Paper short abstract:

Even in its alienated form as wage labour, work is a useful and purposeful activity that involves the worker’s person. Like functionings in other domains of life, aspects of work and employment can be both instrumental for other capabilities and be of ultimate value, i.e. individual capabilities.

Paper long abstract:

Work, i.e. useful and purposeful activity, is specific to the “metabolism” (Marx) of humans with nature, and how work is organised socially is a determining feature of any society. A “world of work” separate from other domains of human existence and as an “opportunity cost” limiting “leisure” are rather recent societal ideas linked to wage labour.

As the capability paradigm is “underspecified” (Robeyns 2017), specific “accounts” of work and employment are called for in order to bring it to labour studies. But the capabil-ity and human development paradigms would be somewhat flawed could they not ac-count for what workers have “good reason to value” in work (“çe que travailler veut dire”, Zimmermann 2014).

The bundle of functionings (“beings and doings”) that paid work and unpaid reproduction and care work involve may have both instrumental and ultimate value for the individual’s capabilities. Depending on conditions of employment and work, the instrumental value of the wage and necessities and constraints may be dominant reasons for holding a job. But other functionings that are considered as potential capabilities also have instrumental value. Like a job, health, education and housing can prove “corrosive” or “fertile” (Wolff/De Shalit 2007) for other functionings of ultimate value. Does that render them “morally ambiguous” (Suppa 2019)?

Other capabilities are institutionally framed and “socially dependent” (Sen 2002) to the same degree as work. As labour power cannot be separated from the worker’s person, even the most degrading job involves workers as subjects. As “reflexive creatures” (Sen 2013) defining and pursuing their own goals, workers bring their individual and collective yardsticks for valuable features of “good work” to the job.

The conceptual appeal of the capability approach in labour studies lies in its ability to model the interaction between personal and structural factors that defines and constrains a person’s “employability” and their aspirations in the work process. This presupposes that workers have reason to value work and to consider labour market or shop-floor con-ditions as more or less “capability-friendly”. To disregard work activities as capabilities may follow from the purpose of a specific capability study, e.g. of poverty. But a “theoret-ical exceptionalism” a priori excluding work from capability accounts and relegating it to a conceptually separate work-wellbeing-nexus (work as “providing activity”, Suppa 2019) would render the paradigm useless for issues like understanding subjective claims on and worker’s agency in the labour process, or “meaningful”, “good” or “sustainable” work.