Rethinking work: an interview with a sociologist

Hélène Wertheim's office at the University of Antwerp is a small monument to the thing she studies: shelves of labour histories, a whiteboard crowded with the names of automated trades, a printout of a job advertisement from 1955 pinned beside one from this spring. For two decades she has asked an unfashionable question — not how to make work more productive, but what work is for. Her new book argues that the "job," as we know it, is a recent and unstable invention, and that the technologies now reshaping it are forcing a reckoning we have postponed for a century. We met on a grey June afternoon, as the rain came in off the Scheldt, to talk about meaning, machines, and the labour we refuse to value.

Let's start with the provocation in your title. You call the job a "twentieth-century artifact." What do you mean?

I mean that the package we treat as eternal — a single employer, a fixed wage, a forty-hour week, a career with a beginning and an end — is barely a hundred years old. For most of human history, people did work, plural: they farmed and traded and minded children and mended things, often all at once, with no clean line between a "job" and a life. The bundled, full-time job is a product of the industrial factory and the institutions that grew up around it. It was a brilliant solution to a particular problem. But we have mistaken a historical arrangement for a law of nature, and that mistake is now costing us.

Costing us how?

Because when the arrangement starts to dissolve — and it is dissolving, into gig work, into portfolios of part-time roles, into automation — we experience it as personal failure rather than structural change. A man whose trade is automated does not think, "a particular bundle of tasks has been reorganised." He thinks, "I am worth less." We have fused identity and employment so completely that losing the job feels like losing the self. That fusion is the artifact. It is not natural and it is not permanent, and the sooner we see that, the better we can handle what's coming.

What is coming? Everyone wants to talk about automation and the latest wave of AI.

I try to resist the two clichés — that the machines will take all the jobs, or that they will magically create better ones. Both are too tidy. What automation actually does is dissolve tasks, not jobs, and then it forces us to re-bundle the tasks that remain. Each wave makes some skills worthless and some suddenly precious, and the disruption is real and painful even if the aggregate number of jobs holds up. But here is the part that interests me as a sociologist: automation is, for the first time, coming for the work we told ourselves was safe. The analyst, the lawyer, the coder. And when the educated middle class feels the ground move, suddenly the whole society is willing to ask the question that the factory worker has been asking for forty years — what is this all for?

You've written that the work society values least is often the work that matters most. Say more.

Look at what a machine cannot do, and you find, overwhelmingly, care. Tending the sick, raising the young, sitting with the dying, holding a community together. This is the labour most resistant to automation — you cannot offshore a bedside or download a kindness — and it is precisely the labour we pay least and respect least. We have built an economy that rewards the abstract and the scalable, the spreadsheet over the bedside, and we are about to automate away a great deal of the abstract while leaving the care work underpaid and exhausted. If we were rational, the coming decade would be a vast revaluation: care would become the best-paid and most honoured work there is. I am not naive enough to expect that. But the contradiction is becoming impossible to ignore.

There's a lot of talk now about a crisis of meaning at work. Is that real, or is it a luxury complaint?

It is real, and it is also a symptom of the artifact we discussed. We asked the job to carry the entire weight of human meaning — purpose, status, community, identity — because we hollowed out the other institutions that used to carry it. The church, the union, the neighbourhood, the extended family. When all of that erodes and the job is the last vessel left, of course people feel a crisis when the job turns out to be a sequence of low-value meetings. We are demanding that employment deliver something it was never designed to deliver. The answer is not to make every job a calling. It is to stop asking the job to be the whole of a life.

And status anxiety? You argue it's getting worse.

Sharply worse, because the markers of status have become both more visible and more precarious. A century ago your place was relatively fixed and relatively local; you compared yourself to the next street. Now you compare yourself to everyone, constantly, on a screen, and the rungs of the ladder are being kicked out by exactly the automation we discussed. Status anxiety is what you get when a society tells everyone they can rise, ranks them with total precision, and then pulls the ladder away. It is corrosive, and it is, I think, the real engine behind a great deal of our politics. People are not only anxious about money. They are anxious about where they stand.

So what would a healthier relationship with work look like?

Less total, for a start. A society where the job is one source of meaning among several, not the only one — where we rebuild the other vessels so that a person's worth does not collapse when their employment does. Practically, it means valuing and paying for care; shortening the working week where we can, as some firms are now doing for hard-headed reasons of their own; and being honest with the young that the single-employer career is the exception in history, not the rule. None of this is utopian. It is closer to remembering than to inventing. We had a more plural relationship with work before we built the factory around it. The task now is to recover that plurality without the poverty that came with it.

A final question. You study disruption for a living. Are you optimistic?

I am a sociologist, so I am professionally suspicious of optimism — but I will say this. Every previous reorganisation of work was eventually tamed by people deciding, collectively, what they would and would not accept. The weekend was not granted; it was won. The forty-hour week was not discovered; it was fought for. The technologies frighten me less than our passivity does. The future of work is not something that happens to us. It is something we negotiate, and the first step is to stop treating the present arrangement as the only one imaginable. We invented the job. We can invent something better.