There have been many, many books written to answer the question of what good work is and what bad work is. Studying work always involves making normative claims about what is wrong with work. How questions get asked affects the route to finding possible solutions. So where the question is ‘How does exploitation happen?’ and the answer is through the alienation of a homogeneous class of workers, then possible solutions are radical class-based transformation. This kind of reasoning and political thinking is both powerful and important, but also limited. It underplays spatial and temporal differences between people, singularities become generalities and some kinds of work get ignored. Where the question is ‘What is good work?’, answers refer to fairness at work, meaningful work, dignity at work, even the pleasures of a work ethic. These bring forward thoughts about work being better when it develops individual capabilities, when it offers self-fulfilment as well as material benefits. Bad work is exploitative, not offering enough material and/or social benefits – such as adequate pay and recognition – and risking damage to workers’ health. Much commentary on good work draws on ideas from the ethics of justice, especially ideas around autonomous individuals. Ethical claims have pragmatic effects; justice ethics (and care ethics) have pragmatic value in calling some things into notice, and I do not want to throw that away. But nor can it be that there is one right way to think about the ethics and politics of work. Think in terms of care and the ethics of care, and relationality through work comes to the fore.

In the course of this book, I have encountered much that it is hard to be against – universal ethics, dignity at work, bullet point lists as to what makes good and bad work. But I am still not certain that easy solutions can be found to the problem of what is wrong with work, because so many of the ideas that are used to think about work tend to be abstract and generalised, unwilling to address the complexity of differentiation, with a strong preference instead for critical distancing and/or regulations. Debating good work and bad work is important, but ‘What is a good job and what is a bad job?’ is not the right question for me.