CHAPTER 7 A Post-Pandemic Update and the Future of Work

Unemployment Benefits: Before, during, and after the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 began its deadly invasion of the United States. Many states responded by issuing stay-at-home orders, shuttering all businesses except those that were deemed essential and those that could continue with their employees working from home. By April 2020, the unemployment rate was a staggering 14.8 percent.⁴ Even after businesses were allowed to reopen, health care concerns, lack of childcare, and supply chain disruptions kept many out of work.

Through the summer and fall of 2020, reporters around the country asked some of those laid-off workers how they were coping while they were out of work and, once they were able to return, how they felt about working again. An immigrant from El Salvador who had been a bartender in Las Vegas before the casinos closed told a reporter, “Sometimes one feels afflicted, desperate, because we want to work. We don’t want unemployment benefits, free money for no work. We want to feel useful.” A young Native man in Arizona who had become a Level 2-certified sommelier missed his job. He spoke of how wine had become his “window to the world, this way for me to travel” to which he otherwise had no access. A Black woman in her fifties cried for joy when she returned to her job at the Grand Rapids, Michigan, visitor center after being furloughed for months. She loved her job: “It seemed like a fairy tale because I just love being a team member where I can help people.” She commented, “I hate being stuck at home. I hate not being able to go to work, not so much for the money, but just for a part of my sanity. After so much time, you’ve done all the projects at your house, so what else is there to do?”⁵

Their comments echo some of the same themes I heard in my research. I spoke with immigrants like the bartender from El Salvador who were reluctant to take government benefits because they wanted to “feel useful.” My participants had additional reasons for wanting to work. Like the Arizona sommelier and the Michigan woman who worked in a visitor center, working could be enjoyable for them. Several of my participants said that working regularly could be a form of self-care. A surprising number said one of their past jobs had been “fun,” either because they enjoyed the tasks or because they liked socializing with their coworkers. Unfortunately, the perspective of laid-off workers was rarely heard during the contentious debates about unemployment benefits in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As I discussed in chapter 4, recipients of unemployment benefits occupy an unstable place in a widely shared American cultural model that imagines a binary division between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. In general, unemployment benefit recipients are considered “deserving” because the only way to qualify for those benefits is to have been working and to have lost their job through no fault of their own. However, if the unemployed remain out of work for many weeks, then some politicians and other commentators start criticizing them for “loafing” at the taxpayers’ expense. Thus, unemployment benefits are designed to be short-term and of limited financial assistance. In most states, unemployment benefits end after twenty-six weeks. After the Great Recession of 2007–9, some state legislatures, facing pressure from business interests, lowered benefit periods to only twelve weeks and created other application barriers. Nationally, only 27 percent of jobless workers qualified for unemployment benefits in 2019, and in some states just 15 percent qualified. Furthermore, state unemployment benefit programs are designed to replace only about half the worker’s former wages, and the maximum benefit is capped, so many of the unemployed receive much less than half of what they had earned.⁶ For minimum-wage workers who are barely getting by even when they are working, an unemployment benefit of half what they had been earning is completely inadequate.⁷ Freelance workers, independent contractors, and the self-employed, including workers who obtain gigs through online platforms, are normally ineligible for unemployment benefits.⁸

A recession created by the response to a public health emergency is not a normal situation. The COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed the social body’s feeble defense, “That is how it’s always been done,” forcing at least temporary changes not only in how work is conducted but also in the way the government responds to widespread unemployment.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, sympathy for those who lost their incomes, along with worries that the economy would go into a deeper recession as the unemployed curtailed their spending, spurred the largest expansion of unemployment benefits in US history.⁹ In March 2020, Congress passed the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act. It not only extended unemployment benefits for an additional thirteen weeks, as is typical during recessions,¹⁰ but also for the first time made unemployment benefits available to those who would not normally qualify because they were freelancers or gig workers or had insufficient prior earnings. Furthermore, the CARES Act added $600 a week to displaced workers’ unemployment benefit through the end of July 2020, regardless of their prior incomes.¹¹

That $600 a week flat benefit enhancement was chosen as a fast and easy fix. To quickly stimulate the economy under the unusual circumstances of the pandemic, policy makers wanted to fully replace workers’ lost wages. Because they could not rely on the states’ outdated IT programs to quickly perform those individual calculations for each worker, federal policy makers fell back on the simple expedient of calculating the difference between the average national wage before the pandemic and the average unemployment insurance benefit. That is how they arrived at the figure of $600, which was added to the weekly check of everyone who qualified for unemployment benefits. It supplemented the state unemployment insurance benefits, which averaged $387 a week, giving the average laid-off worker $987 a week in unemployment benefits for the first few months of the pandemic.¹²

Six hundred dollars a week is the amount someone would receive if they worked a forty-hour week at $15 an hour. The federal minimum wage in the United States in 2020 was less than half that amount at $7.25 an hour. For several years low-wage workers had been engaged in strikes and protests for a minimum wage of $15 an hour. By a cosmic coincidence, the CARES Act temporarily fulfilled the goal of the Fight for $15 movement—but for those who were unemployed, rather than for those who were working. During the pandemic, workers in low-wage service jobs who had been earning less than $15 an hour made up a large share of the unemployed.¹³ Some University of Chicago economists reported that while the $600 unemployment supplement was in place (from April through the end of July 2020), 76 percent of those on unemployment compensation were eligible for more money from unemployment than they had earned while working.¹⁴ It was a remarkable moment in the history of the US welfare state. For a brief time, unemployment benefits, which are usually woefully inadequate, came to as much as or more than low-income workers had earned before they lost their jobs.

The backlash was predictable. Low-wage employers who were ready to rehire workers over the summer of 2020 complained they were having difficulty finding willing workers; conservative politicians and other policy makers argued that the large unemployment benefit was clearly a work disincentive and had to be reduced to force the unemployed to take jobs.¹⁵

When they designed the first CARES Act in March 2020, policy makers thought that the pandemic would end after a few weeks. That optimistic prediction was wrong. When the CARES Act was about to expire at the end of December 2020, Congress agreed to extend unemployment benefits until mid-March 2021, and they compromised on a smaller $300 weekly benefit supplement. The American Rescue Plan that passed the new Congress in mid-March ensured funding for states to provide these enhanced unemployment benefits through the first week of September 2021.¹⁶

Vaccines were developed at the end of 2020. In 2021 restaurants, stores, and other businesses that had been shuttered began reopening, but there were still not enough workers to fill all the job vacancies. The shortages were particularly acute in lower-wage, in-person leisure and hospitality jobs.¹⁷ Once again, business owners and conservative commentators blamed the extended and enhanced unemployment benefits for creating the shortages. As one pub owner put it, “The government is making it easy for people to stay home and get paid. You can’t really blame them much. But it means we have hours to fill and no one who wants to work.”¹⁸ In response, twenty-six governors either discontinued the $300 enhanced benefit or cut off the additional weeks of unemployment benefits.¹⁹ When the governor of Wyoming announced that his state would end those benefits, he stated, “Incentivizing people not to work is just plain un-American.”²⁰

The word choices of the pub owner (“The government is making it easy for people to stay home and get paid. You can’t really blame them much”) and the Wyoming governor (“Incentivizing people not to work”) are revealing. These comments are based on a rational choice work decision cultural model. It is one of two popular US cultural models that explain why people might choose not to work.

According to the second model, the ingrained bad work ethic model, there is a “class of people who simply don’t want to work,” as a businessman put it in an editorial. This discriminatory model casts aspersions on whole groups, such as people in poverty (especially people of color in poverty) or young people. For example, older adults like that businessman are prone to disparage “a generation of slackers who would rather sit at home watching reality TV than to rejoin the real world where people work to make a living.”²¹ Among politicians, the ingrained bad work ethic model is more often voiced by conservatives than liberals.

However, one need not be a political conservative to suspect that any rational person would rather stay home if they could receive as much money as they would by making the effort to go to work. The rational choice work decision model assumes that choices about taking a job are based on short-term cost/benefit calculations. If we add the assumption that most people consider working an unpleasant necessity undertaken solely for a paycheck, then it follows that people would prefer staying at home if they received enough money from other sources.²² These are the unspoken beliefs that lie behind the rhetoric that unemployment benefits are “incentivizing people not to work.”²³

As the psychologist Barry Schwartz argues forcefully, the flaw in this rational choice model is that it focuses on economic reasons for working, ignoring the additional nonfinancial benefits that matter for so many people.²⁴ Those with a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic want to feel productive and have a structure for their days and weeks. Many want to be valued members of a group who are recognized for their contributions. Some men feel they are failing to live up to cultural expectations of manhood if they are out of work. Both men and women say they would feel better about themselves if they were working or that having a job would make them feel a part of mainstream society. And many enjoy at least some aspects of their jobs.

Motivations for working, abstractly, could be enhanced or outweighed by the working conditions of a particular job. Some of my participants’ jobs caused them injuries, subjected them to harassment from coworkers or managers, or required them to engage in repugnant business practices. In those cases, going to work had serious costs. However, it was far more common for them to describe jobs they had liked than ones they had disliked.

To be sure, the pay and fringe benefits they received from their job mattered as well. I do not mean that the financial rewards of working are irrelevant in decisions about whether to go to work. My point is that they are only one consideration.

One could reply that my interviewees and the examples quoted earlier of workers laid off during the pandemic may not be representative. It is quite likely that those who had previously been working hard for poverty-level wages appreciated the enhanced unemployment benefits, which gave them enough money to live on for a change. No doubt some may have delayed their return to work for that reason. However, several careful economic analyses have shown that the effects of the enhanced benefits on returns to work were small.²⁵ Strikingly, half of those who received the $600 a week benefit supplement returned to work before the supplements expired, even though three-quarters of the unemployed were receiving more money from unemployment benefits than they had been paid when they were working.²⁶ In other words, a large share of those thrown out of work early in the pandemic elected to forgo higher incomes in order to work again.

The real reasons for labor shortages predate the COVID-19 pandemic: lower birthrates, retirements of older workers in the large Baby Boomer generation, and immigration restrictions.²⁷ In the early 2000s there were between two and three workers per job opening, rising to more than six in 2009, but by the end of 2021, that ratio fell to a half-worker available for every opening.²⁸ Many other factors affected the labor market during the first two years of the pandemic, including closed schools and daycare centers, which made it difficult for parents of young children (mothers especially) to work, and the continuing fear of infection, a particular concern for older workers.

Labor shortages were difficult for small business owners, but they gave workers more bargaining power. When there are fewer workers than job openings, they can demand higher wages. One ice cream parlor that had no applicants for $7.25 an hour (plus tips) jobs as scoopers was flooded with applicants after the owner raised the starting wage to $15 an hour.²⁹ It should not be surprising that when labor markets give workers more options, they will be choosier about their jobs. In general, Americans, like my participants, do want to work, but they also want more say about their working conditions. The tight labor market and workers’ anger about their treatment during the pandemic fed an upsurge in labor organizing in the United States, as well as in public support for unions.³⁰

What are the practical implications for unemployment benefits? No one is advocating for paying the jobless more than they earned when working. Still, unemployment benefits can be more generous, especially for low-income workers, with little overall effect on employment levels.³¹ There should be a national minimum unemployment benefit level that should increase as average wages increase, as well as a national minimum number of weeks of benefits.³² Some research shows that a longer period of unemployment benefits lets workers find a better employer, a more suitable job for their skills, and higher wages.³³ The problem is not that we provide too much to the unemployed but that we pay low-wage workers too little.

A work ethic is not all or nothing that one either has or does not. There are multiple work ethics, and the specific job matters as much as or more so than devotion to labor in the abstract. I build on those observations in the next section, where I consider competing laborist and post-work visions for the future.

Work Policies, Cultural Models, and Unlikely Bedfellows

Debates about whether unemployment benefits affect labor force participation are technical discussions bristling with terms like “reservation wage” and “liquidity effects.” These technical arguments simply take for granted an affirmative answer to a basic social question: Is a good society one in which all adults are working for wages, unless they are in school, retired, or occupied with family responsibilities? When scholars argue (as I did in the last section) that more generous unemployment benefits will not stop the jobless from looking for work, we seem to be assuming waged work as the ideal. Whether it should be the ideal is the subject of a lively debate at present, one that cuts across the usual Right–Left divide.

Among those on the political Left, there is contention over which would be better: a society in which all adults capable of going to work were guaranteed a well-paid job, or a society in which adults were not forced to sell their labor to live a decent life. Progressive activists and scholars disagree about which vision of a good society to fight for. The laborist Left advocates for the first, the post-work Left for the second.

I take the label laborist from post-work theorist Kathi Weeks. Although it is not widely used, it aptly expresses political organizing that “celebrate[s] the worth and dignity of waged work and … contend[s] that such work is entitled to respect and adequate recompense.”³⁴ That has been the mainstream view of the labor movement, and it is the foundation of European social democracies.³⁵ Progressive laborist activists and scholars claim that most people want to work, and the problem is there are not enough good jobs. They advocate for full employment, with the government stepping in to provide such jobs when necessary. Dr. Martin Luther King proclaimed, “We need an economic bill of rights. This would guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work.” The famous 1963 march on Washington, the occasion for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, was called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”³⁶

The laborist Left shares with political conservatives a preference for a social order in which adults can be self-supporting through waged work. In response to Donald Trump’s election in 2016, some laborist policy makers from the Left, Right, and in between, led by the centrist Opportunity America think tank, agreed that more jobs would be the best solution for the grievances of an angry working class whose standard of living fell as a result of deindustrialization in the mid-Atlantic and upper Midwest. Their report states that despite the ideological differences among the policy makers, they agreed that any solutions must begin with getting people to work: “The most important provision of the social contract is work: the opportunity for meaningful, rewarding work and the norm that healthy adults who aren’t taking care of children should engage in work.” Why is work so important? In addition to producing income, “it’s character-forming—a first good choice that usually leads to other good choices and essential values like purpose, diligence, responsibility and self-reliance.”³⁷ For laborists, advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are threats to a society centered on paid work for all.

Where adherents to the laborist Left depart from typical conservative laborists is in their assumptions about whether most adults want to work. Conservative laborists are more likely than those on the Left to assume that many people do not want to work: they believe in the ingrained bad work ethic model. They think that shirkers must be forced to work for a living by restricting other means of support. The Opportunity America report adopts the alternative laborist Left assumption that most people do want to work: “For most people, [working is] more satisfying than almost any other activity, including consumption.”³⁸ According to this view, the government does not need to force people to work. Instead, the state should provide more jobs and opportunities for job training.

Post-work theorists thoroughly disagree that work is the most satisfying thing people could be doing. These theorists draw a stark distinction between “work time and non-work time, between work and life, between time for what we are obligated to do and time for ‘what we will.’ ”³⁹ They want less of the first of each pair and more of the second. Yet, the term “post-work” is misleading: they do not propose a future of total leisure. As Kathi Weeks forcefully articulates in The Problem with Work, they advocate for much less work time, and they question the assumption that the primary way to support oneself should be through waged labor. Post-work activists and theorists call not for a right to work but for “ ‘the refusal of work.’ ”⁴⁰ By “refusal of work,” they mean, “refusal of the ideology of work as [a person’s] highest calling and moral duty, a refusal of work as the necessary center of social life and means of access to the rights and claims of citizenship.”⁴¹ Adopting this perspective, Weeks questions why so many feminists have fought for women to have equal opportunities for waged work instead of demanding more free time.

A key demand of post-work activists is a shorter workweek, say thirty hours, achieved either through a six-hour workday or a four-day workweek, with no reduction in pay. To give people greater options, including the ability to refuse unfulfilling jobs, post-work theorists also champion a universal basic income (UBI): a monthly or annual cash grant from the government to every adult.⁴² Some on the laborist Left also support a UBI because it would help workers bargain for better wages and working conditions. By contrast, post-work activists argue that “even the best job is a problem when it monopolizes so much of life.”⁴³ Instead, they hope that receiving a UBI will enable people to work less, giving them time “to consider and experiment with different kinds of lives.”⁴⁴ From a post-work perspective, advances in automation are welcome if the result is more free time for people to do what they want. In supporting freedom to decide how to use one’s time, post-work theorists are joined by some libertarian conservatives who prefer a (low) guaranteed basic income instead of government social welfare programs that come with layers of regulation.⁴⁵

Post-work theorists seek to liberate people from having to work long hours to earn a living, while most political conservatives who are not libertarian want to require adults to work for a living instead of receiving money from the government. However, their underlying assumptions about work and human motivation are the same. Writers on both sides accept the rational choice work decision premise that any rational person would prefer staying at home if they received enough money so that they did not have to work. Both assume that waged work is not intrinsically enjoyable. Post-work theorists Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio state that explicitly: “When they are given the opportunity, workers—skilled and unskilled alike—are pleased to be relieved of participation in the labor process provided they are guaranteed an income adequate to the current ‘decent’ standard of living.”⁴⁶ They assume that people work only to obtain a “decent” standard of living, and if they could reach that living standard without paid employment, they would not work. According to Aronowitz and DiFazio, they should not have to.

Kathi Weeks has a subtler argument. As I explained in chapter 6, she recognizes that one answer to her question, “Why do we work so long and so hard?” is that “we work because we want to: work provides a variety of satisfactions—in addition to income, it can be a source of meaning, purpose, structure, social ties, and recognition.” She argues, however, that wanting to work hard is not inherent to humans; instead, it was inculcated in Europe and the United States with the Protestant work ethic. Thus, although people may consent to work long hours, this is a manufactured consent.⁴⁷ That people do not naturally want to work is also implicit in formulations such as the distinction she draws between “work time and non-work time, between work and life, between time for what we are obligated to do and time for ‘what we will.’ ” Waged work is equated with “what we are obligated to do,” whereas activities outside work are “what we will.”

My research leads me to a position between laborist and post-work ideologies. I disagree with post-work theorists Aronowitz and DiFazio that “when they are given the opportunity, workers—skilled and unskilled alike—are pleased to be relieved of participation in the labor process.” That is not true, and such claims reinforce the narrative of many conservative commentators that recipients of government social assistance have to be bludgeoned into working because their natural preference is to avoid that effort. When I asked my participants what sorts of policies they would enact if they were in charge, many proposed measures to create more jobs, much like the proposals of the laborist Left. Few opposed work to “life”; most viewed the right sort of job as part of a good life. Other researchers have found the same, including among people who receive income supports from the state in societies as diverse as Norway and South Africa, as well as the United States.⁴⁸

However, the laborists’ claim, “For most people, [work is] more satisfying than almost any other activity, including consumption,” is questionable as well. Waged work can indeed be highly satisfying, but so can relaxation, leisure activities, time with friends and family, community involvement, and religious and spiritual practices.⁴⁹ Most of my participants did not live to work, and among those who had previously done so, many later changed their priorities. Post-work theorists are absolutely right to insist on a better balance between work time and time for other activities. Many of my participants disliked jobs that required long hours. From my research, I would predict that post-work proposals to shorten the workweek, without a decrease in pay, would prove very popular with workers. Recent studies of workplaces that are trying a thirty-two-hour workweek have found employees more energized and employers ready to continue the practice.⁵⁰

Overtime protections are too weak in the United States. In 2020 the Department of Labor expanded the category of workers entitled to overtime pay, but salaried workers paid at least $684 a week can still be forced to work long hours without additional compensation.⁵¹ More workers should be entitled to overtime pay. The United States could adopt the overtime regulations in the European Union, which mandates an average workweek of no longer than forty-eight hours in all member states, with exceptions for only a few occupations.⁵²

US workers also need mandated paid vacations and holidays. The United States is the only wealthy country in the world without federally mandated vacation pay or holiday pay. Nearly one-quarter of US workers, typically those in low-wage positions, receive neither.⁵³ A posting on Reddit by someone outside the United States asked Americans on the discussion website, “How do y’all stay sane with so few holidays and vacation time?” The top-voted comments of more than 15,000 responses were variations on “We don’t—it’s driving us crazy” (r/antiwork, January 17, 2023).

Descriptions of Americans as driven by a Puritan work ethic are dangerous because they suggest that most Americans want to work long hours and do not care whether they have paid vacations and holidays. One economist commented in 2001, “It’s unique to Americans that they continue to increase their working hours, while hours are declining in other industrialized nations … It has a lot to do with the American psyche, with American culture. American workers are eager to make the best impression, to put in the most hours.”⁵⁴ That is true of some American workers but not most. The very long hours that managers and professionals have to work may explain my findings that many welcomed a break and a chance to rethink their priorities when they lost their job.⁵⁵ Wanting a break is not limited to a new “generation of slackers.”⁵⁶ When Edward Wight Bakke studied unemployed blue-collar working men in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s, he found that, initially, those workers appreciated their layoffs “as a chance for a short holiday.”⁵⁷

Post-work theorists are also right to fight for social welfare protections (for example, health care, paid sick leave, and paid family leave) that are not tied to full-time standard employment. That is important because, as I explain in the next section on the future of work, linking such necessary protections to standard employment leaves out the large and growing category of independent contractors, freelancers, and gig workers.

There is another problem with all the work ideologies I have described so far. Although the laborist Left along with most conservatives say Americans work too little, and post-work theorists disagree, saying Americans work too much, all sides speak of work abstractly, rather than about the characteristics of specific jobs. True, labor unions try to improve material aspects of jobs—pay, fringe benefits, and safe working conditions—but usually they do not address all the features that make jobs enjoyable or drudgery. To explore that issue, we need the insights of other theorists.

Contributive justice theorists see work as potentially a source of meaning or fulfillment. Their political goal is not less work or better remunerated work but more satisfying work. This leads them to consider what makes a job meaningful and whether there is equal opportunity to obtain meaningful jobs, a social justice issue they take to be of paramount importance after minimal economic needs are met.⁵⁸ I agree that we need to stop talking about work abstractly and instead look at what matters to workers in a job, which is a good segue to considering the future of work.

Future Meanings of Working, Not Working, and the Ambiguous In-Between

Does my research give us a basis for predicting how US Americans or people elsewhere might think about working and not working in the future? And are those the only two choices?

Predicting the future of work meanings is doubly hazardous because it requires predicting not only how the world will change but also how people might feel about those changes. Predicting how the world will change is very difficult by itself. For example, we can imagine the potential of AI and robotics to alter or displace human labor, but the availability of a technology does not determine which employers will adopt it, whether state policies will promote or constrain its adoption, or how workers will respond politically.⁵⁹ Furthermore, the future of work cannot be reduced to AI and automation.⁶⁰ For example, will parents be allowed or encouraged to use genetic engineering to improve their offspring’s opportunities for remunerative occupations?⁶¹ What demographic changes are coming, and what impact will those shifts have on the workforce of different nations? How will societies adapt to climate change and the upheavals it causes? How might new technologies and policies about them shape where people work, when they work, and relations between workers and employers?

The importance of humility about the limits of our ability to predict the future became exceedingly clear as I was finishing this book. For years, futurists had been pondering the possibility that human labor would be displaced by advances in AI and automation. Who foresaw that the public health response to a microscopic virus would suddenly throw a half-billion people out of work around the world and disrupt assumptions about how work is conducted?⁶² Now, working from home has forced its way into conversations about the future of work.

Even if we could accurately predict such changes, we would not know what meanings they would hold for people in the future. We do not know whether our counterparts in 2030 or 2040 or 2050 will interpret new situations with the same assumptions and values about the place of waged work in a good life that we have now or whether new circumstances will give rise to different assumptions and values. Most likely, it will be a mix of old and new.

It is tempting to use the past as a guide to the future. For example, the journalist Derek Thompson wondered how Americans would deal with high levels of technological unemployment: “a new normal, where the expectation that work will be a central feature of adult life dissipates for a significant portion of society.” To answer that question, he considered the example of Youngstown, Ohio, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when steel mill owners moved jobs abroad, throwing fifty thousand people out of work. The result was a “psychological and cultural breakdown” reflected in high rates of “depression, spousal abuse, and suicide,” which Thompson suggests we could see in a future in which most labor is performed by sophisticated AI programs and tireless robots.⁶³ However, those who lost well-paid factory jobs several decades ago were unemployed in what has been termed a “work society,” based on the norm that adults (at least, adult men) would spend the majority of their waking hours in full-time employment for forty or more years. If waged work ceased to be a central feature of adult life, we could expect new ways of living, thinking, and feeling.

I am agnostic about whether AI and automation will cause high levels of unemployment in the future. Over the last decade, experts’ forecasts have shifted—from estimates that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be automated in the next ten to twenty years, to carefully reasoned explanations that occupational transformation is more probable than massive unemployment, only to swing back to renewed worries about the value added by human labor given the increasing sophistication of machine learning.⁶⁴ Any prediction I made now could be outdated in a few years. Nor is widespread technological unemployment the only looming possibility to consider. Among the other trends I just discussed, the proliferation of ways of earning a living other than through standard employment is especially important. That is why I labeled this section “future meanings of working, not working, and in-between.” By “in-between,” I mean alternatives to both full-time employment and full-time unemployment.⁶⁵

I do not have the expertise to predict the future, nor do I claim that my participants’ work meanings are timeless and universal. They are only one group of people at one slice of time. Instead, I describe seven factors that affect people’s thoughts and feelings about work: (1) predominant types of livelihoods, (2) workers’ expectations of job availability, (3) workers’ attitudes about the types of jobs and working conditions available to them, (4) nonmarket options for sustaining a living, (5) consumption norms, (6) other meanings of work in a good life, and (7) the individual’s identities. I discuss the first factor in detail and the others more briefly. These factors foreground the diversity of people’s situations and meanings, today and in the future.