In December 2021, a tornado bore down on an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois. Workers asked to leave. Management refused. Six employees died in the collapse; one had texted his girlfriend minutes earlier: “Amazon won’t let us leave.” Elsewhere in the company’s operations, drivers have described urinating in bottles because they lack access to restrooms during their routes. At fast-food restaurants, workers report being told to treat burn injuries with condiments rather than burn cream. In poultry processing plants, employees have been denied bathroom breaks to the point of wearing diapers on the line. At a Louisville McDonald’s, investigators found ten-year-olds working unpaid until two in the morning.
Such conditions have become routine in a labor market that has systematically withdrawn what once made work bearable, let alone meaningful. The unemployment rate stands at 4.6 percent, the highest level in more than four years. Federal employment has fallen by 271,000 positions since January. Hiring has slowed to an average of just 35,000 jobs per month since March. The instinct, when job postings dry up, is to counsel gratitude: any job becomes a good job when the alternative is no job at all. But this reasoning forecloses a more urgent question. What happens to a society when workers are employed in jobs that do not allow them to live with dignity? For decades, economic policy has not focused on whether jobs are good, only on whether they exist. The current labor market has made that evasion impossible to sustain.
What Dignity Means
Half a century ago, oral historian Studs Terkel traveled the country with a tape recorder, interviewing over one hundred American workers about what they did all day and how they felt about it. What he found was that people wanted more than a paycheck. “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread,” he wrote, “for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” They all wanted to feel their labor mattered, be seen, and know the hours they gave meant something beyond survival.
Researchers have since given this longing a framework. Dignity at work is the feeling of being recognized, acknowledged, included, and respected for who you are and what you know. It has two dimensions: inherent dignity, which belongs to every person by virtue of their humanity, and earned dignity, which comes through effort, contribution, and accomplishment.
It also operates on two levels: dignity at work, meaning how supervisors and colleagues treat you, and dignity in work, meaning whether the labor itself feels meaningful. A job can offer one without the other. Plenty of workers love what they do and hate where they do it.
Work can be dignified, but dignity is not automatic. It depends on whether institutions and the people who run them choose to treat workers with value and worth.
This matters because the phrase “dignity of work” has been co-opted to imply that employment itself makes a person worthy, casting those who accept government assistance as somehow diminished. That framing demands workers find dignity in whatever conditions they face, while asking nothing of employers. It makes exploitation sound ennobling.
The Sixty Percent
The most egregious abuses make headlines, but indignity at work is not confined to factories and warehouses where violations are flagrant enough to attract investigators. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being, released in 2022, identified dignity and meaning as fundamental human needs: the sense of being valued and having the understanding that one’s own work has broader significance. Without these, a paycheck is just a transaction, and the hours spent earning it become time subtracted from life rather than time invested in something worthwhile.
Yet the data on how many American jobs actually deliver these conditions is sobering. Only 40 percent of American workers hold positions meeting quality standards across five dimensions: fair pay, safety, growth opportunities, voice in decisions, and schedule predictability. A quarter report no pathway to advancement. Sixty-two percent lack meaningful control over their schedules. Employee engagement fell to 31 percent in 2024, its lowest level in a decade.
Alongside these structural failings, workers face interpersonal ones: 53 percent experienced sexual harassment over a twelve-month period, 36 percent receiving requests for sexual favors, and 46 percent reporting unwelcome sexual advances. Between 2018 and 2021, the EEOC received over 27,000 sexual harassment charges.
What explains the chasm between organizational mission statements and daily reality? Good management, it turns out, plays almost no role in helping employees find their work meaningful, but bad management is devastatingly effective at destroying whatever meaning workers find for themselves. Meaningfulness tends to be personal, discovered through reflection. Meaninglessness is inflicted. Managers who disconnect workers from their values, take contributions for granted, or override judgment shatter purpose. Gallup’s research reinforces this: 70 percent of the variance in team engagement stems directly from the manager.
When the quit rate hovers below pre-pandemic levels as it has throughout 2025, workers who might otherwise leave bad managers have nowhere to go. They lose the leverage to push back against practices that erode meaning, and employers facing less competition for talent feel less pressure to invest in conditions that foster engagement. Unemployment figures indicate how many people have jobs, but tell us nothing about whether those jobs are worth having.
The Power That Cannot Be Checked
The common thread running through these violations is power wielded without constraint. Because employers determine whether workers can pay rent, afford health insurance, and feed their families, the imbalance invites abuse. The United States is the only developed country where at-will employment is the standard, meaning employers can terminate workers for virtually any reason, without notice or severance. An employee who refuses unsafe conditions, reports wage theft, or simply asks too many questions can be fired without recourse. In theory, anti-retaliation laws offer protection, but in practice, 43 percent of workers who complained about violations experienced retaliation anyway, from termination to threats of deportation. The default rule is employer discretion, and in 49 of the United States, that discretion is virtually unlimited.
The result is a workplace culture where bullying operates as a management style.
According to the 2024 Workplace Bullying Institute survey, 52 million American workers have been directly bullied on the job, and 65 percent of bullies are bosses. Targets of bullying face a 62 percent chance of losing their jobs, while perpetrators suffer consequences at less than half that rate. Employers push out abused workers more often than the managers who abuse them. There is no federal law against workplace bullying, and 87 percent of Americans support creating one. Abuse at work remains the only form of abuse in America that is not yet taboo; we condemn the abuse of children, spouses, and partners, while bullying at work is still treated as a normal, inevitable, or even necessary business practice.
Collective action once provided a counterweight to this imbalance. Labor unions have historically been a powerful voice advocating for the respect and fair treatment of workers; most workplace norms we take for granted, including the minimum wage, child labor laws, and safe working conditions, exist because unions fought for them. When 35 percent of workers belonged to unions in the 1950s, employers faced organized resistance to abuse. Today, with private-sector union membership below seven percent, most workers negotiate alone against institutions that hold every advantage. Corporations spend over $400 million annually on consultants whose sole purpose is to prevent workers from organizing. The effect has been a dramatic reduction in the voice and power of workers to advocate for change and preserve dignity.
“We love the work, but we deserve respect and fair conditions,” said Meg Labbee, a 25-year museum employee on strike in 2024. Across industries, the grievances echo one another: understaffing, unsustainable workloads, training that never happens, and bosses who demean rather than lead. At a Brooklyn nonprofit, attorneys went on strike after their employer hired new law graduates with no experience but never created an adequate training program; most workers burned out within two to three years. At a major bank, employees described mornings that felt soul-crushing before they even reached their desks. Those who cannot endure it leave. Those who stay do so knowing the outcome depends entirely on the character of whoever holds authority over them, because the laws that exist to protect them are rarely enforced.
The Unraveling
The notion that labor possesses inherent dignity dates back to 1891 when Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, declaring that employers must “not look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person.” The American labor movement made this principle concrete through strikes and collective bargaining that secured not just higher pay but safer conditions, shorter hours, and a measure of voice. For three decades after World War II, productivity and typical worker compensation rose roughly in tandem, and the balance between employers and workers held.
But eventually, the social contract gave way to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Free market capitalism, deregulation, and small government created every incentive for corporations to shed permanent workers, cut benefits, and squeeze labor costs at any price. The shift transferred risk from organizations onto individual workers and facilitated what researchers describe as the commodification and dehumanization of the workforce. Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981 and private employers followed his lead. Between 1979 and 2019, net productivity grew by 59.7 percent while hourly compensation for typical workers grew by only 15.8 percent. The value that workers create has continued to expand, but the share returned to them has not.
The philosopher Michael Sandel has argued that meritocracy, whatever its initial promise as an alternative to inherited aristocracy, has curdled into a system that not only distributes rewards unequally but breeds contempt in the winners and shame in the losers. The successful come to believe their achievements reflect superior talent and effort, discounting the advantages of birth and circumstance. Sandel calls this “meritocratic hubris,” a self-satisfaction that looks down on those who failed to rise without accounting for the social determinants of health that shaped their chances from birth. Meanwhile, the unsuccessful internalize the judgment rendered against them, accepting that if success is earned, failure must be deserved. Under this logic, the warehouse worker, the home health aide, the receptionist, and the fast food employee occupy the bottom of the hierarchy because of some fundamental inadequacy in themselves, not because of how labor markets systematically devalue certain kinds of work.
When the labor market stalls and good jobs become scarce, meritocracy stops functioning as motivation and devolves into pure blame. Sandel has connected this to the political upheavals of recent years. Populist resentment, at its core, is less about economics than about dignity. Workers sense that elites regard them with contempt, and the meritocratic sorting machine has branded whole categories of people as losers who deserve their fate. Sandel calls for what he terms a spiritual revolution that would celebrate the dignity of labor rather than the hierarchy of achievement, recognizing the contributions of those who lack credentials and corner offices are no less essential to the common good.
The Question That Cannot Be Deferred
What is work actually for? To separate the deserving from the undeserving based on credentials, effort, and luck? Or to provide a foundation for a decent life where everyone who contributes can live with respect and security, regardless of how the market ranks their labor?
In organizing campaigns across industries, workers have been clear about what they need. The language that surfaces again and again goes beyond compensation to address questions of respect and recognition, with one barista during a wave of coffeehouse organizing describing the desire to be. recognized as people rather than profit machines. In his foundational study of workplace ethnographies, sociologist Randy Hodson found that the greatest impediment to dignity is not low wages but mismanagement and abuse.
Yet the policy apparatus that governs job creation has been built to track employment numbers, not job quality, a gap so glaring that researchers created the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index in 2019 to fill it. But because no official government metric tracks job quality, the finding imposes no obligation on policymakers. States spend over $40 billion per year on economic development incentives with little accountability for whether the positions created offer anything beyond a paycheck. When public money flows to employers without standards attached, it funds the problem rather than the solution.
Legal scholars have begun proposing concrete answers. One recent framework suggests that all workers should have the statutory right to work in an environment free from discrimination and harassment, to work in an emotionally and physically safe environment, and to be protected from retaliation for exercising these rights.
Such a standard would not be radical; it would simply codify what most people already believe work should provide. The difference is that it would give workers recourse when employers fail to deliver.
The market has sorted out questions of scheduling, voice, safety, and respect on its own terms, delivering a landscape where the majority of workers find dignity out of reach. That is a choice, and it is indefensible.
Reporting Note
This article draws on a synthesis of labor reporting, academic research, government data, and historical analysis to examine the erosion of dignity in contemporary work. It combines documented workplace conditions, employment and job quality statistics, labor law scholarship, and sociological research with interpretive analysis of how power, management practices, and policy choices shape workers’ daily experience. The piece relies exclusively on publicly available sources, long-standing labor research, and reported cases cited in the primary sources and further reading. Quoted statements are drawn from public testimony and verified reporting across established news outlets.
