The Progressive Work Ethic for Labour: An Interview with Elizabeth Anderson

What vision of work should animate the progressive left? The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has made landmark arguments about equality, democracy, and the nature of work. In December 2025, she spoke to Steven Klein about the history of the work ethic, how it has been abused to discipline workers, and how a positive vision of work could inform progressive politics today. 

Steven Klein (SK): In your earlier work, you made important contributions to debates about moral theory, value theory, and equality. More recently, you have turned your focus to work – both how work and the workplace is organised, and, in your most recent book Hijacked, the meaning and value of work.¹ How did you become interested in thinking and writing about work? And do you see some throughlines from your earlier arguments? 

Elizabeth Anderson (EA): I got interested in the philosophy of work when I was an undergraduate. I arrived at college as a right-libertarian idealogue. Reading Marx and studying the nature of work under capitalism in the late 70s—a decade marked by serious worker discontent—changed my mind. Libertarian, laissez-faire capitalism had no answer to the criticisms radical political economists were making of the capitalist workplace in that era. I never became a Marxist because I rejected too many foundational premises of orthodox Marxist theory. But problems with the commodification of labour stayed on my mind in graduate school, where I started formulating a non-Marxist critique of commodification of all kinds of things. This critique became the foundation for my early articles and first book, Value in Ethics and Economics.²

There is a deep continuity throughout my work, which comes in part from my engagement with classical political economists (not only Marx but Smith, the Mills, and others). They took for granted that economic systems should be evaluated not simply on the basis of the goods and services they produce, but on the basis of the quality of the social relationships within which we produce, distribute, and consume those goods and services. How well or poorly do we treat one another while participating in these activities? Do our institutional arrangements more generally place people into unjust or otherwise pathological relationships to each other? 

My focus on the ethical qualities of our social relationships—rather than what we ‘get’ from them, as if our relations with others were merely instrumental, rather than the very substance of ethical and flourishing living—lies at the core of nearly everything I have written in moral and political philosophy. This is manifest in ‘What is the Point of Equality?’, where I argue that egalitarianism is more fundamentally a quest for social relations of equality than an equal distribution of goods.³ The Imperative of Integration developed that idea by critically examining the unjust and pathological social relationships inherent in US racial segregation. I showed how practices of racial segregation produce not just distributive inequality, but racial stigmatisation, subordination, and neglect; they undermine democratic social relations more generally. My last two books, Private Government and Hijacked, bring the circle back to focusing on the social relationships established in the organisation of work.⁴

SK: In Hijacked, you argue that there is an egalitarian and progressive version of the Protestant work ethic, one that has been missed in the focus on the idea of work as ascetic self-denial.  What is the progressive work ethic and why do you think it can provide valuable guidance today?

EA: In Hijacked, I argue that the seventeenth-century Puritan theologians who invented the work ethic held ambivalent attitudes toward work. On the one hand, work amounted to an ascetic discipline that prevented sin—laziness, sexual licentiousness, extravagance, envy—by focusing people’s minds and bodies on performing relentless work. On the other hand, conscientious work was a sacred activity, more important in God’s eyes than monkish prayer and ritual. In condemning idleness, these Puritans targeted not only able-bodied beggars but the idle and predatory rich. They argued that workers were entitled to freedom of occupational choice, living wages, and healthful working conditions. They condemned all business models based on the extraction of wealth at the expense of others. They especially condemned what they called ‘oppression’ – business models based on the tyrannical abuse of employees or the exploitation of lower-ranking or desperate people. 

During the Industrial Revolution, some political economists and radical workers developed the ethic of sacralising work into what I call the ‘progressive’ or proworker work ethic. The progressive work ethic called for high and rising wages and the emancipation of workers through universal free education, social insurance, labour unions, and expanded opportunities for individual and collective self-employment. It also advanced an ideal of leisure through limits on the length of the working day, paid vacations, and family leave. It developed the egalitarian strands of the work ethic into twentieth-century social democracy. 

We have forgotten that social democracy originated in this progressive side of the work ethic. Hijacked recovers these origins with the aim of expanding the ethical horizons of public policy and economic theory beyond its narrow focus on consumption opportunities, wealth accumulation, and redistribution. We need to critically examine economic arrangements that undermine democracy, promote predatory social relationships, and spread social distrust. In line with the progressive classical political economists, I argue that we need to expand our visions to encompass an agenda of meaningful work, workers’ emancipation, and progressive business models. And we must reimagine how democratic social relations can be revived in the twenty-first century.

SK: Another major argument you make in the book is that a variety of conservative thinkers, going back to the eighteenth century, have hijacked the rhetoric of the work ethic. What is this conservative work ethic? And to what extent do you think social democratic parties have unwittingly adopted the conservative work ethic?

EA: What I call the ‘conservative’ work ethic evolved from the ascetic side of the Puritans’ ambivalent attitudes toward work. During the Industrial Revolution, some classical political economists developed this side of the work ethic in ways that rationalised the emerging capitalist class system. Where the progressive work ethic relaxed the Puritan ban on leisure and play, the conservative work ethic relaxed the Puritan ban on luxury – but only for the middle and upper classes. 

Other conservative deviations from the original work ethic largely suspended the duties it had put on the rich to treat workers and the poor decently. Advocates of the conservative work ethic attacked the English Poor Laws, which provided cash relief payments in local parishes. The most prominent critic, Thomas Robert Malthus, argued that the Poor Laws led workers to quit work, waste their money on alcohol, have more children than they could support, and abandon their families. Abolish the Poor Laws, and ‘the market’ would force poor workers, on pain of starvation, to avoid these vices. ‘The market’ could achieve this by driving poor workers into subjection to their capitalist employers within the panoptic tyranny of the factory system. This outcome was predicated on the prior dispossession of workers due to enclosures and other measures that stripped them of opportunities for self-employment. The conservative work ethic promoted policies favouring capital interests over labour and licensed predatory business models. It ultimately led to what we call neoliberalism today.

Progressive political economists never managed to completely shake off the Puritans’ ambivalent attitudes toward workers in the original work ethic. Many were influenced by Malthus’s critique of the Poor Laws. Ideas of historical progress, in which societies had to become capitalist before adopting socialism, led many progressives to endorse European imperialism. All the social democracies have promoted high labour force participation rates to generate the taxes needed to support their policies. The German socialist intellectual Eduard Bernstein, who laid the foundations of social-democratic theory, argued that social democrats could not abandon the Manchester School principle of personal economic responsibility. Such ideas underwrote Germany’s Hartz reforms in the early 2000s, which precaritised work to reduce unemployment, as well as President Clinton’s 1996 welfare-to-workfare reform. 

SK: I want to ask you about markets. In my view, your work has always tried to synthesise the best of market liberalism and social democracy. Right now, in both the UK and the US, there is an ongoing debate about how the left should embrace markets in areas like housing. How do you think the left should approach markets? And what do you think of arguments that criticise labour markets as inherently troubling for how they commodify labour? EA: I have put ‘the market’ in scare quotes to warn readers against reifying markets, against assuming they have some essence that inherently leads to particular results. Modern, large-scale markets are the result of extensive social engineering and could not exist without a complex legal infrastructure encompassing other institutions such as property, contracts, labour law, tax law, environmental law, and so forth. All of these can be designed to lead markets to generate better outcomes for workers and society more generally. In Private Government, I argued that the capitalist subjection of workers to their employers’ unaccountable power was not due to ‘the market’ as such, but to a complex of corporate law and labour law that should be redesigned to emancipate workers and ensure that they have a voice within the firm. Well-designed markets serve many useful functions and should not be abandoned by the left. That is a core lesson we must draw from the failures of comprehensively centrally planned economies. We need labour markets to ensure individual freedom of occupational choice consistent with the satisfaction of everyone’s needs and interests as consumers. 

I regard Adam Smith as the hero of Hijacked because he was the central progressive work ethic economist who neither attacked the Poor Laws nor supported imperialism. He argued that markets could produce vastly better results for the great majority if they were joined with a radically revised system of private property and free, publicly funded education. Smith and other progressive political economists such as James and John Stuart Mill advocated radical property reforms. Smith wanted to abolish slavery, private colonies (such as the East India Company), chartered monopolies, most joint-stock corporations, and the inheritance laws that supported dynastic wealth. 

Regarding housing, economists rightly argue that increasing the supply of housing will reduce rents! Private developers can play an important role here. Rolling back land-use regulations would encourage them to build. Yet we should also recognise the vital functions of social housing. Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ policy led to the UK’s current housing crisis by permanently reducing the supply of social housing. Social housing construction should be funded by increased taxes on capital income and wealth. 

SK: There are a variety of people on the left, such as advocates of UBI and other ‘post-work’ policies, who argue that the work ethic privileges certain types of people – for example, those who are able-bodied and so can participate in paid work. What do you make of these concerns?

EA: I show in Hijacked that progressive work ethic theorists advocated universal comprehensive social insurance, which includes ample provision for the disabled. We also need to design our social infrastructure to fully include the disabled in all domains they need to have flourishing lives. One of those domains is work. Having real opportunities to contribute to the flourishing of others and to community at large are important for meaningful lives. So we must redesign work and work technologies to include more people with disabilities.

I don’t think UBI can substitute for social inclusion, including at work. UBI utopians tend to identify work solely with how it is organised under neoliberalism – stigmatised drudgery for the poor; bullshit jobs that exploit others for the better-off. But in exclusively advocating a UBI exit option from such work, they neglect the importance of redesigning work so that it meaningfully contributes to others’ flourishing while also enhancing the lives of workers themselves in pay, social recognition, and decent working conditions. 

Meaningful work should not be confused with wage labour or paid work. As the Puritan work ethic advocates recognised, raising one’s children and caring for other family dependents constitutes socially necessary work even if it is unpaid. At the same time, there is a strong case to be made on feminist and progressive grounds that such work should be paid.

Tech bros such as Bill Gates claim that 95 per cent of all jobs will be replaced by AI. I do not welcome this development. For one, there is no reason to believe that AI will do a better job providing goods and services. I discuss in Hijacked how neoliberal business models manage to extract vast profits by enshittifying the goods and services companies sell while exploiting workers, suppliers, vendors, and communities. AI as the tech bros hype it is no different. Once 95 per cent of workers are unemployed and put on UBIs, what will be left for them to do? The tech bros look forward to perfecting their addictive social media platforms and AI chatbots; their goal is to replace real human relationships with fake ‘friends’ and ‘therapists’ that make money for them. This is even more socially destructive than drug-dealing. It contributes to massive loneliness, social alienation, distrust, political polarisation, fascist politics, and the death of democracy. SK:What do you make of the UK Labour government so far? What do you think they have gotten right? Where do you think they have gone wrong?

EA: I am massively disappointed in UK Labour. Starmer was elected with a huge majority by an electorate eager for positive change. But he has offered no larger vision and has settled for tiny incremental advances that will disappoint most voters. He has succumbed to the plutocratic orthodoxy that there is ‘no money’ for ambitious initiatives on housing, green energy, and rebuilding state capacity. Well, there would be money if taxes were more progressive and targeted wealth, not just income. There would be money if Tony Blair had not earlier hooked Labour on the fraud of outsourcing public services to for-profit corporations! In 

Hijacked, I explain why this idea seemed like a good idea during the Industrial Revolution, before a professional civil service was created, and why it was a bad idea once the civil service was professionalised. In reality—as can be observed by looking at how badly for-profit health care serves patients in the US—for-profit services are often of lower quality and cost much more than public provision. The same point applies to education, public transport, and many other services that the state (or in some cases, non-profits) should provide.

Perhaps the latest tax bill will help Labour raise its ambition. And Starmer’s belated defence of immigrants helps against the waves of bigoted and nihilistic rhetoric coming from Reform. I worry, however, that the fatal compromises Labour made with neoliberalism under Blair—like the compromises the US Democratic party made under Clinton—have permanently crimped its vision. 

SK: How do you think a progressive vision of work and the work ethic could provide guidance for a renewed social democratic politics?

EA: Social democrats desperately need to develop inspirational visions to meet twenty-first-century challenges. We have not come to terms with the post-industrial, service-based information economy. Under neoliberalism, this economy has generated precarious drudge work, bullshit jobs, and democratic backsliding. Social democrats can do much better by recalling the Puritan ideal of meaningful work as it was developed by progressive classical political economists. In this ideal, workers advance the real needs of others and society at large by autonomously exercising admirable skills that are honoured by others, not least through decent pay. Visionaries such as Hilary Cottam and Dart Lindsley have been redesigning work along these lines.⁵

Social democratic political economists stressed the importance of building egalitarian, co-operative, and democratic social relationships to replace the hierarchical, class-antagonistic social relations of capitalism. They rightly saw that building democracy at work is critical for promoting democracy at the state level. Academic activists such as Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda are envisioning how to do this in the twenty-first century.⁶

Social democrats also need to address such current challenges as climate change, geographic inequality, and the crisis of care work. Political economist Fred Block has dramatically re-imagined domestic economic arrangements, particularly in finance and industrial organisation, in response to these problems.⁷ Thomas Piketty has been re-imagining social democracy on a global scale in Capital & Ideology and later works.⁸

So, fresh social democratic visions are already being developed. All such proposals need to be democratically debated and experimentally tested and refined. It’s high time for social democratic politicians to raise their sights and try some out. Voters are eager for something more than a marginally better future. They could get one, too, if UK Labour is bold. We should not forget that William Beveridge released his extraordinary plan for a social democratic welfare state in 1942, when the very survival of the UK as a free and democratic state was still in question. Surely UK Labour can do at least as well under less adverse circumstances.

Elizabeth Anderson is John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her most recent book is Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take it Back (2023).

Steven Klein is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London. His book Union: The Global History of a Movement, is forthcoming with Allen Lane.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Anderson, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can take it Back, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
2. Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, Harvard University Press, 1995.
3. Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the Point of Equality?”, Vol 109, No 2, 1999, pp287-337.
4. Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Princeton University Press, 2017; Anderson, Hijacked.
5. Hilary Cottam, Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State, Virago, 2019; Dart Lindsley, Work for Humans Podcast, dartlindsley.com/work-for-humans-podcast/.
6. Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda, Democratize Work: The Case for Reorganizing the Economy, University of Chicago Press, 2022.
7. Fred Block, The Habitation Society, Agenda Publishing, 2025.
8. Thomas Piketty, Capital & Ideology, Harvard University Press, 2020.