Why Work?
Alternatives to the Protestant Work Ethic
Everyone worships at the shrine of work, while everyone agrees that the end of work is in sight.
As a futurist I am often asked about the future of work. I pay close attention to what other futurists are saying about that topic. There seems to be common agreement about the nature of work in the future, particularly regarding the relationship between humans and machines. And it is a view that I find deeply troubling and indeed superficial. Let me explain my concerns by referencing a contemporary case study.
A disturbing pattern of unemployment is unfolding in the diverse landscape that is Asia. India, home to the largest population in the region, is grappling with an escalating crisis, particularly among its youth, where the unemployment rate has almost doubled over the past decade. Various factors, including the global financial crisis, demonetization, the Covid-19 pandemic, and ongoing geopolitical tensions have contributed to a spike in unemployment as economic activity stalls.
Beyond its economic consequences, such as diminished GDP output and sluggish growth, unemployment contributes to social unrest, exacerbates inequality, and results in the underutilization of human capital.
Please note that last point as it is an indicator of the paradigmatic consequences and value we so often attribute to labour. What follows then is the inevitable extrapolative solution...
For amid the escalating doom and gloom, a flicker of hope persists. The widespread adoption of emerging technologies is creating opportunities to skill and empower the disengaged youth of Asia. Providing the region’s young population with the tools to navigate the swiftly evolving landscape will not only enhance their capabilities but also propel the entire region towards a prosperous tomorrow. Or so it is presumed.
From artificial intelligence and robotics to big data and the Internet of Things, technological advancements are reshaping industries and creating entirely new opportunities. The key to unlocking a future marked by inclusive growth and prosperity for Asia lies in embracing these technologies wholeheartedly. But the challenge we face is to bridge the gap between the current workforce and the evolving demands of the new workplace.
Both of these statements offer clues as to the knee jerk nature of so much industrial policy today and the flawed assumptions on which these policies are based.
Conventional wisdom, you see, maintains that it’s an imperative to equip Asia’s young people with skills in emerging technologies, ensuring they are not left behind in the transformative tsunami of societal change. Future of work pundits never tire of emphasizing the need to modernize the education system. Curricula need to undergo a comprehensive overhaul, they say, in order to incorporate relevant technical skills, including coding, data analysis, and foundational knowledge in robotics. We must focus on STEM, they insist. Ensuring practical relevance will require collaboration from academia, industry, and government. Implementing robust vocational training programs to address specific technological requirements will empower youth with hands-on skills directly applicable in the job market. These programs must obviously be easily accessible to the disadvantaged.
Moreover, we should be prioritizing a culture of lifelong learning. Embracing continuous learning and skills development must become the standard to equip people with the agency to navigate an ever-changing technological landscape. Online platforms, micro-credentials and apprenticeship programs can play a pivotal role in facilitating this ongoing journey of lifelong learning. Blah, blah, blah...
I hear these messages over and over. It has become the conventional wisdom across all sectors of society and across the political spectrum. Thus, it is not surprising that a futures-savvy city state like Singapore is already moving ahead in this quest.
Singapore aims to triple its AI workforce by training locals and hiring from overseas. The state’s approach to preparing its workers for future disruptions is commendable and perhaps an ideal example for others in the region to follow. It is essential for other countries to start investing in skilling its workforce. A recent study by Pearson reveals that India will need to ‘upskill’ and ‘reskill’ as many as 16.2 million workers in AI and automation to cover its skills deficit by 2027.
Confronting the dual challenges of escalating unemployment and technological disruption will demand a unified effort. Governments, private enterprises, educational institutions, and international organizations need to unite and establish a collaborative framework. Public-private partnerships have the potential to stimulate investments in skill development programs, while the exchange of knowledge and technology can narrow the gap between developed and developing economies in the region.
By strategically leveraging the synergy between technology and education, Asia can effectively navigate the surging tide of unemployment, ensuring that its young generation emerges as the driving force behind progress and innovation in the years ahead.
Or at least, that is the conventional view of what those versed in foresight call the ‘official’ future. It is the epitome of the Protestant work ethic which sanctifies work as the wellspring of grace; an ethic that still regulates most debates about the future of work. This view is animated by a dogma constituted in equal parts of nostalgia for meaningful work and a dedication to ‘full’ employment, however that is measured. And this is at the core of my disquiet.
All sides of politics are devoted to the same universal remedy for that which ails us. The banal consensus of ‘Get a Job’ seems both impossible yet inevitable. Impossible because nobody really agrees on who the job creators are (i.e.government deficits, private investors, entrepreneurs or small business owners) and inevitable because everyone agrees that work is essential to human dignity and individual achievement. Everybody wants to put us back to work or to keep us there.
Nobody is asking why! Is work absolutely necessary in the age of smart machines? If it is how can we avoid the many ploys set by the neo-capitalist demand for skilled labour, such as a life spent in years of drudgery doing pointless work in exchange for wages and a brief retirement of comparative idleness? Is a culture of lifelong learning really that necessary? And if so, surely we need to totally reinvent education rather than tweak the edges, or wedge the current system within an epistemological crack it cannot entertain?
As of March 2023, nearly 46.5 per cent of China’s 16 to 24-year-olds were neither employed nor at school. An astonishing 16 million young people have opted for the ‘lie flat’ phenomenon. This recent trend among Chinese youth involves voluntarily dropping out of the rat race, choosing to opt for a more balanced and lifestyle-oriented approach to their professional endeavours. It certainly doesn’t fit the current paradigm. So must it be condemned? Or can we learn something about human nature?
Full employment appears to be a self-justifying project. It appeals to all sides of politics. Let’s face it, many of us remain captive to a Marxist tradition that peddles two notions, both of which threaten to distract us from the realities of our time. These are that human nature resides in its capacity to create value through work and, consequently, that the proletariat is the appointed engine of social change and progress. Before the Reformation, almost no one believed that socially necessary labour was an ennobling activity. After the Reformation, almost everyone did. Martin Luther has a lot to answer for!
Have we reached a point in the development of our species where this artificial obligation, this fulfillment of duty in terms of work, is now a fetter on the imaginative capacity and moral activities of individuals? After all work is supposedly the platform on which our individuality is conceived and constructed. In modern times, and in modern terms, it is where character and conscience get built. But can that still be true? Is it possible that the Protestant work ethic and its token bourgeois virtues have become an ailment, not a remedy? For although everyone worships at the shrine of work, a growing number also posit that the end of work is in sight. So which of these two principles will take precedence? The choice will dictate much more than how we expend our political energies.
Once upon a time work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, and self-reliance - in a word, character. It was also the source of your income. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. But if you worked hard, you could pay your way and make something of yourself. In this regard, a market in labour both produced character and distributed income. It developed an individual’s moral capacities and allocated economic resources, imperfectly but transparently. The work in which you engaged created most of what you called your self or, nowadays, your identity.
Not anymore. Work no longer serves these dual purposes of building character while providing income commensurate with effort. There’s not enough legitimate work to go around, and what there is has been reduced to a simulation of effort- pretend work in office cubicles and at academic conventions, or grueling toil in sweatshops and offshore factories. The traditional working world we now experience is a stumbling zombie compared to tomorrow’s flexible, borderless, digitally decentralised, entrepreneurial ‘gig’ milieu.
The urge to put everybody back to work is understandable when viewed from the perspective of industrial economism. It appears both rational and humane because without jobs, people lack incomes adequate to their needs. Unless they can work for wages, their access to available goods is greatly diminished. So the spotlight is on job creation: it has become the obvious, indisputable, bipartisan goal of public policy.
For those on the political right, this urge makes perfect political and psychological sense. Most people with regular jobs are not on the dole, and they are far more likely to acquire the kind of familial obligations that make them law-abiding citizens. Work keeps their unruly desires in check, and that means they are more likely to get married and take on the responsibility of children, thus reproducing the social capital that our civilization requires. But for the left, broadly construed, from apologetic liberals to avowed socialists, the same urge to put everyone back to work, prisoners of the Protestant work ethic, makes far less sense.
Since the advent of bourgeois society and the rise of capitalism, work has served as the crucible of your character and the source of your income: in sum, it has defined your individuality. Through your labour -  your capacity to produce value through effort - your right to share in the productive fruits of that labour by purchasing and consuming material goods, was justified. Using the same logic, the detachment of income from work—getting something for nothing—signified aristocratic privilege, subaltern sloth, bureaucratic chicanery, or criminality. In other words the absence or decline of the bourgeois virtues. How could it be otherwise? Income derived from poetry, privilege, sloth, bureaucracy, or criminality was unearned.
Since the 1920s, the case justifying the Protestant work ethic has become much harder to make. Socially essential labour (i.e. what it takes to reproduce the material rudiments of civilization as we know it) had already started to decline through the mechanisation of industrial processes - enhanced by electrification, instrumentation, and automation, and in any case depicted a steadily shrinking proportion of everyday transactions.
In other words every year we produce more output without any increase of inputs - whether of capital or labour. This holds true globally. Having solved the problem of production we are now facing the challenge of distribution. Mechanisation resulted in an astonishing and continuing subtraction of the human element from the manufacture of goods, exacerbating the ambiguity of social relations in an age when your social standing can no longer be determined by your occupation or career.
And yet we can’t seem to let go of the Protestant principle that tells us our work defines us and gives us a morally virtuous right to consumption. We hate the idea that anybody is getting something for nothing, especially if the recipient is a paper-pushing bureaucrat, a class-action lawyer, a banker, or a dole bludger.
We are living through an historical moment when the piling on of more work, and the relentless demand for the production of more and more stuff that serves no useful purpose, has become pointless, absurd, and positively dangerous. When we work tirelessly at failed marriages, interfere in matters that are none of our business, incarcerate minorities for minor misdemeanours, reward police for making more arrests as crime rates decline, inject more money into slaughtering others than ensuring peace, and generate more atmospheric toxins in the name of energy independence, we know something must be wrong.
Why do we still think that a job well done is our prime goal in life? Why do we locate our identities in the production of goods, as against the consumption of goods? Why do so many of us want to retain the ego boundaries determined by the emotional austerity and psychological renunciations that work requires and reproduces? Why reinstate the ego ideal of the bourgeois individual, rather than ask—as did both Max Weber and Sigmund Freud —whether it is adequate to our present historical condition?
The more pertinent question is, what happens if we dispense with this bourgeois conception of work and the ego ideal that attends it? Instead of repatriating work from overseas, or reclaiming factory labour from the robots on the shop floor, or increasing public spending to create full employment, what if we asked, why work? Or explicitly: We prefer not to work this way any more. Work and life are not the same thing. And now that work matters less in the making of our character because socially necessary labour is, practically speaking, unavailable, we can create lives less burdened by its demands.
Then, and only then, will we be able to address the real questions: How to detach income from work without hating ourselves for doing so. How to justify getting something for nothing—receiving income and consuming goods without producing anything of value. How to build individual character in the absence of real or meaningful work that pays a living wage. And how to pay for a civilization no longer constrained by the imperatives of material scarcity—how to distribute income when the problem of production has been solved and the labour market can no longer allocate resources rationally. How to get beyond the austere moral universe of bourgeois society, which still regulates its corporate successor, that baroque stage of capitalism we call post-industrial society.
My answers to such questions turn on the history of work and the decline of socially necessary labour. The meaning and significance of work have already changed fundamentally. The possibilities of increasing and using leisure time have meanwhile increased exponentially. To ignore these facts is to remain trapped in the gravitational field of classical social theory—from Hegel to Freud via Marx—and to make work a fetish. It’s also to dismiss the moral promise and the historical momentum of a society that is passing beyond toil on its way toward a new kind of freedom, a new version of authentic selfhood.
The future of selfhood and society is written in what we now think about the meaning of work. Either we continue to treat it as the source of both character and income or we find ways of developing individual moral capacities and allocating economic resources outside the market in labour.