This piece of writing, entitled Just Work? Redistribution, Recognition, and the Future of Employment, is my senior thesis for Social Studies.
The idea for this thesis germinated as the final paper I wrote for SOC-STD 98rd: The Problem of Work, Professor Katrina Forrester’s Junior tutorial I took in the Spring of 2019. I received funding to conduct summer research under the supervision of my thesis adviser, Professor Danielle Allen, in the Summer of 2019 before completing the bulk of the writing over the course of an abbreviated 2019-2020 academic year. I am deeply grateful to Professor Allen for her generous advice, feedback, and support throughout this entire process, and especially over the last semester.
A sense of realism about this blog’s (lack of) readership inclines me to append only the Introduction to my thesis below. Please click here if you are interested in reading a PDF copy of the full text.
INTRODUCTION
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes published a short essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In the space of just a few pages, he sketched a bold vision of the world in a century’s time. Paying particular attention to the promise of technological innovation, the power of compound interest, and the magnified role of machines in the workforce, Keynes optimistically predicted that his generation’s grandchildren would live in an “age of leisure and of abundance.” He prophesied that we would work only fifteen hours a week; that we would abandon the blind pursuit of wealth; and that we would have permanently solved our economic problem. Keynes’ was a vision of “technological unemployment”—of a society in which technological productivity not only comfortably meets material needs, but also renders human labor effectively superfluous. Free from “pressing economic cares” and the need to work, humans could instead embrace the prospect of increased leisure time.
Although Keynes may have coined the phrase “technological unemployment,” he was not the first thinker to approach the subject. In the 19th century, many classical political economists, including David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, reflected on the potential effects of automation. Ricardo was “convinced that the substitution of machinery for human labour… is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers,” while Mill characterized the belief that workers would not suffer (at least temporarily) from the introduction of machinery as “necessarily fallacious.” Karl Marx, meanwhile, argued that automation embodied the internal contradictions of capitalism insofar as it upheld labor time as the “sole measure and source of wealth” while simultaneously promising to “make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labor time employed on it.” Marx therefore saw a future of technological unemployment as inevitable: labor’s application to the process of industrial production would necessarily lead to its own redundancy.
Though each of these thinkers differed in the degree of their optimism about that future, they shared the belief that increased technological productivity would necessarily lead to a reduction in working hours. If a society could produce more and better with less human input, they reasoned, its need to employ workers would diminish accordingly; at a certain point, the demand for human workers would disappear.
In some ways, Keynes and his predecessors were right. For one, we have become more productive than Keynes may ever have imagined: since Keynes published “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the nominal gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States has increased more than twenty times, from approximately $1 trillion in 1930 to over $21 trillion in 2019. However, even as we have seemingly solved our economic problem, we have not realized Keynes’ vision. We may be richer than ever, but we have not stopped working. On the contrary, work has rooted itself more obstinately than ever in our social imagination. From the normalization of overwork among young professionals to the belief that hard work is a reliable vehicle of social mobility, and even the careerism that permeates college campuses, the centrality of work is taken for granted in society.
The Questions
Why are we still only halfway towards achieving Keynes’ “age of leisure and of abundance”? The answer lies in the social meaning of work. It may be the primary mechanism through which income is distributed throughout society, but work is not simply about its economic reward. Work is intimately connected to various aspects of the human experience: it regulates our claims for rights, recognition, status, identity, and a sense of belonging in society. We work not just to earn more, but also to uphold our end of the social contract, augment our social standing, define our identity, and enter into public life.
As a source of social recognition and as a normative expectation of all individuals, work is appropriately conceived of as a site of justice. This thesis is not the first attempt to subject work to normative assessment. Much of the previous literature, however, has focused on justice internal to work—on what types of work are fitting and meaningful for humans, for example, or how we might eliminate occupational inequalities that obtain between different jobs.
By contrast, this thesis focuses on justice external to work. More specifically, the main project of this thesis is to contemplate the proper role of work in a just society. My goal is not to advocate for the most realistic set of small-scale reforms, but to articulate the end vision of a just society. Although I take the centrality of work as a departure point for my investigation, I do not presume prima facie that work would be a necessary feature of that society.
In the main, three questions have motivated and guided my investigation. First, by what historical processes has work come to assume its current economic and social importance? Second, what is the significance of the technological and structural change currently affecting the world of work, and what (if anything) should be done in response? Lastly, how might we reshape work and its social meaning in order to constitute a just society? Fittingly, these questions provide the general guidelines for the three divisions of my thesis, which I outline below.
The Roadmap
First, in Chapter One, I give a historical overview of work—why people work, what counts as “work,” and how work has evolved in its meaning and its social role. I begin with a reconstruction of Karl Polanyi’s argument in The Great Transformation to show how preindustrial societies tended to subordinate work to a variety of non-economic factors. I then demonstrate that the rise of industrialization and the ideology of market liberalism divorced work from its social context, transforming how individuals experienced work and legitimating the idea of wealth accumulation for its own sake. Finally, I show how the interaction of neoliberal politics and meritocratic ideals upholds work as a normative expectation of individuals and stigmatizes unemployment. Today, work is valued not only for its economic benefits, but also as a source of social recognition, insofar as individuals gain access to non-economic benefits including rights, status, identity, purpose, and a sense of belonging through work.
In Chapter Two, I turn to the problem of work—how “good jobs” are becoming increasingly scarce and employment increasingly insecure, why these changes matter, and how some thinkers have proposed we should respond. I first review the technological and structural changes affecting the world of work, from the increased adoption of automation and AI in the workplace to the rise of the gig economy and other nonstandard work arrangements. Next, I explore two strategies proposed in response to these changes—the “good jobs” approach and the “basic income” approach. I evaluate each strategy’s respective strengths and limits. Drawing on theories of recognition, I argue that although a basic income would be a necessary component of reform, it would have problematic implications for gender justice and social recognition if pursued in isolation.
In Chapter Three, I propose that a truly just strategy to address the problem of work must involve its redefinition, its revalorization, and a more expansive conception of the public good. First, I argue that we must recognize the value of reproductive labor and ensure that its gender burden is more equitably borne by bringing it under our definition of “work.” Second, I argue that we must revalorize work in relation to non-work activities in order to separate work from being the dominant source of social recognition. Finally, I argue that we must embrace a revised understanding of the public good that takes into account not only economic productivity, but also the full range of factors that make life worth living.
I close by briefly recapitulating my arguments, situating their importance in the current discourse, and issuing some proposals for further research.