Understanding work (part 1)

Before you start reading, beware: this is a two-parter. I toyed with the idea of doing it all in one go, but ended up deciding that it might be a bit much. Look for part two next week.

A student I supervised a few years ago was once shocked to hear that I had a permanent contract. As he’d heard it, all of his lecturers were working in a temporary and insecure way. The casualization of post-secondary education is certainly an issue (and I've heard similar anecdotes from others in the field), but it’s a story for another day. My student was surprised to hear that the proverbial “good job” still exists, and that some people do indeed work under steady contracts and strong collective agreements. I find this emblematic of the casualization of work more generally. I’m not going to do the complete “how did we get here?” in this essay, but I do want to talk about some of the fundamentals that underpin the extreme place we’ve gotten to in terms of labour, its deployments, and how it’s valued.

Why work?

Most of us have to work if we want to supply our day-to-day needs. We need money to pay for housing, and to buy food and other necessities. We need money to pay for the utilities we rely on to be warmed and watered. Without even considering the desire to get ahead, have more, or buy the organic tomato instead of the conventional one, we are locked into work just to make ends meet. And that’s if we’re lucky. For many of the world’s population, day-to-day life is not nearly so stable or comfortable. The paternalism and security that existed in some countries after the second world war has mostly disappeared, with fewer and fewer so-called “jobs for life” and far more worker mobility. That mobility is even sold to us as a good thing. We are encouraged to build careers that take advantage of movement between organizations and tasks. We, as workers, are expected to navigate the job market in ways that benefit us, with the understanding that we are rational economic actors aiming to get the best for ourselves, and capable of using the resources we have to get good deals from our employers. That’s the best case scenario. In the worst case, our mobility and flexibility as workers is a fiction which hides a deliberate benefit for companies: extracting as much value from our labour as possible so that they can maximize profits, satisfy investors, and keep on growing.

What is work?

So what is work? For my purposes here, let’s first make a distinction. When I wash the dishes in my own home, I’m doing a different kind of work which is not at issue in the present essay. One of the things at the heart of today’s vision of work is the idea that a worker trades their labour for money from an employer or client. This concept is not unique to the current moment, but it is currently the dominant form of work in the global north. We can see work as completing a set of tasks or outcomes in order to earn sufficient money to live. Work is things we do to make that money, and the contractual or informal agreements in place to govern the conditions under which we do those tasks. In an ideal world, the work we do contributes to the good running of the societies we live in, and to the ability of ourselves and others in those societies to live well. That’s in an ideal world, of course, and isn’t always the case in real life. But let’s stick with that ideal world for a moment.

In the very simplest sense, in a market-based capitalist economy (currently very popular), individuals work – either as employees or in self-employment – in order to earn money to cover their necessary living expenses. In the 38 countries belonging to the OECD, an organization which is sometimes called “the rich countries club,” an almost record-high proportion of the population currently works. In the third quarter of 2025, labour force participation in OECD countries was at 74.1%. That means that of the entire working-age population of OECD member countries (a cool almost 900 million people), only 25.9% of people between the ages of 15 and 64 were not either working or looking for work. 70.3% of that active population were in some form of employment – resulting in an unemployment rate of 5%, pretty darn near the record low (4.9%, logged a year earlier in Q3 2024, in case you're curious). All of this is to say: in the global north, most of us work, or are looking for work. Whether we work for an employer or in self-employment, whether we’re employed right now or trying to find a job, three quarters of us are workers. (That “us” is admittedly a pretty specific group. I’m making the wild assumption that you’re reading this in an OECD country, and I apologize for the non-inclusive nature of the “us” if, indeed, you’re not.)

Division of labour

A second key element of work today is the importance of division of labour. Ideally, we might see our roles as workers being in support of creating a prosperous and comfortable society, with each member of society contributing their unique skills in order to help society as a whole flourish more effectively. One person grows the grains, another mills them into flour, a third person bakes the bread, and the first person buys the bread with the money they made from selling the grain. Everyone along the chain makes a little profit to invest back into their business or their life, and the baker gets a better oven (which is great for the oven-builder, who supplies the oven) or a new pair of shoes for her child (good news for the cobbler). Labour is divided along lines of specialization so that the farmer doesn’t need to farm, mill, and bake, and the baker doesn’t need to be responsible for the entire process either. The cobbler and the oven maker belong to two more ecosystems which also divide labour, making it possible for them to specialize as well. This is the vision of how division of labour helps society prosper.

The famous pins

Economics gets one of its most famous descriptions of division of labour from Adam Smith, who was quite keen on it, suggesting that wealthier countries were marked by their greater use of division of labour – and he saw wealth as a marker of success, so division of labour was something he thought was worth adopting. Smith briefly describes the production of pins, arguing that in a factory which divides labour among multiple employees, each responsible for different tasks, a far higher number of pins can be made in a day than would be possible for just one worker, trying to complete all the tasks on their own. Thus, Smith argues, division of labour leads to increased productivity which is, like wealth, a good thing in his estimation. More productivity, more wealth, more prosperity.

Smith’s argument extends beyond pins. He uses the example of pins because at the time it was a process where most work happened in one place, making the division of labour visible. Obviously, Smith is ignoring the mining and transportation of the ore, but we’ll let that one slide. As Smith argues, because most forms of production are far more convoluted and require a greater diversity of work, it is hard to find complex goods which can be examined as easily as a simple pin.

So why should we care about 18th century pin manufacturing and a Scottish guy who died in 1790? Whether we like it or not (and there are many reasons to not like it), Smith’s ideas have been hugely influential in the modern history of economics and in the way economics influences the organization of society and work. He didn’t just describe things he was observing, his ideas influenced the way people down the centuries have made decisions. As one of the early and influential writers on economics, Smith’s work has laid the foundation for many of the ways we still think now about the systems in which we live.

Division outside of manufacturing

Division of labour continues to be at the root of how most of us work today. While pins are made very differently now (and videos of modern pin manufacturing are definitely worth watching), the concept of splitting a complex task into a number of smaller ones is alive and well. It’s not just in manufacturing. While it may initially have seemed that division of labour worked best in manufacturing, other forms of work have not been immune. Very few workers do all of the parts of a production process. The first mental jump we need to make together is to see the tasks done in non-manufacturing sectors as production. Most people in wealthy nations now do work that gets classed as being part of the service sector – though service is a term that covers a lot of ground. This terminology comes from a division of economies into three sectors: resource extraction (mining, forestry, that kind of thing) and agriculture (these two categories form the primary sector), manufacturing and refining of resources (the secondary sector), and service and knowledge (the tertiary sector). An increasing share of employment globally is being taken up by the service sector, and that’s also reflected in the contribution of the service sector to economic growth. Manufacturing, agriculture, and resource extraction just don’t form as large a chunk of most economies as they used to.

It’s possible that when thinking about what it means to work in the service industry, we first think about cutting hair or waiting tables in a restaurant. We might even go wild and think about an accountant or bookkeeper as being in the service industry, since they very clearly provide a service to their clients. But from a classification perspective, people like teachers, human resources specialists, graphic designers and so on, are all working in the service sector. So how does division of labour apply to those kinds of jobs? The bookkeeper is a good example of this. Let’s say I’m a small entrepreneur, responsible for almost all of the tasks in my business. I have no employees, and I do as many tasks as I can for myself. But. Chances are good that when my business starts growing and I get more clients, one of the first things I’ll outsource will be my bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is a key task in any business, since having well-organized finances not only lets me pay my taxes correctly, but knowing what bills or invoices are due, when, helps me keep a decent cash-flow – key to supplying my need for money to pay rent and buy food. Once I have enough money coming into my business, I’m likely to contract out to a bookkeeper so that I can focus more on my core work, and not on my finances.

It seems like a given that I’d outsource the work that my business isn’t focused on, but which needs to get done. And why not? This is an example of division of labour in action. It seems like an obvious thing to do because it’s so common. And of course, division of labour has always existed to some degree, but the difference between deciding that I’ll cook dinner if you do the dishes, compared with outsourcing a part of my business to a service provider is that one of these is a form of social division of labour that makes life easier for two people just trying to get things done together and the other is a decision that is also rooted in an economic motive. We come back to Smith: by hiring that bookkeeper, I increase my capacity to do the other things I need to do in my business, hopefully improving my productivity and profit.

This is one of the tensions in the ideal world we’re talking about here: division of labour doesn’t inherently need to be about increasing profit, but it often goes that way. In the best possible world, the bookkeeper I hire to keep my finances in order is great at their job, finds it fulfilling, and gets paid well enough by their clients to have a good life. Then, the work done by the bookkeeper not only contributes to the ability of their clients to have more efficient businesses, but it contributes to the bookkeeper’s capacity to pay for the things needed to have a good life. And this is where we run into the question of the things made by labour. Smith presents the pin factory to us as a given: of course pins need to exist, of course people need to buy pins, and of course it’s in the best interests of the pin factory’s owner to try to make more pins with less labour – as long as we assume that the factory owner’s goal is maximizing their own profit.

Come back next week for the thrilling conclusion: the question of productivity. How does Smith expect to make more pins for the same amount of input costs, and what does that mean for work, and the ways we work now?