The Duty to Work

Essay · society · September 2026

For most of recorded history, work was what the lower orders did so that others need not. The idea that a job should be the centre of a life, the source of who we are, what we are worth and what it all means, is a few centuries old, and it did not spread by itself. It was preached, legislated, schooled and enforced, in Portugal until 1976 by the police. The evidence says it serves employers better than it serves the people who hold it.

Reading time ≈ 27 min Aristotle → Estado Novo → Mappiness Part I of two

The duty

On 20 September 1997, the fourth revision of the Portuguese Constitution deleted a sentence. Since 1976, article 58 had said that “the duty to work is inseparable from the right to work”, except for those who could not work because of age, illness or disability. The revision law disposed of it in seven words: “É eliminado o n.º 2 do artigo 58.º”[1] The duty had a longer pedigree than the democracy that dropped it. The Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional of 1933, the labour charter of the Estado Novo, declared work “for all Portuguese a duty of social solidarity”, in the same breath as it banned strikes.[2] Three years later, in Braga, Salazar listed the five things the regime did not discuss: God and virtue, the fatherland and its history, authority and its prestige, the family and its morals, and “the glory of work and its duty”.[3]

The sentence went; the belief did not. In the European Values Study of 2020, 86 per cent of Portuguese agreed that “work is a duty towards society”, level with Norway for the highest share in western Europe, and 54 per cent that “work should always come first, even if it means less spare time”, against 28 per cent in Britain and 23 in the Netherlands.[4] In 1997, 76 per cent of Portuguese told the International Social Survey Programme that work is “a person’s most important activity”; in Britain and the United States, about 30 per cent did.[5] Yet the Portuguese are also among the Europeans most eager to leave their jobs: in the European Working Conditions Survey of 2024, 13 per cent of Portuguese workers over 45 wanted to stop working “as early as possible”, one of the highest shares in the Union.[6] A duty, then, rather than a pleasure.

The previous essays on this blog asked why the fifteen-hour week Keynes expected never came, and found that the productivity was there and the hours were not given up. This one asks a prior question. Why do we treat work as the centre of a life at all? Why is “what do you do?” the first question at a dinner, and why does its answer place us? The argument here is that this is recent, that it was installed rather than discovered, by the pulpit, the law, the factory clock, the school and the benefit office, and that the evidence on happiness does not support it: the thing people value about work is something a job can give, and which the job has been allowed to monopolise. The second part of this essay, Earned and Unearned, follows the money: how income divides between those who work and those who own, and how each is taxed.

86%of Portuguese agree that work is a duty towards society (2020), level with Norway for the highest in western Europe

39thof 40 activities: where paid work ranks for momentary happiness, above only being sick in bed

10,000+British workers prosecuted each year, 1858–75, for leaving their employer without permission

0.94status and identity: the largest gap between the employed and the unemployed, bigger than income

Before the job

A curse, then a calling

People have always worked. The question is what work meant, and for most of written history it meant something to be escaped. Aristotle wrote that “we are busy that we may have leisure”, and his ideal citizens would do no mechanical trade, commerce or farming, because such work “renders the body, the mind, or the understanding of freemen unfit for the habit and practice of virtue”.[7] The Greek word for leisure, scholé, is the positive term; business is ascholia, un-leisure, and the Latin copies it: negotium is nec-otium, not-leisure. Cicero, passing on what he called received doctrine, classed the earnings of all hired workers “whom we pay for mere manual labour” as vulgar, “for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery”.[8] The Hebrew Bible made toil the punishment for the Fall: “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”.[9]

There was always a counter-tradition. Hesiod told his idle brother that “work is no disgrace: it is idleness which is a disgrace”; Paul told the Thessalonians that “if any would not work, neither should he eat”; Benedict’s Rule, around 530, begins its chapter on manual labour with “idleness is the enemy of the soul”.[9] But these are rules for the poor, the monk and the believer waiting for the end of the world, not a claim that work is where a person finds who they are. Medieval society was imagined as three orders, those who pray, those who fight and those who work, and the third was the lowest. Thomas Aquinas, as Weber later summarised him, held that the duty to labour applied “only for the race, not for every individual”, and did not apply “to anyone who can live without labour on his possessions”.[10] The rich were not expected to work, and nobody thought less of them for it.

Two popular stories about the time before need correcting, because the argument does not depend on them. The first is that hunter-gatherers worked fifteen hours a week. That figure, from Marshall Sahlins’s “original affluent society”, counts only the time spent getting food among the !Kung in one season; when Richard Lee, whose fieldwork it came from, added tool-making, food processing, water, firewood and housework, the week came to 44.5 hours for men and 40.1 for women.[11] What does survive is narrower and more interesting: forager work comes in bouts, mixed with company and rest, and among the Agta of the Philippines, the camps that took up farming had less leisure, mostly because women worked more.[11] The second story is that medieval peasants had a third of the year off in holy days. The historian whose estimate Juliet Schor used has since said he no longer accepts it and puts the working year closer to 300 days.[12] The real medieval finding is different: after the Black Death, a casual labourer in England needed only two or three days of wage work a week to earn what a servant on an annual contract was paid, and many may have stopped there, though the records cannot say whether by choice or because no more work was offered.[12] People worked when they had to, and the rhythm was theirs.

What changed first was the meaning. Luther translated the Bible’s word for a person’s station as Beruf, calling, and gave ordinary work the dignity of a task set by God. The Puritans went further. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic quotes Richard Baxter: “Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins,” and even “more sleep than is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours, is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.” Work became proof of grace, and for the Puritan, Weber wrote, Paul’s rule “holds unconditionally for everyone. Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace.”[10] His closing pages are the most quoted sentences in sociology: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so,” and the light cloak of worldly goods became an iron cage.

Weber’s thesis has been tested hard, and the verdict is split in a way that matters here. On why Protestant regions grew rich, he looks wrong: in Prussia the Protestant advantage is almost entirely explained by literacy, because Luther wanted every believer to read the Bible, and across 272 German cities from 1300 to 1900 the Reformation had no measurable effect on growth.[13] On whether Protestant cultures came to love work, he looks right. In modern Germany, Protestants work three and a half to four and a half hours a week more than comparable Catholics, without higher hourly pay. On the Swiss border between Calvinist Vaud and Catholic Fribourg, Protestant communes vote 13 to 14 points less for longer holidays, a lower retirement age or a shorter working week. And across 82 societies, unemployment hurts Protestants’ well-being about 40 per cent more than it hurts others, and hurts twice as much in historically Protestant societies, whatever the individual’s own faith.[13] The ethic did not make anyone rich. It made not working painful, and it outlived the faith.

Coercion

The clock, the constable and the workhouse

A preached ethic is one thing. The spread of the work norm from Puritan congregations to entire populations was helped along by law, and the law was not subtle. When the Black Death made labour scarce, England’s Statute of Labourers of 1351 obliged every able-bodied man and woman under sixty without land or a trade of their own to serve whoever required them, at the wages of 1346.[14] Vagrancy laws punished those who would not. The criminal enforcement of labour contracts lasted into the industrial age: until 1875, a British worker who left an employer before the contract ended could be arrested, brought before a magistrate and jailed. Between 1858 and 1875 there were over 10,000 such prosecutions a year, more than for petty theft; in 1875, 14,353 against 11,986. No surviving record shows masters winning fewer than 70 per cent of the cases, most cases were for “absconding”, and, most telling, prosecutions rose when demand for labour rose, that is, exactly when workers could have left for better pay. After repeal, wages grew faster in the counties that had prosecuted most.[15]

The workhouse did the same job by deterrence. The Poor Law Commission of 1834 set its principle: the pauper’s situation “shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class”. It did not need to hold many people to work. At the census of 1851 there were 126,488 paupers in workhouses, one person in 142; in 1861 only 131,501 of the 889,942 people on relief, about 15 per cent, were inside.[16] The rest were relieved at home, knowing the alternative. And the land that had let people live partly outside the wage was taken. The best modern study of the English parliamentary enclosures, covering all of them between 1750 and 1830, finds that they raised wheat yields, by 45 per cent in the authors’ main estimate and less on average, and raised the inequality of landholding by 22 points of the Gini coefficient, and that the labour they released flowed to the new industries of the north.[17] Both halves of that finding matter: enclosure was productive, and it made more people depend on a wage.

Inside the new workplaces, time itself changed meaning. In E. P. Thompson’s classic account, pre-industrial work was task-oriented, “alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives”, and many trades kept “Saint Monday” as an unofficial holiday. The factory needed synchronised hours, and the employer “must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted”. “Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”[18] One careful attempt to count what that meant, from the testimony of witnesses in criminal trials, puts the annual hours of English men at 2,576 in 1760 and 3,328 in 1800, a rise of close to 30 per cent, mostly from working on Mondays and the old holy days.[18] The estimate is disputed, and a critic who doubts its small sample of farm workers suggests the national rise could have been nearer 8 per cent; the historian Jan de Vries argues that households also chose to work more to buy the new goods of the age, tea, sugar, cotton and crockery.[18] Both can be true. Hours rose because people were pushed off the land, and also because they wanted things. The law made sure the first mattered.

Portugal has its own version, and it lasted longer. The Penal Code of 1852, article 256, defined the vadio, the vagrant, as a person with “no fixed home, no means of subsistence, and who does not habitually exercise any profession or trade”, and set the penalty: up to six months in prison, after which the vagrant would be “handed over to the Government, to provide him with work for as long as seems convenient”. The Code of 1886 kept it.[19] Not working, without means, was the crime, and state-assigned labour was the sentence. The Estado Novo added machinery. A decree of 1940 created police-run shelters for beggars in every district capital, to hold “persons found begging or suspected of begging”, and its preamble worried about “adventurers, vagrants, vagabonds, false beggars” drawn to the cities by “the mirage of idleness”; in 1947 begging was banned nationwide, and the able-bodied were to be “given work”. The 1940 decree was revoked only in May 1976, and the Penal Code of 1982 was the first without the vagrant in it.[19] In the colonies the same logic ran to its extreme: a native labour regulation of 1899 allowed compulsory work for private employers; the code of 1928 kept a “moral duty to work” that administrators used to recruit; forced labour in its legal forms ended only in 1961 and 1962, under international pressure.[20] In a confidential report to the National Assembly in 1947, a colonial inspector, Henrique Galvão, wrote that in Angola “only the dead are really exempt from forced labour”. The report was suppressed and he was later arrested.[20]

The regime also organised the time off. The Fundação Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho, the National Foundation for Joy in Work, created in 1935 and modelled on Italian and German examples, ran workers’ leisure, and its name says what leisure was for.[21] The communist states agreed with the Catholic corporatist one about the essentials. The Soviet constitution of 1918 made work “the duty of every citizen” and took Paul’s verse as its motto, “He shall not eat who does not work”; the constitution of 1936 repeated it, making work “a duty and a matter of honour”.[22] John Smith had read the same verse to the starving colonists of Jamestown in the winter of 1608–09: “he that will not worke shall not eate”.[22] Left and right, colony and metropole, the one thing twentieth-century regimes could agree on was that a person who did not work had forfeited something.

Not working, without means, was the crime, and state-assigned labour was the sentence. In Portugal the police ran the shelters for beggars until 1976.Código Penal 1852, art. 256; Decreto-Lei 30.389, 1940

Socialisation

Softer instruments

Law explains how the norm was enforced on the poor. It does not explain why the middle classes, who were never threatened with the workhouse, came to hold it more fiercely than anyone. For that, the instruments were softer, and the evidence about each is mixed in ways worth keeping.

School. There is a popular story that mass schooling was designed in Prussia to produce obedient factory workers. Historians do not support it: Prussia made schooling compulsory in 1763, before it had factories, and the best recent study of two centuries of data in over a hundred countries finds that governments expanded primary schools mostly after civil unrest, to instil obedience to the state, not to supply industry.[23] Obedience to the state is not a comforting correction. And the narrower claim, that school rewards what employers want, has good evidence. Adding measured cognitive skill to an earnings equation removes only about 18 per cent of the pay advantage of more schooling; the traits that predict good high-school grades once intelligence is held constant, “punctual”, “dependable”, “perseverant”, “identifies with work”, are the same that predict good ratings from supervisors, and in both settings “creative” and “independent” are penalised.[24]

The firm. Frederick Taylor wrote in 1911 that the first requirement for a man fit to handle pig iron was that he be “so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type”.[25] Henry Ford’s five-dollar day of 1914 was meant to stop a turnover of 370 per cent a year, but the bonus came with conditions: 150 inspectors of the company’s Sociological Department visited workers’ homes and certified that they did not drink, gamble, keep an untidy house or fail to save, before a man was paid it.[26] The crude version gave way to a subtle one. Modern management speaks of mission, family and passion, and the psychology of passion has a dark finding: across seven studies, people judge it more acceptable to ask a worker for unpaid overtime, weekend work or demeaning tasks outside the job description when the worker is described as passionate about the job, on the reasoning that the work is its own reward.[27] The meaning of work, in other words, is used to lower its price. People say they would accept about a third less pay for a job they found meaningful.[27] Someone collects that third.

Status. In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described a leisure class whose rank was shown by “conspicuous abstention from labour”, because “application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and subjection”.[28] That has flipped. British time diaries show that in 1961 the more educated worked shorter hours than others, and by 2001 longer; and in experiments Americans rate a busy, overworked person as higher in status than a person at leisure, while Italians rate the person at leisure higher.[28] The Italian result is the important one. If busyness signalled status everywhere, it might be a fact of human nature. It does not; it is learned, and the Americans who learned it are also the ones who believe most in social mobility. Status competition also drives hours directly. In American data, a rise in the neighbours’ earnings lowers a person’s happiness about as much as a similar fall in their own income, and people respond by working more; across ten rich countries, more inequality goes with longer hours.[29]

The benefit office. The welfare state inherited the Poor Law’s worry that relief would make people idle, and conditionality is its modern form. Britain imposed about 400,000 benefit sanctions in 2015; about a quarter of all Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants were sanctioned at least once between 2010 and 2015, and the National Audit Office found that the department had never evaluated whether sanctions worked.[30] After the American reform of 1996, the number of poor families receiving cash assistance fell from 68 in every 100 to 21 by 2023.[30] In Portugal, the minimum income is the favourite target of the charge of “subsídio-dependência”, dependency on benefits. It cost 1.2 per cent of social security spending in 2017, its maximum for a single adult was 37 per cent of the poverty line, and 11 per cent of its adult recipients were working; when it was introduced, an estimated 72 per cent of eligible people did not claim it.[31] Not everyone who fails to claim is ashamed; in the one survey that asked, not knowing was a bigger reason than shame.[31] But the language is designed for shame, and the Estado Novo’s “false beggar” lives on in it.

One popular instrument deserves less blame than it gets. American advertising has cost roughly 2 per cent of GDP since 1919, with no upward trend; if advertising made people work more, it did not do it by growing.[32] The desire for goods is real and older than Madison Avenue. What the rest of the evidence suggests is that the desire was harnessed: the goods are bought with a wage, the wage requires a job, and the job had been made the respectable, and in Portugal for a century the legal, way to be.

The survey record

What people say about it now

The norm is still strong, and it is strongest in Portugal. Figure 1 sets two work-ethic statements side by side for twelve countries. The Portuguese, with the Norwegians, agree most that work is a duty towards society, and only the Italians agree more often that work should always come first. At the other end, the Dutch, the British and the Americans agree much less, and the Japanese, supposedly the most work-devoted people on earth, agree least of all that work should come first: 10 per cent.[4]

Fig. 1 — Share agreeing (agree or strongly agree) with “work is a duty towards society” and “work should always come first, even if it means less spare time”, latest wave: European Values Study 2017–2020 for European countries, World Values Survey 2017–2019 for Japan and the United States. Don’t-knows excluded. Data: EVS and WVS, via the WVS online analysis and GESIS variable reports.

Look at what Portuguese say about the importance of work in their own lives, though, and the picture moves. The share calling work “very important” has stayed at 58 to 59 per cent since 1999. Over the same two decades, the share calling leisure very important rose from 20 to 49 per cent, and friends from 31 to 48 (Figure 2). Work has not lost its absolute place. It has lost its lead.[4] The International Social Survey Programme found the same Portuguese saying, in 2005, that they would like more hours, not fewer: 49 per cent of workers wanted to work longer for more money and 3 per cent shorter for less.[5] That is not a taste for work. It is what low wages look like from the inside, and the previous essays on this blog showed why Portuguese wages are low.

Fig. 2 — Portugal: share saying each domain is “very important” in their life, European Values Study 1999, 2008 and 2020, don’t-knows excluded. The 1990 wave is omitted: its Portuguese answers are lower for every domain, including family, which points to a change of instrument rather than of opinion. Data: GESIS EVS variable reports; WVS online analysis.

Americans, who preach the gospel of work loudest, show the widest gap between the sermon and the experience. In 1955 Gallup asked whether people enjoyed the hours on the job or off it more, and the country split evenly, 43 to 44. By 1999 it was 16 to 77. Roper’s question about whether work or leisure is “the important thing” went from 48 to 36 in favour of work in 1975 to 34 to 40 against it in 1998 (Figure 3).[33] Yet when Pew asked American teenagers in 2018 what they would want as adults, 95 per cent said a job or career they enjoy was extremely or very important, against 47 per cent for getting married and 39 per cent for having children.[34] The journalist Derek Thompson called this “workism”: the belief that work is “the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose”.[34] The teenagers have not yet worked. They have been told what work is supposed to be.

Fig. 3 — Two American survey series. Solid: Gallup, “Which do you enjoy more, the hours when you are on the job or the hours when you are not?”, 1955–1999. Dashed: Roper, “work is the important thing and leisure recharges” against “leisure is the important thing and work makes it possible”, 1975–1998. The base of the Gallup question may differ between the 1955 and later readings. Data: Roper Center, Public Perspective, September/October 2000.

Happiness

Does it make us happier?

There are two ways to ask whether work makes people happy, and they give opposite answers. The first is to ask how people feel while they are doing it. The largest study of this, which pinged the smartphones of 21,000 Britons at random moments and asked what they were doing and how happy they were, collected 1.3 million answers. Of forty activities, paid work came thirty-ninth. Only being sick in bed was worse (Figure 4). Commuting, waiting in queues and doing the household accounts were all more pleasant than working.[35] The finding is not a British quirk. When a sample of American working women reconstructed the previous day hour by hour, working and commuting had the lowest positive feelings of all their activities, and the worst company to be in was the boss.[35]

Fig. 4 — How happy people are while doing each activity, relative to the reference of doing none of the listed activities, in points on a 0–100 scale, with each person compared with themselves at other moments. Seventeen of the forty activities are shown. The category is “working, studying”; the authors confirm the result for workers only. Data: Bryson & MacKerron, Economic Journal 2017, Table 3; Mappiness app, United Kingdom, 2010–2011.

Most of that unhappiness is stress: when the authors also account for how relaxed people feel, the penalty for working shrinks to a tenth.[35] The same authors note the puzzle that the same people speak well of their work when they reflect on their lives. That is the second way of asking, and here work wins. People without a job are much less satisfied with their lives. Across hundreds of studies, 34 per cent of the unemployed have psychological problems against 16 per cent of the employed, and the damage is larger than the lost income explains.[36] This is the strongest card in the hand of anyone who says that work is simply good for people, and it needs to be looked at carefully, because it may be evidence for the opposite.

The sociologist Marie Jahoda, who in 1931 studied Marienthal, an Austrian village where the only factory closed and 367 of 478 families were left with no one in work, argued that a job supplies things besides money: a structure to the day, contact outside the family, a shared purpose, activity, and a status and identity.[37] A recent meta-analysis measured each of them (Figure 5). The largest gap between the employed and the unemployed is not in income. It is in status and identity.[37] Status is not a property of activity. It is something a society hands out, and ours hands it out through the job.

Fig. 5 — Standardised difference (Cohen’s d) between employed and unemployed people in the five “latent functions” of employment proposed by Marie Jahoda and in income, the “manifest” function. Data: Paul, Scholl, Moser, Zechmann & Batinic, Frontiers in Psychology 2023, Table 1 (meta-analysis, 19 to 47 studies per function).

The same meta-analysis contains the telling detail. Retired people lack the latent benefits of a job almost as much as the unemployed do, and yet they do not show the unemployed’s distress.[37] The difference between them is not what they do all day. It is whether they are supposed to be working. The best natural experiments say the same. When unemployed Germans reach the age at which they can draw a pension, and become “retired” instead of “unemployed” with no change in income, health or free time, their life satisfaction rises.[38] In ten European countries, the probability of depression among unemployed men falls by 23 percentage points once they pass the earliest pension age, an effect larger than the gap associated with being widowed, and it grows as their peers retire.[38] In Swiss communes where the vote on cutting unemployment benefits revealed a stronger work norm, the unemployed are less satisfied with their lives and find jobs faster, by 7 per cent for every ten points of norm.[39] In Britain, unemployment hurts less where more people are unemployed.[39] And there are the Protestant societies, where it hurts twice as much.[13] A large part of the pain of not working is the pain of breaking a rule.

The evidence is not unanimous, and the argument should not claim more than it has. One study across 45 European countries found that the well-being of the unemployed was unaffected by how strong the national work norm was, though the norm did lower the well-being of disabled men and retired women who did not work, and a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies found the moderating effect of norms fragile.[40] The fair reading is that norms amplify the harm of joblessness in several well-identified settings, not everywhere, and that the harm has other causes too: the poverty, the loss of control, the empty days.

What the evidence does not support is that any job is better than none. In an Australian panel, people who moved from unemployment into a good job gained about three points on a standard mental-health scale; those who moved into a poor one, with little control, insecure tenure or unfair pay, lost 5.6 points, and were worse off than those who stayed unemployed.[41] In Britain, people who took poor-quality jobs had higher levels of the biological markers of chronic stress than those who remained out of work.[41] Among British civil servants, low control over one’s own work almost doubled the risk of heart disease, while high demands did not raise it.[41] What harms is not effort. It is being told what to do.

Compliance

Or more compliant?

If work is the source of identity, status and meaning, then losing it is losing oneself, and people will accept a great deal not to. That is the mechanism by which the norm becomes compliance, and each link in it has evidence. Passion justifies unpaid hours in the eyes of others.[27] Those whose passion for their work is obsessive, whose sense of self depends on it, show more burnout, while those for whom work is one good part of a life show less.[42] In the United States, about 18 per cent of workers are bound by a non-compete agreement, 38 per cent have signed one at some point, and a third of them were shown it only after accepting the job; such clauses are common even in low-wage work and in states where courts will not enforce them.[43] The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls the workplace a “private government”, one that regulates speech, dress and conduct and is accountable to nobody it governs.[43]

“Compliant slaves” overstates it, and the distinction matters. Employees can leave; the Master and Servant Acts that jailed them for leaving are gone, and so is the Portuguese vagrancy article. What has replaced them is quieter. When the job is the only respectable identity and the only door to status, exit is costly in a way that no contract clause needs to specify, and workers discipline themselves. The work norm is the cheapest form of supervision ever devised: it is carried by the supervised.

The strongest argument on the other side is that people keep working when they do not have to. Lottery winners mostly carry on, as an earlier essay here noted.[44] In the largest American experiment with unconditional income, $1,000 a month for three years, recipients reduced their labour-market participation by about 4 percentage points and their hours by one to two a week, spending the time mostly on leisure; their well-being rose in the first year and then faded back.[45] Finland’s basic income experiment of 2017 and 2018 found no fall in employment, and recipients reported less stress; a long-running universal income in rural Kenya found no fall in total work, only a shift from wage labour to working for oneself.[45] Unconditional money, then, does not make people stop. But notice what these results show and what they do not. People want to be active, useful and among others. They do not show that people want a job as it is now organised, with its hours set by someone else; the Kenyan households used the money to move from wage labour to working for themselves. What people want is the activity. The job has been allowed to monopolise it.

Otto Bauer, the Austrian socialist leader, is said to have asked the young researchers who proposed to study leisure after the eight-hour day of 1918: “You want to study free time, when what people need is work?” They went to Marienthal instead, and found that free time without work was not freedom but apathy: men who walked slowly and stopped often, library loans that fell even after the fee was abolished, and a community that informed on neighbours doing casual work while on benefits.[37] Both halves of that story belong in the argument. People need something to do and a place among others. That does not mean they need an employer.

Coda

A duty with no one to owe it to

The history runs in a line. Work was a curse and a mark of the unfree; the Reformation made it a calling; the law made it compulsory for anyone without property; the factory made it a matter of the clock; the school, the firm and the neighbours made it a matter of character and status; and the welfare state kept the old suspicion of anyone who lived without it. In Portugal the line is unusually visible: vagrancy as a crime from 1852, work as a duty of social solidarity in 1933, the glory of work beyond discussion in 1936, the police shelters until 1976, the duty to work in the democratic constitution until 1997, and 86 per cent who still feel it today.

The case made here is that this norm is a social product, not a fact of nature, and that it serves employers better than workers. It makes people accept worse terms for meaningful work, blame themselves for unemployment that is not their fault, and fear the loss of a job more than the loss of the income alone would justify. The counterpoints are real and were stated: people do need purpose, activity and company; unconditional money does not make them idle; and the misery of the unemployed has causes beyond the norm. None of that shows that the job, as organised, is the only or the best place to find them.

Bertrand Russell, in 1932, wrote that “immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous”, and that “the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery”.[46] Hannah Arendt, in 1958, worried about the opposite danger: that automation would liberate “a society of laborers” that no longer knew any other activity worth being freed for. “What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.”[46] With machines that can now write, draw and reason, that is the question again. If the only answer a society has to “who are you?” is “what do you do?”, then a technology that does the doing is a catastrophe for identity before it is anything else. It would be better to have other answers ready.

The work ethic praises the person who earns. It says nothing about who receives the income that work produces. That is the subject of the second part of this essay: how much of national income goes to work and how much to ownership, who owns, and why the tax system treats the earner, whom it praises, more harshly than the owner, whom it does not.

Open threads

Where this could go

How many were interned. The Estado Novo’s shelters for beggars and vagrants held thousands, but most of the records of the repression of begging were destroyed. A count from the surviving district archives would put a number on the most direct Portuguese enforcement of the duty to work.

The work norm in Portuguese microdata. The European Values Study microdata would allow a direct test, on Portuguese respondents, of whether those who hold the duty to work most strongly suffer most from unemployment, the Swiss and Protestant results transplanted.

The four-day week. Portugal’s 2023 pilot, with a control group, found frequent exhaustion down by a third among participants and most firms keeping the shorter week. What happened to those firms since, and to their workers’ sense of what their job is for, is the natural next measurement.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data research, analysis and drafting. The figures and the numbers quoted from datasets are computed by scripts/work_value.py, shared with the second part of the essay, from the European Values Study and World Values Survey (through the WVS online analysis and the GESIS variable reports; the microdata were not used), the ISSP work-orientation modules, the Roper Center’s compilation of American survey trends, the Mappiness coefficients of Bryson and MacKerron (2017) and the meta-analysis of Paul and colleagues (2023). Historical and legal texts were read in the original or a standard translation and are cited by article or passage; for the Salazar speech the source is the published collection of his speeches as quoted in secondary literature. Where a figure is disputed in the literature the text says so. The downloaded sources and extracted tables, with a page reference for every number, are kept with the script’s data; results are in docs/work-value-results.json and the figures in docs/work-value-figures.html.

The cover photograph is Power House Mechanic Working on Steam Pump by Lewis Hine, 1920, made for a series celebrating American industrial workers; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Related essays on this blog

1. Earned and Unearned (forthcoming) — Part II: the split of income between work and capital, who owns, and how each is taxed.
2. The Fifteen-Hour Week — Keynes’s prediction, productivity and the hours that were not given up.
3. Where the Hours Went — who got the income, what it bought, and where the hours of work go.
4. The Two-Thirds Country — Portugal’s productivity, hours and wages.
5. The Long Retirement — exit ages, healthy years and pensions.
6. Bullshit Jobs — the tasks, not only the jobs, that should not exist.

Sources

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3. António de Oliveira Salazar, speech in Braga, 28 May 1936, “As grandes certezas da Revolução Nacional”, in Discursos e Notas Políticas, vol. II, Coimbra Editora, p. 130, as quoted in Farinha et al., “Uma propaganda cheia de graça: as casas económicas do Estado Novo”, IX Congresso Português de Sociologia.
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45. Vivalt, Rhodes, Bartik, Broockman, Krause & Miller, “The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income”, NBER working paper 32719, revised August 2026, p. 20 and Table IV; Kangas et al., Suomen perustulokokeilun arviointi, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health 2020:15, and ministry release of 6 May 2020; Banerjee, Faye, Krueger, Niehaus & Suri, “Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya”, working paper, September 2023.
46. Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness”, Harper’s Magazine, October 1932; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 4–5.