What is Work for? The Right to Work and the Right to be Idle

Abstract

While working on this paper I remembered that in the late 1970s an elderly neighbour gave me a pamphlet with the title, The Right to be Idle (La Fargue, 1937) which she explained had sustained her throughout her working life in the textile mills of West Yorkshire. The arguments in it are relevant to much of my chapter, providing a salutary reminder that work and idleness are both part of life. ‘What is Work for?’ is not a question that is often asked, possibly because the answer seems so obvious. It is to make life possible, to produce things to eat, to wear, to provide shelter, to sustain not only ourselves, but those too young, too old or too ill or disabled to provide for themselves. Human beings have devised divisions of labour with the aim of fulfilling these needs. In some societies these divisions are relatively simple, between men and women and between age groups, for instance, while in others they are extremely complex, encompassing age and gender, but also between classes and ethnic groups with fine gradations within them. Theories of divisions of labour seek to explain not just what work is done by whom, but the kind and degree of social integration this produces.