“Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break”:
The industrial nations of the twentieth century were built around the idea that work was the organising principle of life. Catholic social teaching talked about the dignity of labour. Socialist movements sang about the worker as a hero. Protestant infused capitalism turned productivity into a route to salvation. Even the centrist stripe of postwar politics treated a job as the main vehicle through which adults were meant to find status, income and a place in the world. This hung around through the neoliberal years, even as manufacturing shrank and services expanded. You can hear it every time someone from any mainstream party talks about “hard working families”.
The result is that a lot of our institutions still act as if giving everyone a job is the primary goal, long after the underlying economic logic has started to drift.
There is a strange symmetry here. On one side you have firms quietly routing labour through screens and robots, and repeating that jobs will be fine on aggregate. On the other you have unions and politicians insisting that jobs must be preserved, even when that means attaching people to tasks that are technically obsolete. Neither camp really articulates what it would mean for work itself to shrink as a central organising story. They just fight over where the remaining jobs will be and who will do them.