Capitalism Can’t Give Us Meaningful Work
The failure to provide meaningful work to the vast majority of the population is a powerful indictment of our economic system — one more promise capitalism makes but can’t keep.
The failure to provide meaningful work to the vast majority of the population is a powerful indictment of our system — one more promise capitalism makes but can’t keep.
In the mid-nineteenth century, socialist William Morris articulated a famous dilemma: “Meaningful work or useless toil?” He believed the working class performed a socially valuable function, but derided the notion that all work was meaningful, saying it was “a convenient belief to those who live on the labor of others.”
Yet there was indeed work, he said, that was “not far removed from a blessing.” The crucial difference was that some work came with the hope that it would bring well-deserved rest.
Quite a different conception prevails today. Meaningful work isn’t the guarantor of hoped-for leisure, but rather a reason to work more. The hours of all wage and salary workers in the United States have increased by 13 percent since 1975, which is about five extra workweeks per year. And though we are inundated with stories of overworked professionals, the hours of low-wage workers, who are disproportionately women, have increased the most.
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