Lhe debates on the sharing of value come up regularly in public debate. And for good reason: bonuses and other variable remuneration schemes are a bandage on a wooden leg. They do nothing to address the root of the problem, which has little to do with purchasing power. Work remains the foundation of our social value. It is not just about this particular marker that is the net salary, which determines a good part of our possibilities. But from the feeling of actively contributing to something: the well-being of your family, the future of your business, sometimes the common good.
However, our society is clearly experiencing a crisis in the valorization of work, which is stretching the link between contribution and remuneration. This crisis is particularly acute at both poles of the labor market. At the bottom of the pay scale, the annual reports of the Group of Experts on the minimum wage reveal a major problem: the crushing of differences between qualification levels once perceived as significant, but which are no longer so today. This problem affects the private sector, with low-wage traps and minimum wage, but also the public.
The low economic value recognized in skilled professions with high added value for society (nurse, teacher) is on the verge of becoming a fundamental problem: not only because these categories express social anger likely to translate into a political crisis, but also because the modesty of remuneration and prospects ends up posing a real problem of attractiveness and therefore of quality of recruitment.
This crisis of “essential work”, insufficiently valued and in need of recognition, corresponds in mirror image to another crisis of work: that affecting what the anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”, occupied by employees carrying out useless and meaningless tasks. These jobs are the opposite of the previous ones: numerous in large organizations, they are often well paid, but their real value is imperceptible, and therefore uncorrelated from the economic value which is recognized to them via remuneration.
The value of work is not just a question of remuneration
This decorrelation, the anthropologist shows, is a factor in depression, anxiety, and sometimes a collapse in self-esteem. To the question: “What am I worth?” “, to which our work is supposed to provide a substantial response, these forms of work and these salary levels provide no significant response. This double crisis of work finds its manifestation today in a whole series of phenomena, sometimes anecdotal or marginal, but which form a system when brought together. The importance given to retirement, seen as a salvation from this moral misery, is one of them.
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