Moral envy of this sort is rife in activist or religious communities; what I would like to suggest here is that it is also, more subtly, present in the politics surrounding work. Just as anger at immigrants often involves the simultaneous accusation that newcomers work both too much and too little, so does resentment against the poor focus simultaneously on those who don't work, since they are imagined to be lazy, and those who do work, since (unless they've been dragooned into some kind of work-fare) at least they don't have bullshit jobs. Why, for instance, have conservatives in the United States been so successful at whipping up popular resentment against unionized hospital or autoworkers? During the 2008 bailout of the financial industry, while there was a public outcry against bankers' million-dollar bonuses, no actual sanctions followed; however, the consequent bailout of the auto industry did involve sanctions: on assembly line workers. They were widely denounced as coddled for having union contracts that allowed them generous health and pension plans, vacations, and $28-per-hour wages,and forced into massive give-backs. Those working in the financial offices of the same companies who (insofar as they were not just sitting around doing nothing at all) were the ones who had actually caused the problems and were not expected to make similar sacrifices. As a local paper recalled: The bank bailout would be followed in February by a bailout of auto companies. Here, it was assumed that thousands of jobs must be shed for those companies to regain profitability. There had long been envy of auto-workers' job protection and health benefits; now they became a scapegoat. As once-proud Michigan manufacturing cities all but shutdown, right-wing radio commentators asserted that workers-instrumental, historically, through their labor struggles in obtaining seven-day work weeks and forty-hour days for everyone-were getting their just desserts.1 One reason American autoworkers had such relatively generous plans, compared with other blue-collar workers, was first and foremost because they played such an essential role in creating something their fellow citizens actually needed, and what's more, something recognized as culturally important (indeed, central to their sense of themselves as Americans). 2 It's hard to escape the impression that this was precisely what others resented about them. "They get to make cars! Shouldn't that be enough for them? I have to sit around filling out stupid forms all day, and these bastards want to rub it in by threatening to go on strike to demand a dental plan, or two weeks off to take their kids to see the Grand Canyon or the Colosseum, on top of that?"

— Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (72%)