I write this after reading a new piece on the New Statesman website on the so-called crisis of economic inactivity, a phrase that has become a favourite of politicians and columnists alike. Even Keir Starmer has been buttering up his backbenchers, hosting them at No.10 before his government begins the unenviable task of selling welfare cuts to the country. The reasoning is familiar enough: Britain isn’t working. The phrase has been deployed across the political spectrum, from Tory backbenchers to Labour frontbenchers, often with an air of exasperation. It is a problem, we are told, that must be fixed. And yet, even a cursory glance at the numbers suggests there is no real crisis of worklessness at all. The number of economically inactive people, those neither in employment nor actively seeking it, has remained largely stable for decades. What has changed is the way it is talked about.
Economic inactivity is presented as an aberration, an unnatural state requiring correction. The argument is not simply fiscal, though the Treasury’s concerns are never far from the surface, but moral. If a person is not in work, they must be nudged, trained, reformed, or, failing that, cut off. The idea that work is a fundamental part of what it means to be a good citizen has a long history. The Tudors distinguished between the “impotent poor,” who were to be supported, and the “sturdy beggars,” who were to be punished. The Victorians built workhouses for those who needed reminding that survival was conditional on labour. Today’s benefit system is less explicit in its coercion, but the logic is unchanged: the state draws a line between the deserving and undeserving, the sick and the shirker, the worker and the burden.
It was once assumed that technology would free us from this necessity. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that the working week would, by now, have been reduced to 15 hours. The great economic challenge of the 21st century, he suggested, would not be the struggle for employment, but the problem of how to occupy so much leisure time. He had underestimated the ability of capital to absorb technological gains. Instead of reducing work, automation has made it more intense. Productivity has risen, but the benefits have not been shared. The working week has not shrunk. Instead, work has become more intrusive, more precarious, and, for many, more meaningless.
The pandemic normalised the idea that the home is an extension of the workplace. This is not the old work from home debate; something deeper has occurred. Work has not retreated, but expanded, creeping into evenings and weekends, turning leisure into a temporary pause before the next task. One might have expected, with the advances of technology, that work would become easier, that its grip on our lives would loosen. Instead, the opposite has happened. The boundary between labour and life has blurred, and yet we are still told that work is a moral imperative.
There is something particularly revealing about the way economic inactivity is framed. It is rarely acknowledged that much of the so-called “workless” population is engaged in other forms of labour: care work, creative work, domestic work. These activities are not recognised as valuable, because they do not generate surplus for capital. A parent raising a child, a carer supporting an elderly relative, an artist producing work outside the market—none of these count as “productive.” Why, exactly, is an office job considered more valuable than composing music or painting? Why does a society that claims to cherish creativity only reward it when it can be commodified?
I saw a recent blog post on Verso about the reissue of The Arcana of Reproduction, Leopoldina Fortunati’s 1981 study of domestic labour, and it was striking how much of her argument still applies. Fortunati, part of the Wages for Housework movement, insisted that capitalism does not just exploit waged workers in offices or factories but extracts value from reproductive labour, the unpaid work of cooking, cleaning, childcare, that ensures workers are fit to be exploited again each day. The home, she argued, is not separate from capitalism but integral to it, a hidden factory producing and maintaining labour power.
It is an argument that cuts through the official narrative about work. The fixation on economic inactivity assumes that the wage relation is the only meaningful form of labour, that those who are not officially employed are doing nothing of value. But as Fortunati shows, capitalism has always relied on unpaid labour. The fact that it does not appear in GDP figures does not make it any less real. The same logic applies to today’s welfare debates: when Starmer talks about getting people into work, the implication is that they are not already working, despite the fact that millions of them are engaged in essential but unpaid labour.
Oh, and when I say technological improvements freeing the worker, I don’t mean an AI chatbot replacing me or an algorithmic analysis tool that checks how many times I look at Bluesky. I mean tech that will set me free. Machines that reduce the hours spent on drudgery, systems that distribute the benefits of automation to workers rather than concentrating them in the hands of capital. Instead, the technology we have been given, productivity trackers, workplace surveillance, digital piecework, has been designed to intensify work, not to eliminate it. This is what Fortunati understood: capitalism does not simply exploit work, it organises social life to ensure that work never stops.
What is framed as a crisis of work is, in reality, a crisis of capitalism’s ability to extract value. More than a million people spend half their take-home salary on rent. Work, for many, does not offer stability, but merely prolongs precarity. And yet when people opt out, when they claim the benefits designed to keep them afloat, they are treated as parasites, as threats to fiscal discipline. The state will always subsidise capital, but never labour.
If technology is to liberate us, the rewards of progress must be distributed differently. The work ethic that has governed life for centuries is not immutable. There is no reason, beyond ideology, that human worth should be measured in productivity. We could work less. We could value care as much as capital. We could build a world in which art, learning, and rest are not treated as indulgences, but as fundamental parts of life. The question is not whether Britain is working. It is why we are still expected to.
