Work (human activity)
Work or labor refers to the intentional activities individuals engage in to meet their own needs, as well as those of others or organizations. In economics, work is understood as human labor that, alongside other factors of production, contributes to the creation of goods and services within an economy. Work or labor is a service in standard economic theory.
Work has existed in all human societies, whether as paid or unpaid work, from gathering natural resources by hand in hunter-gatherer groups to operating complex technologies that substitute for physical or even mental effort within an agricultural, industrial, or post-industrial society. One's regular participation or role in work is an occupation, or job. All but the simplest tasks in any work require specific skills, tools, and other resources, such as material for manufacturing goods. Humanity has developed a variety of institutions for group coordination of work, such as government programs, nonprofit organizations, cooperatives, and corporations.
Cultures and individuals across history have expressed a wide range of attitudes towards work. Besides objective differences, one culture may organize or attach social status to work roles through formalized professions which may carry specialized job titles and provide people with a career. Throughout history, work has been intimately connected with other aspects of society and politics, such as power, class, tradition, rights, and privileges. Accordingly, the division of labour is a prominent topic across the social sciences as both an abstract concept and a characteristic of individual cultures. Work may also present a threat to individual human happiness and survival, either through dirty, dangerous, and demeaning occupations or in extreme cases, from death by overwork.
Some people have also engaged in critique of work and expressed a wish to reduce or abolish it entirely, for example in Paul Lafargue in his book The Right to Be Lazy, David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, or The Abolition of Work by Bob Black. Real world programs to eliminate the economic necessity for lifelong work first emerged through the concept of retirement, and have more recently been extended to all adults through experimentation with universal basic income.
Description
Work can take many different forms, as varied as the environments, tools, skills, goals, and institutions around a worker. This term refers to the general activity of performing tasks, whether they are paid or unpaid, formal or informal. Work encompasses all types of productive activities, including employment, household chores, volunteering, and creative pursuits. It is a broad term that encompasses any effort or activity directed towards achieving a particular goal.Because sustained effort is a necessary part of many human activities, what qualifies as work is often a matter of context. Specialization is one common feature that distinguishes work from other activities. For example, a sport is a job for a professional athlete who earns their livelihood from it, but a hobby for someone playing for fun in their community. An element of advance planning or expectation is also common, such as when a paramedic provides medical care while on duty and fully equipped rather than performing first aid off-duty as a bystander in an emergency. Self-care and basic habits like personal grooming are also not typically considered work.
While a later gift, trade, or payment may retroactively affirm an activity as productive, this can exclude work like volunteering or activities within a family setting, like parenting or housekeeping. In some cases, the distinction between work and other activities is simply a matter of common sense within a community. However, an alternative view is that labeling any activity as work is somewhat subjective, as Mark Twain expressed in the "whitewashed fence" scene of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
History
Humans have varied their work habits and attitudes over time. As humans are diurnal, they work mainly during the day, but some occupations require night shift work. Hunter-gatherer societies vary their "work" intensity according to the seasonal availability of plants and the periodic migration of prey animals. The development of agriculture led to more sustained work practices, but work still changed with the seasons, with intense sustained effort during harvests alternating with less focused periods such as winters. In the early modern era, Protestantism and proto-capitalism emphasized the moral and personal advantages of hard work.The periodic re-invention of slavery encouraged more consistent work activity in the working class, and capitalist industrialization intensified demands on workers to keep up with the pace of machines. Restrictions on the hours of work and the ages of workers followed, with worker demands for time off increasing, but modern office work retains traces of expectations of sustained, concentrated work, even in affluent societies.
Forms of work take on changes over time in response to technological and societal changes. According to a 2024 study, the majority of current employment in the United States was in occupations that had been introduced since 1940.
Kinds of work
There are several ways to categorize and compare different kinds of work. In economics, one popular approach is the three-sector model or variations of it. In this view, an economy can be separated into three broad categories:- Primary sector, which extracts food, raw materials, and other resources from the environment
- Secondary sector, which manufactures physical products, refines materials, and provides utilities
- Tertiary sector, which provides services and helps administer the economy
Another common way of contrasting work roles is ranking them according to a criterion, such as the amount of skill, experience, or seniority associated with a role. The progression from apprentice through journeyman to master craftsman in the skilled trades is one example with a long history and analogs in many cultures.
Societies also commonly rank different work roles by perceived status, but such ranking is subjective and goes beyond clear progressions within a single industry. Some industries may be seen as more prestigious than others overall, even if they include roles with similar functions. At the same time, a wide swathe of roles across all industries may be afforded more status or less based on characteristics such as a job being high-paid or dirty, dangerous and demeaning.
Other social dynamics, like how labor is compensated, can even exclude meaningful tasks from a society's conception of work. For example, in modern market-economies where wage labour or piece work predominates, unpaid work may be omitted from economic analysis or even cultural ideas of what qualifies as work.
At a political level, different roles can fall under separate institutions where workers have qualitatively different power or rights. At one extreme, the least powerful members of society may be stigmatized or even violently forced into performing the least desirable work. At the other extreme, elites may have exclusive access to the most prestigious work, largely symbolic sinecures, or even a "life of leisure".
Workers
Individual workers require sufficient health and resources to succeed in their tasks.Physiology
As living beings, humans require a baseline of good health, nutrition, rest, and other physical needs in order to reliably exert themselves. This is particularly true of physical labour that places direct demands on the body, but even largely mental work can cause stress from problems like long hours, excessive demands, or a hostile workplace.Particularly intense forms of manual labour often lead workers to develop physical strength necessary for their job. However, this activity does not necessarily improve a worker's overall physical fitness like exercise, due to problems like overwork or a small set of repetitive motions. In these physical jobs, maintaining good posture or movements with proper technique is also a crucial skill for avoiding injury. Ironically, white-collar workers who are sedentary throughout the workday may also suffer from long-term health issues due to a lack of physical activity.
Training
the necessary skills for work is often a complex process in its own right, requiring intentional training. In traditional societies, know-how for different tasks can be passed to each new generation through oral tradition and working under adult guidance. For work that is more specialized and technically complex, however, a more formal system of education is usually necessary. A complete curriculum ensures that a worker in training has some exposure to all major aspects of their specialty, in both theory and practice.Equipment and technology
Tool use has been a central aspect of human evolution and is also an essential feature of work. Even in technologically advanced societies, many workers' toolsets still include a number of smaller hand-tools, designed to be held and operated by a single person, often without supplementary power. This is especially true when tasks can be handled by one or a few workers, do not require significant physical power, and are somewhat self-paced, like in many services or handicraft manufacturing.For other tasks needing large amounts of power, such as in the construction industry, or involving a highly-repetitive set of simple actions, like in mass manufacturing, complex machines can carry out much of the effort. The workers present will focus on more complex tasks, operating controls, or performing maintenance. Over several millennia, invention, scientific discovery, and engineering principles have allowed humans to proceed from creating simple machines that merely redirect or amplify force, through engines for harnessing supplementary power sources, to today's complex, regulated systems that automate many steps within a work process.
In the 20th century, the development of electronics and new mathematical insights led to the creation and widespread adoption of fast, general-purpose computers. Just as mechanization can substitute for the physical labour of many human beings, computers allow for the partial automation of mental work previously carried out by human workers, such as calculations, document transcription, and basic customer service requests. Research and development of related technologies like machine learning and robotics continues into the 21st century.
Beyond tools and machines used to actively perform tasks, workers benefit when other passive elements of their work and environment are designed properly. This includes everything from personal items like workwear and safety gear to features of the workspace itself like furniture, lighting, air quality, and even the underlying architecture.