[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]While researching a book[.small-caps] about work, I learned the most from an impromptu conversation. During a Sunday evening dinner at a bottomless sushi buffet, my friend’s mother – Cathy, we’ll call her – grew unexpectedly excited as I explained my research on integrating purpose and work. “Well, that’s easy,” she chimed in. Cathy was the owner of a driving school in rural Virginia. She loved her job. She proudly recounted how her job allowed her to give clients not just the personal freedom of driving but a new confidence in themselves.[.article__paragraph--cap]

“My work is an amazing setting for conversations and relationships,” she explained, describing people from the various communities she has helped get driver’s licenses, from teenagers to newly settled immigrants and adults with special needs. This occupation shaped her personal sense of calling, providing her a place in which she was able to love and serve others. As someone deeply informed by her Christian faith, Cathy could not imagine her faith without meaningful work interactions.

Prior to that conversation, I had not given much thought to the profession of driving instructor. But Cathy’s case shines light on what’s at stake in the rapidly transforming world of work. Compare Cathy’s story to one that appeared last year in Bloomberg News. Sam Liang, founder and CEO of the AI transcription service Otter, came to realize he did not like his job. Or more specifically, he found his job dragged him into tasks – mainly meetings – he found neither enjoyable nor important. Liang took advantage of his own company’s technology to do something about it: he automated himself. “Sam-bot,” as he described it, attends daily meetings with coworkers at Otter, fields questions, grants approvals, and makes basic decisions, freeing Liang to do other things.

In comparing the cases of Cathy and Sam-bot, there’s little question of which we associate with the future. Everyone knows that the robots are coming. Having moved up through the ranks of blue-collar work over the past century, they’re now gunning for the corner office. Algorithms at Amazon have already been terminating workers for nearly a decade. The Sam-bots are no longer at the (factory) gates, they are ruling over us.

We’re only beginning to see the real impact. Computer programmers and financial analysts are having a harder time finding work. Consulting firms have begun hiding the meager size of their yearly hires of college grads. Forecasting the future of work is never a precise science, but the projections are grim. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts half of white-collar work will be displaced by November 2027.

A great deal of commentary views these changes through political and economic lenses. Will we see unemployment surge? Will inequality worsen? Is universal basic income the only option? But focusing on Cathy’s work versus the world of Sam-bots also brings us face-to-face with other things on the line. That is, what will we lose when jobs like Cathy’s get displaced by “Cathy-bots”?

Work has long provided more than formal compensation. Work is about “a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread,” writes Studs Terkel in his bestselling 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Workers search “for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Gallup polls confirm that this remains true: 71 percent of Americans see having a job or career they enjoy as highly important to living a fulfilling life, a higher percentage than those valuing having close friends, children, a spouse, or a lot of money.

But Terkel also resists romanticizing work, and for good reason: not all workers have access to jobs that give them this strong sense of fulfillment. Unfortunately, discussing what can make work life-giving requires moving beyond straightforward economic calculus. It requires looking more closely at the human dimensions of work and what it is that Cathy finds so fulfilling, while holding it up to what Liang found lacking. Put simply, we need to know what makes good work good work.

Against Work Universalism

I’ve found many discussions of good work get led astray by a set of ideas I call “work universalism.” Work universalism holds that all work, independent of precisely what it is, what it achieves, or how it affects others, possesses some shared positive qualities or merit. This is particularly prevalent in cultures that valorize a strong work ethic. If all hard work is good work, all work becomes a viable candidate for being “good,” provided it be performed with sufficient zeal or dedication.

Three main camps champion this doctrine of work universalism, each of which deploys its own dubious logic. The first camp are social conservatives we might call “work moralists.” Think of older generations praising the virtue of strenuous labor and toil, recalling fond memories of their time in that magical postwar American economy. Work builds character, they contend, or offers an arena for resilience. Should demanding work disappear – as envisioned by postwork futurists pushing for universal basic income (UBI) programs – we would lose something central to being human.

Work moralists take an odd turn when they begin separating work from its ethical dimensions. Activities otherwise considered harmful or evil are venerated, insofar as they yield a paycheck. A consistent work moralist would seemingly endorse the dedicated laborers behind all political causes, all scandal-ridden companies, all companies deriving profits from deception. Here, rigid social conservatism tips over into flaccid moral relativism.

A second camp preaching work universalism hails from certain circles of economic thinkers. This camp oversells work’s voluntary dimensions. Work, at least in free enterprise systems, is presented as a freely chosen exchange of labor for wages, a transaction from which both parties benefit. This leads to a highly questionable thesis that workers never voluntarily choose bad work. The conclusion is both totalizing and reassuring: insofar as a job exists, it is good. Or: if you have a job, it’s a good one.

Economic approaches overlook what we might call the stickiness of work. That is, all jobs entangle us within webs of attachments, loyalties, and longer time horizons of wants and needs. Amid these webs of overlapping pulls and desires, voluntarily sticking with a terrible job often proves the best available option. It could offer a favorable geographic location, job benefits, scheduling accommodation, coworker relationships, good standing in community, or – most simply – a wage otherwise not available.

But to judge all “sticky” jobs as good work is a case of circular reasoning. This is yet another road to relativism. Where jobs with recurring harassment or safety issues remain filled, they meet the economist’s criteria of “good.”

Finally, a third source of work universalism emerges from a newer breed of organizational consultants and management gurus. We might call this camp “work enchanters,” as they preach a gospel of an existentially fulfilled workforce, selling their spiritual wares to employees and employers alike. Enchanters can generally be identified by their frequent citing of Gallup employee engagement polls, heralding every dip as evidence of a crisis of workplace engagement. Urgent intervention is required, the enchanters tell us, spelling out plans to impute work tasks with a greater sense of purpose.

Making work meaningful can be a good thing. But enchanters go further: they attribute cases of meaningless work to workers’ perceptual error. Yale School of Management professor Amy Wrzesniewski, a favorite guru of work enchanters, preaches the power of individualistic interventions to improve bad work. A Harvard Business Review article by Wrzesniewski aptly titled “Managing Yourself: How to Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want” charges workers to reconfigure their perceptions so as to conjure up engaging experiences they otherwise lack. Bad work becomes a problem of bad attitudes and misaligned expectations.

A particularly disturbing trend among the enchanters has been the adoption of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl as the patron saint for purposeful work. Frankl provides valuable lessons for modern business leaders, claim Roy M. Spence and Haley Rushing in a book bearing the subtitle Why Every Extraordinary Business Is Driven by Purpose. Achieving profitability and shareholder value only requires imitating Frankl in identifying your “concrete assignment,” one passage in their book explains. Another workplace consultant, Aaron Hurst, described Frankl in a 2016 webinar as having “the worst job in human history,” referring to Frankl’s time in a concentration camp. But Frankl’s ability to adapt to his work conditions makes him an exemplary case for today. If Frankl found meaning in his conditions, so can you.

Liang’s case at Otter makes clear how work universalism falls flat. Liang knew his job had gone bad. And altering his perceptions or simply working harder offered no relief, nor did his generous compensation. Fortunately, we can also see in Liang’s case some clues about how bad work might also become good.

Craft Goods and Human Goods

Discussions of good work should begin with the obvious: not all work is created equal. Consider work that does great harm to its participants or society at large. Take the call center employee dialing up senior citizens to sell them unneeded car warranties. Or the beauty industry marketer targeting online ads at depressed preteens. Or any industries that profit off vice, manipulation, or fear. All bad work.

But these are the easy cases: they’re bad work because they’re bad activities. Once we set aside ethically bad activities, what distinguishes good work from bad work? Or what did Cathy’s work have that Liang’s pre-automated work lacked?

I’m not sure there’s any exhaustive list of what makes good work good. But I have found most people judge their jobs on whether they provide either of two kinds of opportunities, or what philosophers call “goods.”

The first we might call craft goods. These goods are available to anyone whose job allows them to do something with a sort of timeless excellence. But excellence must be judged in a particular way. The criteria must be rooted in the nature of the activity itself. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre draws on Aristotle’s ideas of virtue (arete in Greek, which translates to excellence) to argue that certain activities have internal goods of excellence against which our doing those activities might be judged. Good shipbuilding is judged against the criteria of what makes a good ship, to use Aristotle’s example. Excellent hair styling or excellent play directing can be evaluated in a similar manner.

Internal goods are opposed to external goods. External goods relate to wealth, fame, or power. Your job offers craft goods if your performance can be judged independent of the external goods it returns, whether for you or your employer. Hairstyling and directing Macbeth meet this criterion, as does making really good sushi. A good test of whether craft goods are present in an activity is whether we can envision it serving as a hobby.

This is where the first kind of goods is inescapably exclusive. Mutual fund management or pharmaceutical consulting do not offer craft goods. One can certainly perform those jobs excellently, but that judgment will turn to criteria rooted in external goods, most often the financial returns garnered from such work. And these activities would make odd hobbies on weekends or with grandchildren on a family vacation.

Fortunately, the second kind of goods is common to a broader set of jobs. We might call these “human goods.” Human goods are the sorts of interactions and relationships that allow workers to relate to others as full human beings. It’s what Cathy has in her work and what Liang’s work lacked. Human goods span jobs, occupations, and industries: what characterizes Cathy’s human goods in a driving school is the same as that found in good work in a pet grooming business or a consulting gig.

Human goods can come from relationships with coworkers or customers. These can be judged by the extent to which workers have interactions that provide esteem, affection, and a sense of belonging. Jobs of this kind allow us to fulfill our nature as “social animals,” as Aristotle described humans.

Sigmund Freud thought that work offers “a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.” Surveys suggest this is true. A 2022 Edelman survey on trust in the workplace found that 69 percent of employees see coworkers as a significant source of community in their lives. Even Gen Z, known to keep their distance from overreaching workplace culture, identifies relationships with coworkers as the feature of their jobs that gives them the greatest satisfaction, according to a 2023 Pew study.

My conversations with workers have repeatedly led to discussions about human goods characterized by interdependence. “Every operation depends on me,” a surgical technologist once told me, explaining why he liked his work. “Our front of house could get through anything,” a restaurant server recounted. Team problem solving forged in high pressure can generate human goods, as depicted in shows like The Bear and The Pitt. There is arguably something very human about responding to the call to “man one’s station” among others, whether at a Sunday brunch, a product launch, or the start of a new school year. Where this is done in a way that honors and respects the individuals involved, it constitutes good work.

The Fight for Good Work and Instrumental Work

Common takeaways from discussions about good work are “job redesign” blueprints: top-down plans to engineer more good work. This is the well-trod path of work enchanters and the HR specialists and industrial psychologists before them. Indeed, for such thinkers, nothing outlined here is particularly new. A 1922 trade magazine for engineers described the ideal job as providing “the satisfaction of attaining mastery over something” and “the satisfaction of being mastered in turn by brainy, likable people,” an amazingly curt summary of everything written above. Other job redesign frameworks focus on autonomy, flexibility, communication, and room for advancement.

Making work better is, again, a commendable goal. But many such efforts go wrong where the what of work is overshadowed by the how. The ends of work quickly give way to adverbs. Rather than providing work that offers human goods or possibilities for making excellent things, job redesign simply envisions all work being performed humanistically or excellently. Job redesign efforts then revert back to the universalist dream of making every job a good one. The dehumanizing elements of work observed by everyone from Karl Marx to Josef Pieper become managerial problems for which there exist managerial solutions.

Job redesign misses the mark today. A great deal of jobs are almost certainly shifting toward training Sam-bots and Cathy-bots and mopping up their errors. These likely won’t be good jobs, seeing that they detach work from human and craft goods. And driving these shifts will be the same forces that have already significantly harmed job quality across industries: private equity and market-concentrating acquisitions of smaller businesses like Cathy’s. Such acquisitions already bear a proven record of vacuuming up the craft goods and human goods once offered in a wide range of industries and occupations. Decision making and judgments of excellence become reassigned to people (or AI) not directly engaged with the work itself. Cathy’s work becomes reduced to following a script and meeting performance quotas.

All discussions of good work must include the category of instrumental work. Work is instrumental where it provides the means to achieve ends outside one’s nine-to-five work life. Reasserting the category of instrumental work allows us to accept that not all work will be of the same job quality as Cathy’s or a tech CEO. Work can be “just a job.” Reports of “employee engagement” with their workplace can indicate healthy adaptation to this reality.

Recognizing instrumental work also reminds us that inquiries into the human dimensions of work can never be completely severed from political and economic factors. Instrumental work is only instrumental where it provides wages and conditions that make possible a good life beyond work. Protecting and expanding instrumental work has historically fallen to political action and organized labor. Today, such efforts also need support from antitrust laws and alternative forms of ownership that can prioritize worker interests over short-term financial returns.

But protecting instrumental work does not mean surrendering the notion of good work. Good work should be protected and preserved at all costs. In cases where workers have good work, the preachy moralism of the work universalists proves apt. Good work is central to developing character. It permits people to fully flourish. Where workers have it, they should seek to share it as widely as possible with others.

To preserve good work is to preserve the best of human culture. Our future Sam-bot and Cathy-bot coworkers will bear no divine calling from their makers. It will be up to humans to ensure workplaces still provide access to the sorts of goods that make up a meaningful life. Doing so will allow workers to be fully human through their work while making excellent things and serving others well.

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