact,
the actor may find performing pleasurable rather than a burden because
she takes great satisfaction in producing this objective value for
others. Other work involves little exertion of strain because it is
nearly entirely passive; those who are paid subjects in medical
research are compensated less for their active contribution to the
research effort but simply "to endure" the investigative
process and submit to the wills of others (Malmqvist 2019). Still, the
research subject must also be deliberate in their participation,
making sure to abide by protocols that ensure the validity of the
research. Examples such as these suggest that a neglected dimension of
work is that, in working, we are paradigmatically guided by the wills
of others, for we are aiming in our work activities to generate goods
that others could enjoy.


## 2. The Value of Work



The proposed definition of work as the deliberate attempt to produce
goods that others can enjoy or consume indicates where work's
value to those besides the worker resides. And the value that work has
to others need not be narrowly defined in terms of specific
individuals enjoying or consuming the goods we produce. Within some
religious traditions, work is way to serve God and or one's
community.



But these considerations do not shed much light on the first-personal
value of work: What value does one's work have *to*
workers? How do we benefit when we produce goods that others could
enjoy?


### 2.1 The Goods of Work



On perhaps the narrowest conception of work's value, it only has
*exchange* value. On this conception, work's value is
measured purely in terms of the material goods it generates for the
worker, either in monetary terms or in terms of work's products
(growing one's own vegetables, for instance). To view work as
having exchange value is to see its value as wholly extrinsic; there
is no value to work as such, only value to be gained from what
one's work concretely produces. If work only has exchange value,
then work is solely a cost or a burden, never worth doing for its own
sake. Echoing the Biblical tale of humanity's fall, this
conception of work's value casts it as a curse foisted upon us
due to human limitations or inadequacies.



But work is often valued for other reasons. One powerful bit of
evidence in favour of work's being valued for reasons unrelated
to its exchange value comes from studies of (involuntary)
unemployment. Unemployment usually adverse economic effects on
workers, inasmuch as it deprives them, at least temporarily, of
income. But prolonged unemployment also has measurable negative
effects on individuals' health, both physical and mental (Calvo
et al 2015, Margerison-Zilko et al. 2016, Helliwell et al 2017), as
well as being among the most stressful of live events. (Holmes and
Rahe 1967). That being deprived of work is evidently so detrimental to
individual well-being indicates that work matters for many beyond a
paycheck.



Many of the goods of work are linked to the fact that work is nearly
always a social endeavour. As Cynthia Estlund (2003:7) observes,
"the workplace is the single most important site of cooperative
interaction and sociability among adult citizens outside the
family." Individuals thus seek out many social goods through
work. Gheaus and Herzog (2016) propose that in addition to providing
us wages, work fulfills various social roles. For example, work is a
primary means by which individuals can achieve a sense of community.
In working with others, we can establish bonds that contribute to our
sense of belonging and that enable us to contribute to a distinctive
workplace culture. In a similar vein, communitarian theorists often
argue that work, by embedding us in shared practices or traditions, is
essential to social life (Walzer 1983, Breen 2007). MacIntyre
(1984:187) defines a practice as a "any coherent and complex
form of socially established cooperative activity through which goods
internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying
to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and
partially definitive of, that form of activity." Those working
together in (say) a bakery are cooperating to produce the goods
internal to that activity (bread), with the result that they extend
their capacities and enrich their appreciation of the goods they
cooperatively produce.



Many philosophers have closely linked work's value to different
aspects of human rationality. For instance, philosophers inspired by
thinkers such as Aristotle have underscored work's ability to
allow us to perfect ourselves by developing and exercising our
rational potential in worthwhile ways. On this picture, work is a
central arena for the realization of our natures across our lifetimes
(Clark 2017). Marxists typically agree that work allows us to develop
and exercise our rational powers, but add that work's value also
resides in how it enables us to make those powers visible by imparting
human form to a natural world that would otherwise remain alien to us.
Hence, for Marxists, work is an expression of our active nature, a
pathway to self-realization inasmuch as work creates products that
"objectify" the human will. Work thus represents a
counterweight to the passive consumption characteristic of modern
societies (Elster 1989, Sayers 2005).



Another value associated with work is *meaningfulness*.
Philosophical inquiry into meaningful work often parallels
philosophical inquiry into
 the meaning of life.
 One central dispute about meaningful work is whether it is
fundamentally subjective (a matter of how a worker feels about her
work), fundamentally objective (a matter of the qualities of
one's work or of the products one makes), or both (Yeoman 2014,
Michaelson 2021). Some accounts of meaningful work are broadly
Kantian, seeing meaningful work as grounded in the value of autonomy
(Schwartz 1982, Bowie 1998, Roessler 2012). Such accounts judge work
as meaningful to the extent that it is freely entered into, affords
workers opportunities to exercise their own independent judgment, and
allows them to pursue ends of their own that are to some extent
distinct from the ends mandated by their employers. Other accounts
locate the meaningfulness of work in its potential to enhance our
capabilities, to manifest virtues such as pride or self-discipline, or
to emotionally engage our sense of purpose (Beadle and Knight 2012,
Svendsen 2015, Yeoman 2014, Veltman 2016).



At the same time, some argue that meaningful work is in turn a
precondition of other important goods. John Rawls, for example,
proposed that a lack of opportunity for meaningful work undermines
self-respect, where self-respect is the belief that our plan for our
lives is both worth pursuing and attainable through our intentional
efforts. Meaningful work, as Rawls understood it, involves enjoying
the exercise of our capacities, particularly our more complex
capacities. Given that meaningful work is a "social basis"
for self-respect, a just and stable society may have to offer
meaningful work by serving as an "employer of last resort"
if such work is otherwise unavailable (Rawls 1996, Moriarty 2009).



Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the
*dignity* of work. Christian thought, and Catholicism in
particular (John Paul II 1981), has long advocated that work manifests
the dignity inherent in human beings. The claim that "all work
has dignity," regardless of its nature or of how much social
esteem it enjoys, rests on egalitarian ideals about labor, ideals
articulated by Black American thinkers such as Booker T. Washington
and Martin Luther King, Jr. As Washington expressed it, "there
is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem"
(Washington 1901:220). At the same time however, this tradition has
also deployed the notion of dignity as a critical concept, to
highlight labor injustice and to decry exploitative forms of work
(including slavery) that fail to serve or uplift humanity (Washington
1901: 148, King 2011: 171-72, Veltman 2016: 29-31). This
position thus seems to assert that work as such has dignity but that
work can also vary in its dignity depending on workers' economic
conditions or social status. More recent philosophical scholarship on
the dignity of work has investigated its relationship to human rights.
For instance, Paolo Gilabert (2018) distinguishes between dignity as a
status and dignity as a condition. Status dignity is grounded in
certain valuable capacities that individuals have, capacities that in
turn that require workers be treated with respect and concern.
Condition dignity is achieved when individuals are treated in
accordance with the 'dignitarian' norms mandated by such
respect or concern. Gilabert's distinction may allow the
affirmation both of the inherent dignity of work, inasmuch as work
gives evidence of human capacities worthy of respect, and of the claim
that failing to provide decent working conditions is at odds with (but
does not undermine) dignity.


### 2.2 Opposition to Work and Work-centred Culture



That work is a potential source of income, social and personal goods,
meaning, or dignity, does not entail that work *in fact*
provides these goods or that work is good for us *on balance*.
Since the Industrial Revolution in particular, many philosophers and
social theorists have been sceptical about the value of work and of
the work-centred cultures typical of contemporary affluent societies
(Deranty 2015).



Crucially, much of the scepticism surrounding the value of work is not
scepticism about the value of work *per se* but scepticism
about the value of work in present day social conditions or scepticism
about the veneration of work found in the "Protestant work
ethic" (Weber 1904-05) or in work-centred societies.
Sceptics about work-centred culture question whether popular
enthusiasm for work is rational or well-informed or whether it gives
adequate credence to alternatives to work-centred culture (Cholbi
2018b, Sage 2019). Indeed, many critics of contemporary work
arrangements essentially argue that good or desirable work is possible
but rarer than we suppose. In "Useful Work versus Useful
Toil," (1884), for example, the socialist activist William
Morris rejects "the creed of modern morality that all labor is
good in itself" and argues for a distinction between work that
is "a blessing, a lightening of life" and work that is
"a mere curse, a burden to life," offering us no hope of
rest, no hope of producing anything genuinely useful, and no hope of
pleasure in its performance. Similarly, the anarchist Bob Black opens
his essay "The Abolition of Work" (1985) as follows:



> 
> No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery
> in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from
> working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop
> suffering, we have to stop working.
> 



But Black proceeds to define work as "forced labor, that is,
compulsory production." His 'abolition' of work is
thus compatible with individuals *voluntarily* engaging in
economically productive activities, which (as we have seen) can
resemble work in its essentials.



Danaher (2019:54) allows that work can contribute to human well-being,
but as presently organized, the world of work is "structurally
bad" and unlikely to change in these respects:



> 
> The labor market in most developed countries has settled into an
> equilibrium pattern that makes work very bad for many people, that is
> getting worse as a result of technical and institutional changes, and
> that is very difficult to reform or improve in such a way as to remove
> its bad-making properties.
> 



Thus, even those espousing stridently 'anti-work'
positions usually target not work as such, but work as it has been
organized or understood in the contemporary world. Indeed, much of
their ire is directed at current conditions of employment, which (as
noted earlier) is only one prominent species work can take.



The sceptical case against work or work culture has many dimensions,
but can be fruitfully analysed as having four strands:


1. *Goods not realized:* While work can be a source of various
goods, many people's working lives fail to provide them these
goods. Popular enthusiasm for work thus seems misplaced, according to
work sceptics, for "the moral sanctity of work is painfully out
of step with the way that a vast proportion of people actually
experience their jobs" (Frayne 2015: 62-63).



With respect to the exchange value of work, work is often poorly
compensated or insecure. Contemporary economies are increasingly
characterized by a 'hollowing out' of middle class labor,
wherein wages continue to increase for those at the upper end of the
wage scale, wages stagnate at the bottom end of the scale, and the
number of workers in the middle strata shrinks. This has resulted in
the emergence of a class of 'working poor,' individuals
who lack sufficient income to pay for basic needs such as housing or
food *despite* being employed.



Many of the other potential goods of work are enjoyed by some workers,
but many receive little social recognition or do not achieve a greater
sense of community through their work. A good deal of socially
valuable or 'essential' work is largely invisible to its
beneficiaries. Many jobs are dull or unchallenging, contributing
little to the development or exercise of our more sophisticated human
capacities. It is difficult to envision, for instance, that toll booth
workers find their jobs or stimulating or challenging (aside from
testing their ability to withstand repetition or boredom).



Modern work has been oriented around the *division of labor*,
i.e., the increasing separation of productive processes into ever
smaller tasks. (The factory assembly line provides the model here.)
The division of labor results in workers becoming hyper-specialists,
who repetitively perform narrow or simple tasks. Although the division
of labor increases overall economic productivity, critics such as the
classical economist Adam Smith worried that it eventually makes
workers "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human
creature to become." (Smith 1776 [1976]: V.1.178) As to meaning
or dignity, a wide swath of human work neither engages workers nor
allows them to exercise their autonomous judgment, and many work in
oppressive or exploitative conditions seemingly at odds with the
dignity of the work they perform.
2. *Internal tensions among work goods:* A characteristic of
work-centred societies is that their members look to work to provide
them with many different goods. But work (and employment in
particular) may be ill-suited to provide this package of goods, i.e.,
work may be capable of providing some of these goods but only at the
expense of others. For instance, many of the professions that
individuals view as offering the greatest opportunities for meaningful
work (such as education, counseling, or care for the sick, young, or
disabled) are among the poorest paid professions. Contemporary labor
markets thus seem to offer a workers the opportunity for an inadequate
income or meaningful work, but rarely both. The psychologist Barry
Schwartz argues (2015) that our non-material motivations for work,
such as seeking meaningfulness, social engagement, and opportunities
for autonomy, are in motivational competition with the monetary
incentives associated with work. The monetary incentives distort
workplace attitudes and behaviours so that the non-material goods we
seek in work are crowded out by a focus on productivity and the
economic goods work makes available. That labor markets are
competitive may also undermine the social benefits of work, for even
those who succeed in the labor market do so by being 'pitted
against' other workers in ways that reduce solidarity among
them, turning fellow citizens into rivals who are indifferent (or even
hostile to) each other's interests (Hussain 2020).
3. *Unrecognized bads or costs:* Sceptics also point to
'bads' or costs associated with work that tend to go
unrecognized. The most obvious of these is the opportunity costs
resulting from the amount of time spent working. Typically, full-time
workers spend 1,500-2,500 hours per year on the job, equivalent
to around nine to fifteen weeks annually. These are hours that, were
they not allocated to working, could be devoted to leisure, sleep,
exercise, family life, civic and community engagement, and so on (Rose
2016). These hours do not include the considerable amount of time that
workers expend on training or educating themselves for work or on
commuting to and from workplaces. Nor does it include the hours that
many salaried workers are expected to be 'connected' or
'on call' by their employers. Formal employment also tends
to preclude workers from work other than that performed for their
employers, with the result that workers often end up paying other
workers for that labor. Such costs include the hiring of housekeepers,
child care providers, maintenance experts and landscapers, etc. And
while unemployment seems to have adverse effects on our physical and
mental well-being, working is not free of adverse health effects
either, including stress, emotional frustration, and physical ailments
from repetitive work tasks or ergonomic deficiencies in workplace
design.



Sceptics also argue that when work fails to deliver certain kinds of
goods, workers suffer certain psychological bads. Three such classes
of bads merit particular attention:


	* Marx's critique of work under capitalism rests on the notion
	that work often lacks goods whose absence gives rise to the further
	bad of *alienation*. Marx (1844) proposed that work under
	capitalism alienates workers from what they produce, inasmuch as
	workers have little if any say over what is produced and how; from the
	act of work itself, inasmuch as workers are compelled by economic
	necessity to work and so do not take intrinsic satisfaction in
	working; from their own human nature or "species-essence,"
	inasmuch as workers do not witness their own agency or intentions
	"objectified" in the products of their work; and from
	other workers, inasmuch as capitalism treats workers as
	interchangeable inputs of production and pits worker against worker.
	In terms of our earlier enumeration of the goods of work, Marx's
	appeal to alienation suggests that the absence of these goods is not
	merely a lack or a deprivation but is a positive bad of work in its
	own right (Elster 1989, Brudney 1998, Kandiyali 2020).
	* Many work sceptics emphasize how work may distort our priorities
	or values. The value of work, in their eyes, has come to be an
	unquestioned ethical dogma. "The economists and the moralists
	have cast a sacred halo over work," according to Paul LaFargue
	(1883), instilling us in the "delusion" of the "love
	of work." (See also Frayne 2015.) Bertrand Russell (1932) argued
	that the veneration of work has eroded our appreciation of the value
	of leisure and idleness. (See also O'Connor 2018.) Economists
	such as Keynes (1930) observed that the dramatic increases in economic
	productivity have often not led to reductions in work time, a
	development he attributes to a work ethic that stymies our capacity to
	enjoy leisure and abundance.
	* The social cachet of work may end up warping our moral
	relationship to ourselves, treating ourselves not as intrinsically
	valuable but as mere instruments of production. Hannah Arendt (1958)
	argued that conceiving of ourselves primarily as workers leads to a
	sort of instrumental stance on ourselves and other human agents, in
	which we come to view ourselves purely as resources for production or
	sites of consumption. More recent critics have proposed that
	work-centred cultures encourage us to view the self as a commodity to
	be 'branded' or marketed to prospective employers (Davis
	2003).
Lastly, work can have costs to others besides workers themselves. The
aforementioned opportunity costs deriving from time devoted to work
may worsen workers' relationships with others or bar their
communities from making use of those workers' skills for
socially worthwhile purposes. Some work arguably makes workers
complicit in harmful or unjust practices, such as the sale of tobacco
or unhealthy foods. Workers may also impose *negative
externalities* through their work. For example, working outside
the home typically results in a greater environmental impact,
including contributions to the carbon outputs responsible for global
climate change (James 2018).
4. *Alternatives sources of work-related goods:* A last thread in
'anti-work' thinking is that, even to the degree that work
is good, it is not obviously uniquely situated to provide the goods it
provides. A sense of social recognition or identity can be rooted in
domains of human life besides employment, such as volunteer work,
family life, religion, or friendship. "Ludic" activities,
i.e., play, can offer opportunities to exercise and hone our rational
capacities (Black 1985, Nguyen 2019). Some have proposed that virtual
reality will provide us simulacra of work-like activities that could
thereby substitute for work itself. Contrary to Gheaus and Herzog
(2016) then, work may not be a "a privileged context" for
realizing the goods we associate with work.



Anti-work theorists typically call for work to be re-valued such that
individuals will 'work to live, not live to work,' as well
as policies (such as reductions in the mandated weekly working time)
to minimize the influence of work on our quality of life. That work is
both unavoidable and seemingly necessary but frustrating might suggest
the wisdom of an ironic stance toward work (de Botton 2010).


## 3. Justice and the Politics of Work



Human societies can be seen as cooperative endeavours aimed at
securing their members' interests. If so, then social justice
will be centrally concerned with those practices within societies by
which individuals cooperate to produce goods for one another's
use. Work is therefore a central concern of social justice. Questions
of work and justice arise both with respect to the design of
institutions and the choices of individuals.


### 3.1 Distributive Justice



Most accounts of justice assume that a large number of individuals
within a given society will engage in paid work. A crucial moral
question, then, is what individuals are entitled to with respect to
both the benefits and the harms of work. How, in other words, are the
goods and bads of work justly distributed?



One possible answer to this question is that each worker is entitled
to whatever benefits their talents and abilities enable them to secure
in a labor market governed purely by supply and demand. This answer
entails that those whose talents or abilities are in high demand
and/or short supply will command greater benefits from prospective
employers than those whose talents or abilities are in low demand
and/or generously supplied (Boatright 2010). (This same logic would
apply to those who use their labor to produce goods for sale rather
than those in employment arrangements.)



After the early decades of the twentieth century, many nations
implemented policies at odds with this 'pure market'
vision of work and labor. Most have wage regulations, for example,
mandating a minimum level of pay. But the justice of minimum levels of
pay is disputed, with some theorists arguing that disallowing a person
to sell her labor at a price she judges adequate infringes on her
personal liberty. According to many libertarian thinkers, our labor is
an exercise of our bodies or our talents, each of which we own in a
way akin to our ownership of private property. To disallow someone the
right to sell their labor even at a very low cost thus infringes on
their rights of self-ownership. (Mack 2002) The fairness of wage
differentials is also disputed. Should wages track the economic value
of a worker's contributions or their effort, or are wages
primarily an incentive to encourage worker commitment and motivation?
(Heath 2018, Moriarty 2020) Some theorists have proposed that
inequalities in pay ought to be eliminated altogether (Ortenblad
2021), while some supporters of an unconditional basic income, in
which individuals receive regular payments regardless of their working
status, see it an alternative way to ensure a sufficient minimum
income, one immune to workers becoming unemployed (van Parijs and
Vanderbroght 2017).



Distributive justice also pertains to various *protections against
harms* *or wrongs* associated with work. Again, most
societies place legal limitations on various conditions of work. These
include protections against overwork via limitations on the length of
the workday or workweek; bans on discrimination in hiring or promotion
based on race, gender, religion, or other social categories;
assurances that workplace risks and dangers are mitigated; and, at a
wider societal level, prohibitions aimed at ensuring that individuals
lives are not dominated by work at particular life stages (bans on
child labor and provisions to make retirement possible). One important
moral question about these protections is whether workers should have
the right to bargain away some of these protections either for
increased pay (as when employees negotiate higher wages in exchange
for performing more dangerous jobs) or for enhancements in other
protections.


### 3.2 Contributive and Productive Justice



The questions of distributive justice addressed in the previous
section concern what goods workers receive from work *if* they
work at all. But critical questions about justice also pertain to
whether workers are entitled to work and whether they are obligated to
do so. Work thus raises questions of *contributive* and
*productive* justice respectively.



For one, do workers have a right to work in the first place? The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights states as much, assuring each
individual "the right to work, to free employment, to just and
favorable conditions of work and to protection against
unemployment." (United Nations 1948, Article 23) A right to work
would presumably be more than a negative liberty, i.e., not simply a
right that others not interfere with one's attempts to work,
secure employment, etc., but a *claim* to be provided work if
one wishes (Schaff 2017). The right to work has been defended both for
specific populations (such as the disabled; see Kavka 1992) or for the
populace writ large (Tcherneva 2020). If there is such a right, it
will presumably be because work is an essential (or at least the
prevailing) means for the acquisition of vital goods. Elster (1988)
proposes a job guarantee on the grounds that work is essential to
self-realization. Gomberg (2007) argues that work is a key social good
because it is the primary path by which to make a socially validated
contribution to one's wider community, a contribution that can
provide us recognition and a sense of meaning. Two crucial questions
that arise in connection with the putative right to work are (a)
against whom is this right held, i.e., who must provide work if
workers have a right to it, or (b) whether work provided so as to
honour this right will in fact provide the goods on which the right to
work is based (e.g., the work provided under a government-provided job
guarantee could prove unfulfilling).



A right to work would mean that any person (or at least any adult) who
wished to work would be able to do so. But do individuals have a right
*not* to work, or is work in any sense morally obligatory? The
most obvious basis for such an obligation appeals to notions of
*fair play or reciprocity*: Individuals act wrongly when they
fail to contribute to social enterprises from which they benefit, and
since the productive economy benefits most everyone in a society,
individuals have an obligation to contribute to the productive economy
by working. (Becker 1980, White 2003) Opponents of this fair play
rationale argue that the conditions for just reciprocal relations
between societies and particular groups (e.g., the ghetto poor; see
Shelby 2012) do not obtain, thereby exempting members of such groups
from the obligation to work, or that contemporary economic
developments fail to provide the background conditions for the
obligation to apply (Cholbi 2018a). Other opponents of an obligation
to work argue that it represents a violation of the state's duty
to treat citizens equally; citizens who are compelled to work are made
to pursue a conception of the good life with which they may not agree,
and a just state should treat citizens as equals by remaining neutral
among rival conceptions of the good life (van Parijs 1991, Levine
1995). An obligation to work would in effect amount to the
state's endorsement of the 'work ethic' and the
rejection of ways of life (e.g., being a beachcomber) that themselves
oppose the work ethic. Other opponents of a duty to work argue that
requiring individuals to work is likely to stand in the way of
self-realization for particular people (Maskivker 2012).



Another possibility is that even if there is not a general obligation
to work, we might be subject to limitations on our work-related
liberties in order to satisfy demands of distributive justice. Many of
the goods provided by a just society, including education and health
care, are labor-intensive. But societies often face shortfalls of
workers in the very occupations that provide these goods. Some
philosophers have argued that the demands of distributive justice may
permissibly constrain our work choices, and in fact, may license
governments conscripting labor in order to secure workers to provide
these goods, on the model of the military draft during wartime.
(Fabre 2008, Stanczyk 2012). Similar concerns arise concerning
socially necessary but undesirable 'dirty' work.(Walzer
1983, Schmode 2019). Conversely, if justice can require individuals to
perform certain kinds of work, this might speak against a right to
strike (Borman, 2017, Gourevitch 2018), particularly on the part of
essential workers (Munoz 2014).



How one's choice of work contributes to justice and the overall
good is a moral question that individuals face as well. Some jobs
(hired assassin, for example) seem immoral as such. But to what
extent, if any, are we obligated to choose careers or jobs that
promote justice or the welfare of others? On the one hand, choice of
jobs and careers does not appear exempt from moral considerations,
inasmuch as the work one performs affects others and society at large,
and given the often dismal state of the world, perhaps we are
obligated to choose jobs and careers for moral reasons rather than
solely on the basis of self-interest. Norman Care (1984:285) proposes
"that in today's world morality requires that service to
others be put before self-realization in the matter of career
choice." In contrast, some philosophers who believe that
individuals (and not merely institutions) within a society are subject
to demands of justice nevertheless accord individuals discretion in
their choices of occupation. G.A. Cohen, for instance, asserts that we
should each enjoy a "personal prerogative" that allows us
to be something more than an "engine for the welfare of other
people" or "slaves to social justice." (2008:10) We
might likewise worry that requiring that our job or career choices be
optimal from the standpoint of justice or social welfare is
excessively demanding in light of how such choices both reflect and
shape our identities (Cholbi 2020).


### 3.3 Equality and Workplace Governance



In recent years, egalitarian philosophers have begun to critique
typical workplace arrangements as antagonistic to requirements of
equal relations among individuals in society. Particularly influential
here is Anderson's suggestion that many workplaces amount to a
form of "private government," at least as authoritarian as
many forms of state government.



> 
> Imagine a government that assigns almost everyone a superior whom they
> must obey. Although superiors give most inferiors a routine to follow,
> there is no rule of law. Orders may be arbitrary and can change at any
> time, without prior notice or opportunity to appeal. Superiors are
> unaccountable to those they order around. They are neither elected nor
> removable by their inferiors. ...The government does not
> recognize a personal or private sphere or autonomy free from sanction.
> It may prescribe a dress code and forbid certain hairstyles. Everyone
> lives under surveillance, to ensure that they are complying with
> orders. ...The economic system of the society run by this
> government is communist. The government owns all the nonlabor means of
> production in the society it governs. It organizes production by means
> of central planning. The form of the government is a dictatorship
> (Anderson 2017: 37-38).
> 



The 'society' Anderson invites us to imagine is of course
the contemporary workplace, at least as it stands in the United States
and many other nations. Anderson and other *relational*
egalitarians view the relationships defined by the powers that
employers usually have over their employees as oppressive and unjust.
Workers are subject to employers' 'governance,' but
this governance consists in employees being arbitrarily and
unaccountably subject to the wills of employers. The relational
egalitarian thus concludes that workplaces, as presently constituted,
do not involve employees and employers relating as genuine equals. And
while employees will generally have the right to exit employment
relationships, this may be little protection against oppression if
most workplaces are organized in the way Anderson illustrates.



To some degree, the inequalities to which Anderson points are products
of labor law and policies specific to different nations. There are,
however, ways of altering the relationships between employers and
workers so as to potentially prevent or address these (and other)
inequalities.



Perhaps the most familiar such method is *unionization* or
collective bargaining. Worker unions amplify the power of individual
workers in relation to their employers by compelling employers to
negotiate contracts with workers as a body. Unions may organize
workers within a particular profession, within many professions, or
within a single workplace or firm. Societies vary considerably in the
degrees to which their workers are unionized and their labor laws
friendly to union formation and power. Unions are presumptively
justified on the grounds that workers who consensually form or join
unions are exercising their right to freely associate with others with
whom they share interests in order to promote those interests
(Lindblom 2019), though if union membership is required in order to be
employed in a particular workplace or industry, unionization may
violate individuals right *not* to associate with others or to
associate with (in this instance, to enter into an employment
relationship) any party of their choosing (White 1998).Appealing to
"republican liberty," Mark Reiff (2020) has argued that
unions should be viewed as a basic institution of society that
protects workers' liberty from exploitation by employers. On
Reiff's view, unionization should therefore be universal and
*compulsory*.



Other methods for redressing the seemingly unequal and oppressive
relations between employers and employees involve breaking the
monopoly on decision making that management typically has within a
given firm or employment arrangement. Typical workplaces are
hierarchical rather than democratic. Many egalitarian critics of work
call for the workplace to be more democratized, with workers having a
greater say not only concerning their own working conditions but also
concerning decisions usually reserved for management. Advocates for
workplace democracy often argue that it is likely to be the most
effective workplace organization in protecting workers'
interests. (Gonzalez-Ricoy 2014). Others emphasize that the
workplace is a microcosm of larger society and hence serves as a
training ground for the development of virtues needed to live in a
larger democratic society (Pateman 1970, Estlund 2003). But perhaps
the most basic argument for workplace democracy is that firms are
analogous to states, and so if the state ought to be governed
democratically, so too should firms and other workplaces (Dahl 1986,
Mayer 2000, Landemore & Ferreras 2016). Workplace democracy would
seem to render the workplace more just inasmuch as it makes
workers' conditions a partial byproduct of their consent and a
reflection of their autonomy (Schaff 2012).


### 3.4 Gender, Care, And Emotional Labor



Work's role in justice is further complicated by the fact that
work is a highly gendered phenomenon in many societies. For one, women
typically perform much of the housekeeping and child care that
traditionally have not been recognized with monetary compensation.
Within the formal labor market, many societies have a wage gap wherein
women are paid less than men for similar work, and there are
significant differences in gender representations in different
professions (traditionally, women highly represented in fields such as
primary school teaching, nursing, and social work, men highly
represented in fields such as engineering and finance). Feminist
philosophers have detected in these differentials an undervaluation of
the kinds of work, particularly care work, that women have often
performed (Gurtler and Smith 2005) as well as a blind spot in
philosophical theorizing about justice wherein
'relational' goods that matter to our life prospects but
are usually not provided via market exchange are ignored (Gheaus
2009). One intricate set of issues here is understanding the
underlying relations of cause and effect: Are women in societies with
sexist norms pushed toward low pay or low prestige jobs because they
are women, or are these low pay or low prestige jobs because women
tend to perform them (or both)? In a similar vein, we may wonder how
norms of gender intersect with the gendered division of labor
(whether, for example, the stereotype that women are more eager to
care for children feeds the gendered division of labor or whether the
gendered division of labor reinforces that stereotype, or both).



The gendered division of labor is open to objections of different
kinds: On the one hand, it appears to result in distributions of
work-related goods (such as income, free time, etc.) in which women
are systematically shortchanged. In addition, the gendered division of
labor may be unjust because it contributes to hierarchies between the
genders that render them unequal. (Hartley and Watson 2018) Schouten
(2019) argues that, although many individuals embrace traditional
gender norms and the gendered division of labor these entail, those
who instead favour gender-egalitarian ways of life have a reasonable
ground to complain when societies create institutions and policies
that support expectations -- the gendered division of labor chief
among these -- that serve as impediments to such ways of life.
According to Schouten then, a just society will regulate work time,
family leave, and dependent care so as to foster gender-egalitarian
ways of life and a non-gendered division of labor. (See also Wright
and Brighouse 2008, Gheaus 2012.)



A further strand in feminist thought about work arises from
Hochschild's scholarship (2012) on *emotional labor*.
Some work involves intensive monitoring or management of one's
own emotions in order to engage or manipulate the emotions of others.
Although Hochschild offers examples of such emotional labor undertaken
both by women and men, some professions in which women predominate are
saturated with emotional labor. Hochschild notes that female flight
attendants, for instance, are subject to a wide array of emotional
expectations vis-a-vis air travellers (smiling, friendly
banter, interest in travellers' destinations or professions,
etc.). Scholars have highlighted a number of ethically salient
features of emotional labor (see Barry, Olekalns, and Rees 2019 for a
useful overview), but the phenomenon has been subject to little
systematic philosophical analysis. Hochschild primarily emphasizes the
detrimental effects of emotional labor on workers themselves, arguing
that it can estrange workers from their own emotions and lead to
struggles to identify or express authentic emotion both within and
outside the workplace. Furthermore, when emotional labor results in
employees' "surface acting," that is, displaying
emotions at odds with their own internal feelings, employees'
health suffers. Other ethical concerns are more interpersonal --
for example, that emotional labor is deceptive or lacks integrity.
Barry, Olekalns, and Rees (2019) offer a useful starting point by
noting that emotional labor raises the prospect of conflicts between
workers' rights and the rights of their employers, between
workers' rights and workers' duties, and between employer
rights and employer duties.


## 4. Work and its Future



A number of social commentators have predicted that economic and
technological trends will soon culminate in societies become
increasingly 'post-work,' that is, far fewer individuals
will engage in paid work, work hours will dramatically decrease, and
work will have a far smaller role among individuals' values or
concerns.(Frey and Osborne 2013, Thompson 2015, Brynjolofsson and
McAfee 2014). Whether this prospect should be welcomed or avoided
depends to a large extent on issues addressed earlier in this article:
how good work in fact is, whether there are other avenues for
attaining the goods associated with work, etc.



Some welcome a post-work future as liberating (Livingston 2016,
Chamberlain 2018, James 2018, Danaher 2019), arguing that diminutions
in the centrality of work will afford us greater leisure, freedom, or
community, especially if activities such as play or the appreciation
of the natural worlds supplant work. Others worry that the decline of
work will deprive us of a central arena in which to realize goods
central to our natures (Deranty 2015) or will instigate high levels of
inequality or economic distress (Frase 2016). Others express concern
about individuals' ability to psychologically transition from a
work-centred to a work-optional society (Cholbi 2018b).


## 5. Conclusion



Work and labor bear intrinsic philosophical interest. But their
centrality to the human condition also entail that work and labor
intersect with still broader philosophical questions about the human
good and the just organization of human societies. Ongoing and
anticipated changes to the world of work should provide rich fodder
for philosophical inquiry in coming decades. Philosophy is likely to
have a special role to play in addressing what Appiah (2021:7) has
called the "hard problem," to determine "how to
produce the goods and services we need, while providing people with
income, sociability, and significance."