For a first encounter with the book that would hopefully encourage further reading I recommend the chapter on work discourses (chapter 2). In this chapter, I contrast voices that seek to overcome work with others that praise work. Throughout history, we can find manifestations of this antagonism.The desire to overcome work is rooted in a concept of work that relates it to toil, stress, hierarchy, and exploitation by a landlord or capitalist employer. In order to escape the hardness of labor, philosophers, novelists, and social movements have suggested that workers will need to overcome their status as workers and leave the working class. From the age of mechanization onwards, social movements have been counting on machines to accelerate work or take over human tasks. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, propagated a three-hour working day in his Manifesto “The Right to Be Lazy” — without considering care work and household work as work, however.

Conversely, praising work is rooted in a concept of work that is related to human actualization. In this perspective, work is not a burden, but allows the worker to reach fulfillment, self-actualization. The worker is able to identify with the product as well as the process of work, which allows the worker to make use of knowledge, experience, skills, and creativity. Interestingly this positive image of work is encountered not only in intellectual, art, and artisan circles, but also among labor movements. All over nineteenth and twentieth century Europe labor movements developed songs in praise of labor – not the labor faced in the factories, but the labor they hoped to perform after their liberation from exploitation. “Sing the song of the high bride, Who was already married to man, Before he was even human. What is his on this earth, Sprang from this faithful covenant. Up with labor!” These lines were written for a Workers’ Educational Association in Vienna, Austria in 1863.Such attitudes towards work may seem totally contradictory. Lazy hedonists versus industrious working bees! In fact, they demonstrate the double meaning of work between toil and fulfillment. They also help us understand the ambiguous position of social movements, who fight hard working conditions, but also dream of labor relations that will allow them to develop their full human potential. Karl Marx’s writings reveal that he was sympathetic to both attitudes during his life. “The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labor,” he wrote in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1844. In Capital, vol. 3, he appears to write the exact opposite: “The realm of freedom really begins only where labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends; it lies by its very nature beyond the sphere of material production proper.”From here, readers can approach chapter 3, and discover that different languages provide different terms for the toilsome side of work­—labor—that goes back to the Greek pónos and the Latin labor, and the creative side of labor–work—that goes back to the Greek érgon and the Latin opus; we refer to it when we speak of workshop, artwork, or workmanship.

This book follows a historical approach. It challenges the reader by offering theoretical concepts for interpreting the changing meaning and interpretation of work throughout history. At the same time, I hope to contribute to contemporary debates.The current debate about work—and its eventual substitution by robots, whether enthusiastically applauded or rejected—is still shaped by a Euro-centric, male, big-industry notion of work, that reduces work to gainful employment that opens access to wages (income) and social security. Viewed from a global perspective that includes all types of workers, gainful employment appears to be but one form of work alongside others. The history of work is a history of combining paid and unpaid, formal and informal, free and unfree work by individuals and within families, households, companies, and commodity chains. Women’s studies and feminist historians have been challenging the division between production and reproduction, public and private for a long time. When their findings are intertwined with global perspectives, work can be conceived in its greater complexity, and we begin to see interconnections that change with economic conjunctures, business cycles, and technologies.

The historical perspective and a broader understanding of work—including gainful employment, care and housework, voluntary work for the community, as well as personal training and education—may help us to overcome fears, or hopes, expressed in current discussions, that work might disappear altogether. We can address the deep and ongoing transformation of labor relations both in the former industrialized countries in the West and the newly industrializing countries in the Global South on the basis of a broad and flexible understanding of work in its toilsome and fulfilling expressions.