Labor Day 2025
Contemporary capitalism often places workers in positions where survival requires moral compromise: tolerating insults, enduring abuse, cutting ethical corners, or embracing indignities. This produces a social trauma akin to moral injury: not from being deceived, but from being forced to live against one’s own moral compass in order to eat. Over time, this erodes civic dignity and conditions people to normalize exploitation—making them miserable, more likely to be a bystander to harm, and more likely to grow numb to the abuse of authority.
Economic hoarding and hyper-concentration mean fewer good jobs, fewer pathways to stability, and more power in the hands of bosses and institutions. With too much market power, they can afford to behave in irresponsible and harmful ways because the disparity of wealth gives them a higher margin for error. Workers “grin and bear it” not because they are ambitious but because they are desperate, caught in a chokehold economy. The old claim that work builds identity and honor rings hollow through the valley of desperation. In practice, for too many, work now corrodes identity, eating away at dignity. They can afford to lose their income less than they can afford to lose themselves.
The Stripping of Dignity
The problem is captured ironically by The Full Monty, the acclaimed British comedy about unemployed men in a declining steel town. Out of options, they decide to earn money by staging a striptease show. Inspired by professional male strippers, they vow to go further—to strip completely naked. The film presents this as ordinary men taking control of their lives in a humorous and liberating way. But the story is subtle and subversive.
Beneath the laughs lies desperation. These men want to work. There is no work. So they do what they must to survive. For one man, the humiliation is layered. As a father estranged from his son, blocked by his ex-partner’s new lover, he endures yet another emasculation, this time by disrobing for strangers in order to reclaim some semblance of manhood and income, and therefore fatherhood. In normal times we would see this clearly: these men are not empowered, they are stripped of their dignity. The writer, Simon Beaufoy, said that he was inspired by the lack of employment, especially industrial jobs, in post-Thatcher Britain—how working-class men had nothing to do. He later spoke with Italian producer Uberto Pasolini, who asked what had happened to British men to make them lose their pride. For Beaufoy, the story became one of working-class disenfranchisement, the loss of dignity, and an attempt to regain control over one’s life. However, American audiences tend to miss this, to see the film and think these desperate men of England are somehow an example of the bootstrapping entrepreneur. We evade the obvious.
If fraud shame is betrayal by trust, negotiable virtue is self-betrayal by necessity. Workers forced into systems that contradict their moral core internalize shame, cynicism, and complicity.
Mistreatment as the Boss’s Perk
The MeToo movement revealed how deeply this culture of expected negotiable virtue had spread. MeToo hit a nerve. It should have, the casting couch is wicked. For decades, employers in the entertainment industry treated the humiliation of workers as a perk of the job. It had nothing to do with maximizing profits; it was about asserting privilege. The “casting couch” is a system where powerful men demand submission. Preying on young, insecure women and men, telling them that they should strip for the camera to “gain confidence” is a ploy of vile manipulative men who in earlier ages would have shunned —and perhaps even violently held to account— but now are promoted and given accolades for their “artistic vision.” The smiles of their victims were then used to say “See their method works, you should try it.” Harvey Weinstein was protected and promoted by the social system of the film industry and also scapegoated by it. The problem was social and beyond the horrible actions of one media executive.
Forcing people into silence to preserve the careers they love strips them of self-belief.
How many models and actors were told to pretend to enjoy themselves? How many hated themselves afterward for going along? How many carried broken and impaired relationships for years because of compromises forced upon them? The visceral anger of MeToo was not a conspiracy but pent-up rage at a workplace culture where humiliation had become the privilege of power.
The Utopia That Owns You
A different threat to human happiness hides beneath the glossy visions of the future promoted by institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2016, Danish politician Ida Auken sketched her idea of a life of ease in the techno city of 2030: a world where no one owns anything,1 everything is a service, and citizens are happy because their needs are instantly provided by algorithms and corporations. She wrote of a life where homes are shared, appliances delivered on demand, and privacy erased in the name of convenience. “I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded,” she admitted, but insisted that this was a small price to pay.2
The details of the vision reveal its problems, however unintended. The essay appears to celebrate the idea that the writer’s living room would be used for business meetings whenever they were away, as if the loss of a private home is an advance in civilization. It shrugs at the fact that “AI and robots took over so much of our work” because it gave people more leisure to eat and sleep—as though the destruction of human labor and craft is a happy trade. And the essay concedes that in this hypothetical 2030 city she has “no real privacy” but treats it as an inconvenience rather than a violation. The very things that should provoke resistance—loss of home, loss of work, loss of privacy—are recast as the markers of progress. But given what we know about humans and the potential for abuse, the total loss of privacy and private spaces is a horrific vision. Whether the WEF or others, you cannot credibly reimagine human flourishing and leisure if you do not first understand humanity.
This is not to endorse wild conspiracy theories about plots from the WEF. Rather it is to challenge these imagined futures that are developed by leaders in tech and government who do not understand the individual need for worth and dignity that comes from being true to oneself and actively engaged in living life productively. Given the economic challenges since the 2008 financial crisis, it is no wonder the vision “You’ll Own Nothing. And You’ll Be Happy.” provoked backlash.3 It touched the same nerve the pro-Brexit campaign tapped into with its slogan “Take Back Control.” People felt something was slipping away—stable jobs, dependable futures, their say over their own lives.
Everyday Negotiable Virtue
Most people will never face the Hollywood casting couch, but there is a good chance they know the experience of swallowing indignity to survive. Gig workers are expected to smile through mistreatment. Junior staff in corporate hierarchies are expected to accept status games that reward cruelty as the cost of “paying their dues” when all they want is a mentor to help them grow into their roles. We have created workplaces where virtue—loyalty, honesty, dignity—becomes negotiable and where good people are driven away by leaders too cowardly to confront deputies who act like petty tyrants. Experts are dismissed because of bureaucracy and their pleas are ignored. People have gotten used to making bricks without straw, as employee support and resources are cut, and then blamed when the bricks do not stack like they used to. Far too often good people cannot afford to quit, so they stay and absorb the abuse and become smaller in their own eyes. Too many young professionals are entering the workforce not as respected graduates but as workers in a system where their integrity is constantly on the table because their employers do not want someone with an independent spirit who will say no to an unethical request. So the youth are stripped of their excitement for their new careers.
The workplace is one of the major forms of social engagement, but it can also be one of the most corrosive. Its pressures can make people lose their prior moral formation, and over time desperation becomes a destructive habit of mind. Imagine a young woman with a brilliant mind, yet unknown to her, unwanted attention by others to her appearance is what secures her the job. Or perhaps she is pushed into gig work where survival depends on generating clicks because the jobs are lacking. Both cases are insulting to her and her hard work. When this happens, what is society communicating to her and her peers about worth and work? If out of desperation she goes along with the tide, we judge her, and she judges herself. Eventually, a person grows weary of the judgment and embraces the infamy, not because they want to, but because trying to maintain their dignity while compromising it to survive caused one to give way. So some choose OnlyFans and other forms of self-exploitation and we avert our eyes and convince ourselves that everyone has agency so the context of the choice does not matter. But deep down we should know the difference between a free choice and a tragic one. Too many see these choices as personal failures rather than as signs of wider economic problems we refuse to quantify; we pretend they missed opportunities that were never there to begin with. Many are out there just trying to survive with very limited options and that is a shared tragedy of our society. They need grace.
In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, only 25% of Americans said they think they have a shot at improving their economic situation; 70% do not believe the American dream is still true.4 While people can also be mistaken and suffer from misperceptions, it appears their experiences have crushed their hope.
Against the Command to Smile
When wealth piles up at the top, big firms raise prices, push down wages, and bury rivals. That means fewer firms to hire employees. Innovation slows. Competition fades. Growth drags because those at the top spend little of their income, while workers are left with debt, weak schools, and crumbling roads. Over time, birth and connections matter more than talent and hard work. And once people are desperate enough, they can be told to accept exploitation.
Dignified work is not just an economic concern. It is moral infrastructure for democracy. When survival requires constant compromise, citizens grow habituated to indignity—not only at work, but in politics. What we endure at work, we begin to excuse in public life. Dog-eat-dog workplaces produce citizens too exhausted or too jaded to defend democratic norms. It is hard to go on strike, let alone protest, when you are in debt and forced to laugh at your own humiliation just to keep food on the table. Credit card debt has become a more effective tool of social control than the gulag ever was.
The fix is not to hate markets but to make them work as they should: open and fair. That means antitrust with teeth, tax rates that actually fund spending, limits on non-compete contracts, and workplace cultures that honor employee dignity. Capital must serve people, not the other way around.
This is no time for passivity or resignation. Recovering dignity and respect in labor and at work means having the right response for when you are told, “You will do the full monty and like it.”
No.
See also
https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-own-nothing-have-no-privacy-and-life-has-never-been-better-ee2eed62f710
Auken later insisted this was not her personal utopia but a speculative scenario meant to spark debate. Yet once such visions are broadcast by the World Economic Forum and promoted as possible futures, their moral assumptions matter—and their risks deserve scrutiny. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-the-world-economic-forum-does-not-have-a-stated-goal-to-have-people-idUSKBN2AP2SP/
https://x.com/wef/status/983378870819794945
https://www.wsj.com/economy/wsj-norc-economic-poll-73bce003?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAig3ARQ99oh5SR2WNwmD9JUb1jqhj9-JB_xg-yseumQt6ABZWnkDO_P2VkPDbA%3D&gaa_ts=68b654d9&gaa_sig=RQLKMCp_szjidESKcA8K7U-NT5dgQFsWzJZtKl0ChlKLREnW_pLcgAK8nvZV1JuKvRNyDNeZOTQ9_zJxMaWy4A%3D%3D