What can Kant teach us about work?*

Work is no longer working for us. Or, for most of us anyway. Citing lack of pay and promotion, more people are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the past 20 years. This is no surprise, considering that ‘real wages’ – the average hourly rate adjusted for inflation – for non-managers just three years ago was the same as it was in the early 1970s. At the same time, the increasing prominence of gig work has turned work from a steady ‘climb’ of the ladder into a precarious ‘hustle’.

Of the growing number of people working through apps like Uber or Taskrabbit, nearly 70 per cent of them say that they do so on the side, supplementing a main income that is too low to provide for life’s necessities. Even young and upwardly mobile professionals must change jobs, rather than stay in them, in order to grow in their careers. Almost perversely, the loss of stable careers is branded as a benefit. Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper, both career consultants, argue that we ought to embrace these ‘squiggly careers’ as a new, more ‘flexible’ norm.

Politicians claim that the solution to our work problems is ‘more jobs’. But simply increasing the number of bad jobs won’t help us avoid the problems of work. What we need, it seems, is not more work, but good work. But what exactly is good work?

You can find the rest of this essay here: Freedom at Work.