Work for the Workers

Abstract

In the words of Voltaire ‘work banishes those three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty’. But there have always been unemployed people without work who have provoked different, and often opposed, reactions. Some people, and not necessarily the hardest working, assume that the unemployed have chosen to be out of work in some way: that they are shirkers, preferring a life of boredom, vice and poverty. Others are more compassionate and blame the circumstances rather than the individual. To them the unemployed are people to whom no work is offered but who are essentially, potentially still workers. Those that Franklin D. Roosevelt called ‘the forgotten men at the bottom of the economic pyramid’. So how do economists ally themselves with these positions? Do they see the unemployed as lazy shirkers or wasted workers?