Work is one the most time-consuming activities in our lives. If we take into account caring duties and housework, work easily takes up more than sixty hours of a person’s week. Even if one prefers a narrower understanding of work as one of gainful employment only, a third of our adult lives is spent on labour.Footnote ¹ What work entails and which activities are perceived as work varies. In the present day, it is usually assumed that if somebody mentions work, they mean wage labour.Footnote ² If it is not paid, it might very well be work, but it is not necessarily acknowledged as such.Footnote ³ Unpaid labour needs an extra attribute in order to signify work: care work or housework or, for German speakers, ‘Beziehungsarbeit’ (work on your relationship). ‘Work’ entails such diverse ‘activities’ as typing away at the office, standing behind a counter in a shop selling cheese, tending your vegetable plot ‘after work’ or being the person in the family who knows all the birthdays and organises the children’s sport and school activities.Footnote ⁴ Which activities qualify as work and which do not? What is it we actually do when we work? Who defines what is work and what is not? And what does work do? For/to us, for/to nature, for/to society? The German term ‘Arbeitsgesellschaft’ (labouring society) implies that work is the feature of modern societies, which structure their existence, legitimacy and resources around work.Footnote ⁵ Undoubtedly, work has an enormous impact on most people’s lives; it influences our bodies and minds, our self-fashioning and lifestyles.

Surprisingly, though, work is not particularly well researched.Footnote ⁶ Much of labour history has investigated issues relating to gainful employment, such as living conditions for workers, how they spent their leisure time, how workers were organised and what role labour played in people’s lives. The actual work process, how people survive doing the same movement for eight hours straight while officially working, has often been of less concern or left to sociological or anthropological studies.Footnote ⁷ It was the feminist discourse about care work from the 1970s that led some scholars to reconsider the concept of work, which had been tightly linked to histories of the (western or western-style) working class.Footnote ⁸ Recently, new global histories of work have added some more miles to the library shelves scrutinising the narrow concept of (wage) labour and arguing for a much broader understanding of work that includes care work and studies of less standardised working lives.Footnote ⁹ It has been these two schools that have fundamentally questioned western assumptions about work, the working class, workers’ freedom or unfreedom. However, we still lack a coherent concept of work.Footnote ¹⁰

Often it is a new approach, a fresh perspective that sheds light on hitherto underexplored bigger questions. The link between work and emotions is obvious for anybody who has ever worked; however, a systematic approach to emotions at work has so far not been undertaken.Footnote ¹¹ Historians of work and labour are only tentatively, if at all, open to such approaches even though terms like joy and frustration, self-realisation or despair are omnipresent in texts about work. In the four books under review, emotions are omnipresent, but it is only the volume edited by Agnes Arnold-Forster and Alison Moulds that explicitly sets out to map the field of labour history under the premises of a history of emotions approach. Their guiding questions are: what is the ‘complex relationship between feelings and work’ and what can we say about the ‘spectrum of emotions which underpin[s] different forms of work’ (p. 2)? The editors set out to fill a gap Claire Langhammer identified back in 2016 when she called for the use of emotions as a category of analysis within the history of work.Footnote ¹² Separated into three thematic sections, the thirteen contributions discuss ‘spaces of labour’, ‘professional and personal identities’ and ‘emotions, politics and power’. They cover a broad range of topics, geographies and times, and discuss mostly paid work in spheres as diverse as academia and healthcare, catering, the textile industry or libraries, thus slightly favouring sectors with an overwhelmingly female working population. The timespan ranges from the late nineteenth century to today, and in terms of geographies, Brazil and the Soviet Union are as much present as India or Argentina. The majority of contributions, however, focus on British history.

As always when it comes to emotions and work, the shadow of Arlie Hochschild’s concept of ‘emotional labour’ looms large, a term that has considerably narrowed the field of emotions and work since the mid-1980s and – as the editors of the volume imply – not necessarily to its advantage.Footnote ¹³ This management of feelings allegedly has hindered questions about how work elicits emotions in those who do the work (the above-mentioned ‘spectrum’). Since Hochschild’s findings on the management of feelings of flight attendants, it now seems to require some effort (if not work) to redefine emotions and labour/work without thinking about the smiles of stewardesses and other service sector workers, as well as the psychological toll such plastered smiles take. The claim of the edited volume is exactly that: to take it beyond the ‘foundational concept’ of emotional labour. Accordingly, the volume starts off by engaging closely with Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour, in which particular emotions are performed rather than felt.Footnote ¹⁴

In her chapter about ‘nippies’ (waitresses in a famous London chain of corner houses and teashops in the early twentieth century), Grace Whorall-Campbell shows that the age-old paradox of labour as either joy or burden does not get any less blurry simply because one takes emotions seriously. Whorall-Campbell demonstrates how much some nippies thrived at their job, which consisted to a large degree of smiling and deploying a cheerful demeanour while entertaining the male customers: tolerating their eyes, views and – often enough – hands. Although nippies had a very similar job as Hochschild’s stewardesses, the interpretation of the workers’ emotions is a distinctly different one. Reflecting on one nippie fondly remembering her job as late as 1990 at the age of 73, Whorall-Campbell argues that ‘adherence to emotional norms did not always lead to emotional suffering but rather could be reflected on with pride and satisfaction’ (p. 20). This might very well be the case. But what does such an attitude of pride and satisfaction fifty years later tell us about the work experience itself? What is it we gain from scrutinising emotions at work beyond saying: well, people felt different things?

Whorall-Campbell depicts the nippies’ work conditions as highly charged. ‘Courteous service’ was demanded and nippies were expected to ‘suppress or induce feelings’ for the sake of customers and their various whims (p. 22). She argues that the emotional labour requested from nippies was ‘naturalized through association with feminine qualities, such as patience’. She reminds the reader that nippies were extremely poorly paid despite the intensity of their labour (p. 23). In other words, nippies would have had a lot of reasons not to like their jobs. Whorall-Campbell, however, emphasises ‘the potential to reward workers with the promise of economic, social and emotional security in marriage’ when nippies managed to excel ‘at this performance of cheery and courteous femininity’ (p. 19). Furthermore, the author discusses successful emotional labour in waitressing as a means of social mobility and feminine agency. For Whorall-Campbell, pride and satisfaction about a job is not necessarily the result of having mastered taxing working conditions or difficult situations. In her interpretation, emotional labour does not necessarily have to mean alienation; the work itself retreats into the background while social status and upwards mobility are emphasised. Her contribution thus raises questions that every historian of emotions has encountered multiple times but not necessarily solved. Is it possible to take positive emotions about one’s work as a statement about the work itself? What can emotions add to our understanding of work and labour if we take them for granted? What can be achieved when using emotions as a category of historical analysis? And what could be achieved other than saying: well, some experience joy, others frustration.

So, what is it we gain?

Discussing the so-called living-in system of shop assistants in late nineteenth-century Britain, Alison Moulds shows how emotions changed notions of work, thus demonstrating what emotions do to work. Moulds manages to illustrate how emotions and their management influenced workers’ perceptions of work and their life beyond work. In the living-in system, shop assistants lived on the shop’s premises, often together with their employers. Having to control their behaviour beyond opening-hours, service workers effectively worked 24/7 since recreation, rest or simply non-performing under the employers’ eyes was impossible. Moulds shows how having to manage one’s emotions defined what was perceived as work.

What Moulds furthermore shows is that work elicits a range of emotions that do not neatly align. While Whorall-Campbell argues to some degree for a hierarchy of emotions (pride and satisfaction trumped others), Moulds’s chapter underscores the many competing emotions around work. Even though some former shop assistants nostalgically remembered their youth, Moulds does not question the precarious work and living conditions when stating that living-in meant both ‘struggles and rewards’ (p. 53). In her contribution, the emotional well-being of workers became a category of health and, around the time of the First World War, influenced emerging notions about what we now would call work–life balance. She employs emotions as a driver of change that ultimately led to a new understanding of work – one in which work and leisure were at least supposed to be distinct spheres.

In another contribution, those precarious boundaries of work and leisure or rather work and non-work are more than blurred. And again, it is emotions and feelings that delineate work and non-work. In her contribution on care workers in Argentina, Inés Peréz discusses housework and childcare done mostly by unpaid girls and women during the twentieth century. Many of her cases were teenage or younger girls who were sent to live with other families to help with housework and childcare. Often these girls stayed on for years or decades and were never paid. They never officially received a salary but rather were provided allowances or gifts (like a car for instance) from the families they worked for and lived with. These families, however, portrayed the relationship with their living-in underage workers as not an employment relationship but rather a family relationship, which is why they never paid the girls money. Once these girls asked for money, their de-facto employers thought them to be ungrateful and felt misused since they claimed that their relationship was one of mutual affection. The de-facto employers portrayed proper work relations as exempt from emotions and used the alleged affection they experienced for their living-in workers as an argument in later labour disputes. As Peréz summarises, ‘the social construction of work as a field that is free of emotions rests on a narrative that presents the increasing predominance of wage work’ as the result of personal ties being replaced by ‘impersonal, commercial ones’ (p. 127).

To be sure, the field of emotions and work is a fuzzy one, which all too often slips into stereotypes or generalises emotions to such an extent that it is no longer clear how emotions as a form of analysis could contribute to a better understanding of work and its experience. It is certainly true that we still do ‘know too little about feelings at work in past and present time’ (p. 255), as Claire Langhamer reemphasises in her afterword; however, the horizon of what we could gain remains cloudy after having read this foray into new territory.

While in Feelings and Work in Modern History, the approach was subject-centred and the question was which kinds of emotions are elicited in those who work, the approach in Nicolas Lelle’s two books on labour under National Socialism in Germany is one that scrutinises work as a means of state power and ultimately extinction. In the monograph Arbeit, Dienst und Führung, which is based on his dissertation in social theory, Lelle analyses the notion of German labour, a supposedly distinct (and ultimately deadly) concept of work that has a long trajectory from Martin Luther to today’s far right party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). According to this concept, Germans are good and relentless workers, even in such straitened circumstances as the defeat of 1945.Footnote ¹⁵ This concept of German labour reached its heights in the nineteenth century (Lelle dates it precisely from 1848 to 1871), and was later radicalised under National Socialism when work was reduced (or indeed elevated) to service to the German ethnic community (Volksgemeinschaft).Footnote ¹⁶ Lelle expands this idea of work as a service to the Volksgemeinschaft by looking at the continuities before 1933 and, importantly, after 1945. Through this lens, he asks how the ‘concept of work made National Socialism attractive and gave it promise’ (p. 16) and which of these attractions still ‘work’ today. In other words, Lelle has written an explicitly political book. Firstly, he pursues the explicit goal of deconstructing or demystifying fascist ideas about work in the hope that this might prevent them from becoming attractive again. Secondly, he does not hide his conviction that the concept of German labour is an especially deadly one that makes his first goal even more pressing. Finally, Lelle’s self-identification as a follower of critical theory further enhances the political nature of his book. He ends the book with a ‘critical theory on work’, which refers to the resurrection of a savoir vivre, of non-work as opposed to the notion of German labour, or ‘unrestrained activity’ to quote Adorno (fesselloses Tun), meaning an unbridled zeal for work.Footnote ¹⁷

His book has three parts. The first, ‘Serve!’, reconstructs the concept of German labour starting with the nineteenth century, where the author systematically analyses the National Socialist concept of work. In addition to texts from the nineteenth century (Riehl, Drexler or Feder), Lelle analyses Hitler’s speech ‘Why are we antisemites’ from 1920, which can be interpreted as the core text for the crucial link between a National Socialist concept of work and Nazism’s ensuing deadly eliminatory antisemitism.Footnote ¹⁸ In this speech, Hitler makes a clear distinction between a desirable, supposedly ‘Nordic’ work ethic in which everyone produces for the good of the collective, and an individualistic work ethic in which one works only for oneself and only when absolutely necessary. Those who ascribe to the latter (read Jews, black people, Sinti and Roma) would never be able to submit to or be integrated into a work ethic that works towards the common good. Therefore, this other had to be excluded forever.

What Lelle demonstrates throughout his book is the importance of labour and work as a, if not the, central category for ex – and thus inclusion. According to Hitler, it is work ethic that set ‘northern races’ apart from the others. However, at the same time it is work that integrates all members of a society into working for one common goal. Work (for Hitler and other right-wing thinkers) transcended class and formed the social body as one: the Volksgemeinschaft. It is here that the National Socialist idea of extinction through labour was born. In this first part, Lelle’s case studies (exhibitions, marches and the German Labour Front) demonstrate how the concept of German labour became the focus of fascist integration into the Volksgemeinschaft.

The second part of Lelle’s book analyses how such an understanding of work as service to the Volksgemeinschaft was transformed into practice. This section, entitled ‘Obey!’, hinges on two terms: allegiance and obedience. It asks how people were and are managed into submission through essentially activating their freedom and initiative. According to Lelle, it was not a clear-cut decision for the National Socialist leader to establish which worker indeed served the Volksgemeinschaft and which did not, something he calls the ‘National-Socialist transformation problem’ (p. 125). This was the moment when the attitude of the worker towards their work and, most importantly, the collective became important. It is the attitude that determined if somebody served, that is, worked adequately, not the quality or quantity of the work produced (commodity). The workers’ attitude towards their work and the collective was best monitored in the enterprise itself. According to Lelle, the work collective (Betriebsgemeinschaft) was the Volksgemeinschaft, albeit in smaller units. In theory, the work collective would not know class conflicts between capitalists and workers anymore (p. 157) since everybody was serving the Volksgemeinschaft together, meaning that everybody obeyed and led at the same time. The individual responsibility for one’s performance – the active and participating worker – was the ideal.

Lelle leaves no doubt that the National Socialist concept of labour was a modern one. As Stefan Link has recently demonstrated, Fordism was engrained into National Socialist production and work relations, a notion Lelle shares.Footnote ¹⁹ It is the Fordist model together with a peculiar idea of managing the workforce that makes the fascist concept compatible with neoliberal ideas of production and ‘the entrepreneurial self’.Footnote ²⁰ Lelle demonstrates this tradition by showcasing a military equipment producing factory declared a model plant in the early 1940s (Klöckner-Humboldt-Deutz-Werke) and how the factory activated and disciplined its workforce.Footnote ²¹ For Lelle, the key term in National Socialist concepts of labour was allegiance (Gefolgschaft).

The third part, entitled ‘Lead!’, discusses the continuities between the Nazi concept of labour and West Germany. According to Lelle it was a small step from work understood as a service to the Volksgemeinschaft to the notion of a shining future based on work and creation (Made in Germany). For him this fixation on work is even partly responsible for Germany’s sloppy and hesitant coming to terms with the past (p. 211). For Lelle, the continuities with the Nazi concept of labour are twofold. Firstly, continuity can be seen in the insistence on a particular quality of German labour (Made in Germany) as something that hard-working Germans were particularly good at. Secondly the celebrated West German model of social partnership (Sozialpartnerschaft), a cooperative and allegedly consensual relationship between employers and employees, was the de-nazified version of the harmonious work collective. Following Alf Lüdtke, Lelle contends that ‘service’ faded away but obedience and leadership lived on. The case study in this last part is the Bad Harzburg academy for executives, led by none other than Reinhard Höhn, an (in)famous Nazi jurist. Höhn’s model for management delegated responsibility to every worker, thus creating what in German is called the ‘Mita rbeiter’, a person who not only receives commands or tasks but also anticipates them and has their own realm of liberty and decision-making. This is certainly a model that seems omnipresent in post-Fordist times and not necessarily a privilege of German labour, but for Lelle it is not so much the singularity of German labour but its continuity and tradition that is of importance. At the height of the academy’s success in 1972, about a quarter of a million future managers had been trained at Bad Harzburg, among them managers from BMW, Thyssen, Aldi Nord and so on. While the worker in the Deutz-Werke of National Socialism was an ‘obedient self’, now the worker would be conceptualised as the ‘leading self’. Power and rule, obedience and allegiance are internalised; the worker is supposed to develop a relationship to his enterprise as if he were an entrepreneur himself.

In his ‘Arbeit macht frei’, a spin-off to Arbeit, Dienst und Führung and essay of just over 100 pages, Lelle scrutinises the Nationalist Socialist slogan of ‘Arbeit macht frei’ inscribed above the gates of the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Dachau and, of course, Auschwitz. Often, the slogan is understood as a cynical one, because no inmate in a concentration camp was set free by their labour. On the contrary, labour was used to degrade and eventually kill the prisoners. The slogan ‘Arbeit macht frei’ could only be read from outside the camps, when entering them. Contrary to most interpretations, Lelle argues that this slogan was not meant for the prisoners, but for the personnel working in the camps. It was the nurses, doctors, guards and overseers who were set free through their allegedly important labour – be it killing the camp inmates directly or slowly. The extinction of those people was an ultimate service to the German Volksgemeinschaft. Therefore, it was the people organising and executing the deadly National Socialist programme who were set free through their labour.

What Lelle demonstrates is the extent to which National Socialists radicalised modern ideas about labour and work into a programme of extinction and elimination. In this sense, Lelle adds to the growing literature that scrutinises continuities between democratic states and fascism.Footnote ²² As Lelle shows, the concept of German labour was not invented by the Nazis, nor did it vanish after 1945. Even though the concept of German labour had peculiarities, it shares a common trajectory with many other concepts of labour – be they neoliberal or socialist. Modern societies ground their existence in work (the above-mentioned labouring societies); this trait is shared by democratic states, fascist ones and certainly socialist ones, too. As much as there is a current trend to stress the commonalities within Fordist regimes, for instance, the many differences should not get lost. One such profound difference is that the National Socialists used labour as a tool for deadly exclusion, while Eastern European socialist regimes used it as a means for inclusion.Footnote ²³

Socialist enterprises were a, if not the, centre of social life, something that has been amply demonstrated for East Germany.Footnote ²⁴ Socialist enterprises offered a range of non-monetary benefits for their workers, from kindergartens, vacation vouchers and recreation centres to cheap hot lunches in the canteen. In her study on the car producing factory Automobilwerk Eisenach (AWE) entitled Von Wartburg zu Opel, Lindner-Elsner builds upon this existing research about the socialist welfare state in order to analyse the changing work environments and social inequalities during the existence of East Germany (and after).Footnote ²⁵ She grounds her meticulously researched company history on local and company newspapers, visual sources (photographs and posters), letters, interviews and archival files, the majority from the company archive itself.

The city of Eisenach was one of only two car-production sites in East Germany. The Wartburg passenger car was produced from 1955 until early 1991. One of the many merits of Lindner-Elsner’s almost 500-page-long study is to include the so-called transformation period after German reunification in 1990 and the accompanying quick dissolution of an enterprise that employed around 10,000 people in 1989 (p. 37).Footnote ²⁶ Lindner-Elsner divides her book into two unequally sized parts. The first, much longer part focuses on the period of East Germany, while the smaller second section offers a brief history of roughly three years after 1989. Each part begins with an economic history of the enterprise, followed by a chapter focusing on the enterprise as a social space and a third, usually much longer chapter on the many inequalities for those at the margins. The starting point for Lindner-Elsner’s chronological company study is the ‘union of social and economic policy’ in the 1970s (the so-called Einheit von Sozial- und Wirtschaftspolitik), which, according to Lindner-Elsner, led to ‘new forms of social inequality’ that ‘were established and reinforced by company social policies’ (p. 14).

Lindner-Elsner traces the social policies of the AWE and their effects on various groups on the ‘margins of society’ (women, pensioners, migrants, ex-convicts and prisoners) up until 1992. She argues that the socialist state, despite propagandistic emphasis on equality, created its very ‘own social differences and inequalities’ (p. 12). Benefits were separated from work performance and were instead based on social and societal status within the company, she maintains. When social institutions and services in the AWE collapsed more or less overnight in 1989, those who were affected were the same who already had been in a disadvantaged position under socialism: women, migrants and (ex-)convicts. Only a minority of those formerly employed found a job with Opel, which had had a joint-venture with AWE since the late 1980s and opened its own branch in Eisenach during and after the process of dismantling the AWE. This allows Lindner-Elsner to highlight the extent to which inequalities remained the same (with the notable exception for pensioners) across the alleged divide of 1989.

In analysing these many inequalities for women, migrant workers, pensioners and (ex-)convicts in East Germany, the male, able-bodied productive worker appears in Lindner-Elsner’s study as the reference point and winner both in East Germany and later unified Germany.Footnote ²⁷ Many women working at AWE suffered structural inequalities as mothers. They accumulated fewer years of work due to raising children and therefore lower pension entitlements; care work fell largely on their shoulders during the so-called second shift at home. In this regard, the fate of women under socialism does not differ too much from western German histories of a female workforce. Women in East Germany who managed to get a part-time job were lucky in terms of workload but had to make do with significantly lower wages and later pensions, as well as raised eyebrows, because the ideal of the working woman was the full-time working woman. Nevertheless, individual agreements at the enterprise level granted women a so-called household day for cleaning and access to certain gynaecological examinations during official working hours, and shopping during working hours was tolerated. This preferential treatment of women, in turn, brought men onto the scene who now felt disadvantaged themselves.Footnote ²⁸

Lindner-Elsner notes that this structural conflict (p. 167) privileged one group in order to equalise unequal conditions, thereby creating new inequalities. However, she refrains from discussing more theoretically how positive discrimination interfered with or in fact adhered to the political goal of equality. If equality is an explicit political goal (and it certainly was in East Germany, as Lindner-Elsner repeatedly stresses), would not the appropriate question be: how much inequality is needed in order to gain equality and vice versa? Moreover, much of the inequality as understood by Lindner-Elsner was explicitly affirmed by the East German state as ‘fair’ treatment, such as the preferable treatment of productive workers as opposed to allegedly non-productive workers. According to socialist labour theory, productive workers added more to the (value-)cake, which is why they received more. Women, who made up a third of the factory’s workforce but overwhelmingly worked in non-productive sectors, therefore faced a substantial wage gap (women earned up to 30 per cent less than men). For the East German state much of this was equal treatment, while Lindner-Elsner discusses these policies as unequal.

In discussing the obvious discrimination of Cuban and Mozambiquan workers at the AWE (living in dormitories with a curfew; prohibition of women falling pregnant; an inability to leave their jobs without forfeiting their right to live in East Germany), Lindner-Elsner mentions the preferential treatment of the Cuban workers in East Germany, who suffered less virulent racism than the Mozambiquans. This inequality between the two migrant groups was even reflected in pogroms against the Mozambiquans in Eisenach on the night of the reunification on 3 October 1990. The precariousness of the concept of equality – which is never really deconstructed by Lindner-Elsner – appears especially stark in this chapter. Clearly, the two migrant groups were treated differently along racist lines and political preferences. As soon as East Germany ended and the newly unified Germany and its migration regime appeared, these migrant workers were indeed treated equally. This meant, however, that both groups lost their right to stay in the new Germany since their residence permit depended on their jobs at the AWE, jobs they had lost after 1989. Finally, they were equal – in being rejected. This shows how equality played out in various ways, something that is not directly addressed in Lindner-Elsner’s book. For Lindner-Elsner, equality is a goal and inequality a problem.

Lindner-Elsner delivers both a vivid and devastating portrait of the AWE and the city of Eisenach when, for instance, a worker who lost his job shouted at a meeting on the last day of the AWE: ‘My wife is unemployed, I am unemployed now. What is gonna happen to our children? I can hang myself on a rope now. Everybody up there has feathered their nest, but not me’ (p. 329). Lindner-Elsner explains the positive view many workers held about East Germany ‘because in retrospect the social security system of the GDR was perceived as positive or better’ (p. 345). What Lindner-Elsner does not elaborate on are the fundamentally different concepts of equality in East Germany (which was an unequal society) and the concept of equality in West Germany, which was unequal in a different way. Workers and directors of East Germany had a decidedly different perspective on equality than the new managers and supervisors. When it became clear that a lot of people had to be made redundant in 1990, the East German director of the AWE, Wolfram Liedtke, let go of those who had a higher chance of finding a new job first while keeping on those who would have struggled on the new job market. His social policy undermined the new capitalist calculation, which would have kept the effective and well-educated workers rather than those with little hope of finding another job.

What all these books under review certainly demonstrate is that we only cursorily grasp the many meanings of work. With the exception of Lelle, work remains reduced to gainful employment only; activity beyond official work time is rarely conceptualised as work. Often research about work looks at individual dimensions of work: work as a means of state power or work and emotions. However, what might be needed is to discuss work more broadly as an instrument of power, as an economic category, as an experienced social reality and as something that influences and shapes subjectivities (emotions!), no matter which modern society we look at.

With the prospect of artificial intelligence doing the work that used to be the precarious privilege of human beings, the end of the labouring society appears to be approaching. Yet rather than celebrating the end of work, a void seems to be opening up. As Hannah Arendt famously noted already in the 1950s:

While Arendt wrote about the active side of work and ignored economic necessity, the potential end of labour is frightening only as long as modern citizens and workers depend on money, and the commonly accepted way for earning money remains to be gainfully employed. Usually, gainful employment is more drudgery than fun, but the prospect of losing it is indeed no fun in capitalist societies. As we face some of the greatest changes to the labour market in living memory, it would certainly help to know what ‘we’ lose exactly.