In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a simmering discontent with the quality of work suddenly bubbled to the surface. Millions of people left their jobs in what became known as the Great Resignation – a trend that, although it has eased, continues to influence labour markets to this day. Long before the pandemic, researchers were already warning of a steady increase in low-quality jobs in the United States, but now the workers seemed to have reached a breaking point. For many, the pandemic had made already difficult jobs unbearable. The risk of exposure to a potentially deadly virus was particularly high in frontline roles, while employers often showed little willingness to take adequate protective measures. What looked like a mass withdrawal, however, has been redefined by Robert Bruno, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, as the Great Refusal. It was not that people no longer wanted to work. They just did not want to work under such degrading conditions.
In What Work Is, Robert Bruno argues that there is a crisis in the quality of work. This is not just because capitalism leaves workers vulnerable to exploitation, reduces them to commodities, and alienates them from the product, the process, and even their own nature. While Bruno continuously acknowledges this inherent feature of capitalism, he emphasizes that work can be a site of creativity and agency too – a place where things get done. Work has always been hard in capitalist society, throughout the twentieth century and beyond. For many, it has primarily been a means of survival, marked by pain, exhaustion, joy, life, and death. Yet, it is precisely within the tension between alienation and fulfilment – an inherent feature of capitalist production – that the quality of work has deteriorated.
Bruno has experienced this development at close hand. For more than thirty years, he has been teaching as an academic labour educator, working with a diverse group of employees as part of a training programme in labour relations. Over the years, he has taught people from all kinds of sectors: healthcare, education, services, industry. What united them was that they all worked in unionized workplaces. A recurring element in his courses was the assignment to write a six-word “essay”, starting with the words “Work is …”. It was thanks to these short reflections that Bruno began to understand the deep, complex relationship that people feel towards work. Work, as these essays made clear, is not just something people do – it is a place where the world itself is made. They did not do what Bruno calls “glamorous work”, but most spoke with modest pride about how their work was important to the communities in which they lived.
Throughout the book, Bruno explores five ways his students found meaning in their work – an approach somewhat reminiscent of Aristotelian virtue ethics. For them, good work was defined not in abstract terms but through lived experience: time such as that bought by self-sacrificing labour; the space of work and their relationship to it; the tangible impact of the work; the purpose of their labour; and the subject of the work itself – who you work for and who you work with. The book does not unfold as a clear, linear argument. Rather, it moves in a constant back-and-forth between the reflections of his students, his own observations on the meaning of work, and the objective data on labour conditions in the United States. At times, the book is deeply grounded in the American context, reminding readers of the country’s uniquely harsh labour conditions: the absence of federal paid leave, the lack of any protection against dismissal in non-unionized jobs, and the extreme difficulty workers face in negotiating even minimal unpaid time off, as seen in recent railroad strikes. While Bruno is fully aware of the exceptional nature of these American realities, his insights resonate far beyond the US, tapping into the broader, global decline in the quality of work.
Yet, the most valuable parts of the book are those where the positive dimensions of work take centre stage – moments that invite other researchers to truly place work at the heart of their analysis, not as an abstract relationship expressed through wages or working conditions, but as the concrete, everyday practices of workers and their labour. Take, for example, Bruno’s reflections on the place of work. Legally, no worker in his class owned the space where they worked, but many spoke as if they did. This sense of ownership stemmed from the skills they applied there, the ways in which they shaped the environment by allowing their skills to flourish in it. By making the place productive, they got the feeling that it was theirs in some way. From that perspective, it is no surprise that nothing frustrated them more than a workplace marked by the absence of the right tools and equipment.
Everyone described themselves as skilled in their work, exposing the constructed nature of how society ranks certain skills above others. These hierarchies are, ultimately, ideological choices – distinctions that hold little relevance to the workers themselves as they perform their tasks. It is this combination of ownership, skill, and place that leads Bruno to argue that: “Instead of relying on abstract metrics to determine a scale of job worthiness, all workspaces should be appreciated and treated as locations that enable workers to learn how to make things, serve others, problem-solve, construct relationships, and acquire new talents” (p. 60).
What, then, makes work good? When Bruno asked his students what they wanted from their work, four themes emerged (p. 101). Beyond recognition and appreciation of their skills, they wanted authorship and control over what they did to earn a living. They wanted work that held them accountable to the people around them. And they wanted work that was relational – something they did not just for others but with others.
But, somewhere along the way, something broke. The gap widened between how workers believed work should be and the reality of how it actually was. It is difficult to pinpoint a single cause. The pandemic certainly triggered and exposed much of this rupture, but the decline in quality had already been unfolding across every dimension: ownership of the job, fulfilment, the valuation of skills – all showed clear signs of erosion. Instead of work being something that enables life, for many, work has become actively harmful to their health. Beyond the daily injuries – the cuts and bruises that come with physical labour – new risks have emerged. Nurses, for instance, increasingly face violence from patients. And to cope, many workers turn to painkillers, drugs, alcohol, or even opioids, as their bodies and minds struggle under the weight of their jobs. The scale of neglect is staggering. According to one report, it would take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) an estimated 165 years to inspect every workplace in the United States just once. With oversight so thin, employers face little incentive to maintain safe conditions. The result is predictable: unsafe workplaces, physical exhaustion, mental burnout, and an ever-deepening sense that work no longer sustains life, it depletes it.
In the wake of the pandemic, much was said about “the future of work”. But, as Bruno reminds us, very little of that conversation was actually about the work that workers do. The focus remained on abstract questions: Will there be enough jobs? What sectors will survive? What new forms of employment will emerge? Rarely did anyone ask how workers themselves experience the work they are required to do. And that, perhaps, is the book’s most urgent message: we must shift our attention from the future of work to the future of workers. The two are not the same. To imagine better futures, Bruno argues, we cannot settle for merely ensuring the existence of jobs – we must ask what kind of work these jobs entail, how they are organized, what they demand from the people doing them, and what they give back in return. Work and life should not be seen as opposing forces to balance or trade off against one another. They are inseparable. When work is diminished, life is diminished. When work is good, life can flourish.
Fittingly, Bruno closes his book not with a statement by Marx, which is what one might have expected, but with one by Adam Smith, who once observed: “Keep wages high and profits low. The rate of profit is always highest in countries that are fastest going to ruin.” It is a reminder that the well-being of workers is not a secondary concern – it is the foundation on which any sustainable society rests.
