The Dignity Of Work

Drum cautions liberals against denigrating it:

Even people who hate their jobs take satisfaction in the knowledge that they’re paying their way and providing for their families. People who lose their jobs usually report intense stress and feelings of inadequacy even if money per se isn’t an imminent problem (perhaps because a spouse works, perhaps because they’re drawing an unemployment check). Most people want to work, and most people also want to believe that their fellow citizens are working. It’s part of the social contract. As corrosive as inequality can be, a sense of other people living off the dole can be equally corrosive.

Ryan Avent asks what happens when there are no jobs available:

In that case, the dignity of work may cease to be a particularly useful social concept, and something will be needed to replace it. Society will have to come up with new means to set useful incentives for people in a world in which we do not allocate purchasing power through market wages. We might talk instead about the dignity of endeavour for its own sake, or the dignity of contribution to society. Such phrases may seem to have the makings of a social infrastructure for socialism. Indeed they do, for a world in which machines can do much of the work will need to become more socialistic if it is not to become intolerably unequal.