Work Used to Be About Hours and Pay, but Now We Want It to Mean Something.
A quick history behind Labor Day…
1882: 10,000 workers in New York City took an unpaid day off to march from City Hall to Union Square.
1894: Pullman Company workers went on strike over wage cuts. Federal troops were sent in and more than a dozen workers died. On June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day into law as a national holiday.
The 8-hour workday wasn't federal law until 1938, with the Fair Labor Standards Act. Before that, 100-hour workweeks were normal.
For most of this history, "better work" meant fewer hours and more pay. That was the whole ask, and it took decades of organizing to win it.
Along the way, we realized we wanted more than just fair pay. Now we want work to mean something. We want to have an impact, create something, connect with people, be part of something bigger than ourselves.
Interestingly, Organizational Psychologists Hackman and Oldham studied it directly, back in the 1970s.
What actually makes work feel meaningful?
Their Job Characteristics Model found that meaningful work comes down to five things:
Skill variety — using more than one skill, instead of repeating the same task over and over
Task identity — seeing a whole piece of work through from start to finish, instead of only touching a small piece of it
Task significance — knowing your work actually affects other people
Autonomy — having input into how you do the work
Feedback — knowing whether what you did actually worked
When someone experiences these five in a job, three things happen: 1) they feel their work is meaningful, 2) they feel responsible for the outcome, and 3) they understand the impact they're having.
That combination is what drives motivation, satisfaction, and performance. Yes, more consistently than pay.
Why this matters more than it used to
For most of labor history, the fight for better work was collective. People organized, marched, and struck for it, and the wins were structural: shorter hours, safer conditions, a legal minimum for wages.
Meaning doesn't work that way. Nobody can fully create someone else's sense of purpose. It has to be built into how a specific job is designed and how a specific person experiences it.
That's a harder problem than hours and pay. It's also a more interesting one, and it's the one most organizations still aren't equipped to solve.
What does this mean?
If you're an employee, the five characteristics above are a useful diagnostic. If your job is missing skill variety, or you never see a task through to completion, or you rarely get real feedback, that's often where disengagement is actually coming from, not the paycheck (although fair compensation is important!).
If you're a leader or in HR, you can't hand someone meaning directly. But you can design a job with these five things in mind.
How do you create meaning at work for yourself, or for the people you lead?
