There is a multitude of reasons why people work, but certainly one of the most important ones is that especially in Western nations, we need money in order to procure the things that are necessary to live, such as shelter, education, healthcare, food, and sundry other items. That is to say, we work because if we don’t work we won’t have what we need to live a reasonably satisfactory life.
It would be one thing, if work, consisted of a workweek of a guaranteed forty hours, which was thus part and parcel of our nation, but what we find is that not only are jobs seldom guaranteed in duration, unless they have been written into a contract or labor agreement, but obtaining forty hours in a workweek, is typically not guaranteed, either. This means that very few of us can count as an absolute certainty, that we will work as many hours as we desire to work while having a guarantee that our job will always be there for us, and further to the point, make enough money from our work to live a decent life.
The very first thing any job should provide to us in this modern-age world is enough income that people could live a decent life, and when that seemingly isn’t certain, within those nations, that have an abundance of money and prosperity, then something is wrong with the system and needs to be fixed. No doubt, it is a two-way street in which people just can’t assume that showing up for work, is good enough to be paid, but it does mean that workers who are contributing their fair amount to the company that employs them, should be compensated at a fair and living wage.
Additionally, there is the nature of work itself, of which, not every job is going to be the type of job, that little kids imagined themselves that they would obtain when they were growing up. This thus indicates that within the jobs that we perform, there should be a recognition that the people performing these jobs are human beings, and therefore any job, in which a human being is essentially treated as a cog in a machine, is going to after some period of time, have a tendency to dehumanize that worker, which is why those types of jobs, should have a high rotation rate so that in the end, workers are treated overall as human beings of value, rather than seen as nothing much more than an instrument to get work done.
Ideally, a job should provide to its workers some degree of autonomy, of which, their participation provides an opportunity for them to not only take responsibility for the work that they help to produce but also provide that worker with some degree of satisfaction of having done a job well. Indeed, to simply have a job that permits us to pay our bills is not the final step of what those who labor need, but rather represents the fundamental floor of what a job should entail, of which, jobs should themselves inherently provide all workers with opportunity, as well as the satisfaction of knowing that their work is valued, because it is of value.