The Meaning of Work

What is the meaning of work? I might as well ask what is the meaning of life. There are many different perspectives on this question. What do you think? Is work basically a necessary economic activity — people must work in order to live? Or, is work a uniquely human activity through which we express our creativity — people living to work? This question whether we work to live or live to work has been pondered by many social theorists over the past two centuries or so.

Karl Marx held that humans were differentiated from animals because of their unique human nature, a creative urge they possess. Individuals were meant to live to work. Work was not to be something forced upon them out of necessity. They were not to simply work in order to survive. However, Marx tracked the social changes he observed as the factory system took hold in England and concluded that although people should live to work, the current system (capitalism) perverted human nature and caused humans to work to live. The division of labor in society and in the factory caused workers to become alienated from their work, from each other, and even from nature. Under capitalism, people were working to make factory owners wealthy. While they were paid a wage, they did not own what they produced nor did they share in the wealth they created through their labor. Marx called this "exploitation." Other social theorists have simply called it "profit." Okay, potato (po-tay-tow) or potato (po-tah-tow); one person's exploitation is another's profit. Nevertheless, Marx was describing the very changes you just read about in Hodson and Sullivan.

Adam Smith, on the other hand, felt that human beings were economically oriented. People worked in order to live. The division of labor would increase a society's productive power such that many more goods could be produced. Rather than one worker producing 10 widgets in a day, if the labor was divided such that people specialized in the different parts of making that widget, perhaps thousands of widgets could be produced in that same day. The division of labor would bring greater wealth to a society and, thus, to the individuals working in that society. Rather than making and selling 10 widgets in a day, one worker could participate in helping to make 2000 widgets. Greater compensation would follow. Workers would not be alienated, rather they would be satisfied at their greater material wealth. They worked to live.