Rethinking work: an interview with a sociologist

Hélène Wertheim's office at the University of Antwerp catalogues the thing she studies: shelves of labour histories, a whiteboard crowded with the names of automated trades, a job advertisement from 1955 pinned beside one from this spring. For two decades she has pressed an unfashionable question — not how to make work more productive, but what work is for. Her new book argues that the "job," as most of the industrialised world now understands it, is a recent and unstable invention, and that the technologies reshaping it are forcing a reckoning postponed for a century. We met on a grey June afternoon, the rain coming in off the Scheldt, to talk about meaning, machines, and the labour we have agreed not 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 — one employer, a fixed wage, a forty-hour week, a career with a beginning and an end — is barely a century old, and it was never universal. For most of human history, and across much of the world still, people do work in the plural: they farm and trade and mind children and mend things, often 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 in a handful of rich countries. It solved a particular problem brilliantly. But we mistook a historical arrangement for a natural fact, and the bill for that mistake is now coming due.

Costing us how?

Because when the arrangement dissolves — and it is dissolving, into gig platforms, into portfolios of part-time roles, into automation — people read it as personal failure rather than structural change. A worker whose trade is automated does not conclude that a particular bundle of tasks has been reorganised. He concludes that he is worth less. We fused identity and employment so completely that losing the job registers as losing the self. That fusion is the artifact. It is neither natural nor permanent, and the sooner a society sees that, the more soberly it can handle what is coming.

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

I resist both clichés — that the machines take every job, or that they conjure better ones. Each is too tidy. What automation actually does is dissolve tasks, not jobs, and then force a re-bundling of what remains. Every wave renders some skills worthless and some suddenly precious; the disruption is real and painful even when the aggregate job count holds. But here is what interests me. Automation is, for the first time, coming for the work the professional classes told themselves was safe — the analyst, the lawyer, the coder. And once the educated middle class feels the ground move, an entire society becomes willing to ask the question the factory worker has been asking for forty years: what is all this for?

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

Map what a machine cannot do and you arrive, overwhelmingly, at care. Tending the sick, raising the young, sitting with the dying, holding a community together. It is the labour most resistant to automation — you cannot offshore a bedside or download a kindness — and it is precisely the labour our economies pay and respect least. We built systems that reward the abstract and the scalable, the spreadsheet over the bedside, and we are now poised to automate much of the abstract while leaving the care work underpaid and exhausted. A rational decade would answer with a vast revaluation: care becoming the best-paid, most honoured work there is. I am not naive enough to expect it. 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 a symptom of the artifact. We asked the job to carry the entire weight of human meaning — purpose, status, community, identity — because we hollowed out the institutions that used to carry it. The church, the union, the neighbourhood, the extended family. When those erode and the job is the last vessel standing, of course a crisis follows the discovery that the job is mostly a sequence of low-value meetings. We are demanding that employment deliver what it was never built 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 are now both more visible and more precarious. A century ago your place was relatively fixed and relatively local; you measured yourself against the next street. Now the comparison is global, constant and on a screen, while the rungs of the ladder are kicked out by 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 withdraws the ladder. It is corrosive, and it is, I think, the real engine behind a great deal of the politics unsettling democracies right now — the populism, the resentment, the search for someone to blame. 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, to begin with. 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 with their employment. Practically: valuing and paying for care; shortening the working week where the productivity allows, as some firms are already doing for hard-headed reasons of their own; and telling the young honestly that the single-employer career is the historical exception, not the rule. None of this is utopian. It is closer to remembering than to inventing. Humanity had a more plural relationship with work before the factory enclosed it. The task 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, in one country after another. The technologies frighten me less than the 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.