After my dad retired as a unionized pipefitter at the age of 56 in 2001, he would often joke that he had given up “the last good job in America.” Born of quite modest means on a small southern Illinois farm in 1945, he graduated high school, was drafted into the army, and then moved to the metropolitan St. Louis area to find work. After hiring in as an unskilled laborer at the power company, he seized the opportunity offered by a craft apprenticeship to become a journeyman pipe fitter, a position he held for over thirty years. He worked hard and saved as much as possible so that he and my mom could retire while both were relatively young, and they raised two sons who never wanted for anything.

An intellectually inquisitive yet highly practical and unpretentious man, he directed his aspirations for higher learning and upward mobility onto his children, who unreflexively identified as middle class and took that route for granted.

For my father, the term “good job” carried multiple meanings, some genuine and some ironic. By many objective measures, he had a “good job” as defined by those of his gender, class, and generation. Skilled work came with decent pay, especially for someone without a college degree. He also enjoyed the work itself, taking pleasure from the daily deployment of his skills and problem-solving abilities, deriving satisfaction from knowing that his labor was indispensable to maintaining the industrial plumbing required to power our community and taking great pride in being a member of a craft with a long history of promoting quality work.

But he also knew that the quality of his job depended on his union. Pipefitter pay was decent, to be sure, but collective bargaining brought him and his family additional benefits such as employer-provided health care, a defined-benefit pension, and paid time off that increased with each year served; equally important were job security provisions that prevented the boss from terminating him without cause or arbitrarily disciplining him in case of a dispute. More than money, these latter provisions promoted dignity on the job, empowering him to speak up without fear of a pink slip or demotion, and off the job, enabling him to plan ahead, purchase a home, and invest in his children’s education. Though neither ideologue nor firebrand, my usually quiet dad was always quick to remind organized labor’s critics—a growing group during his working years, including some in our extended family and neighborhood—that the only thing separating a “good job” from a “bad job” was the union contract.

The joke that my dad retired from “the last good job” in the country, especially for ordinary working folks, was both personal—his bittersweet recognition of the physical challenges of advancing age—and political—his lament at the nationwide decline of unions and erosion of the employment contract, as beginning in the 1970s American corporations and policymakers globalized the labor market, lessened worker protections, and increasingly produced jobs that were less remunerative, more precarious, and stripped of dignity. From his retirement perch, he appreciated his own security while constantly worrying whether the “good jobs” pathway would exist for working-class folks in coming generations, as well as what that would mean for the country as a whole.

Lest my dad come off as unapologetically nostalgic for a receding golden age of the American worker, I hasten to add that his understanding of the term “good job” was laced with an irony never far from the surface. As much as he enjoyed the work itself as well as the camaraderie of his union colleagues, he refused to romanticize this “good job,” which exposed him to all sorts of daily hazards, from unsafe conditions to industrial accidents, from intense periods of overwork and extreme exhaustion to decades of bodily wear and tear, including hearing loss. Further, he sometimes endured the inconvenience of forced overtime, especially when he was young and had little seniority, prompting him to miss the occasional family gathering, middle school band concert, or little league baseball game. More problematic to him, he also suffered the indignities associated with having to follow the orders of foremen who “didn’t know their elbows from a pipe wrench,” as he put it.

In short, my dad was a worker, and like all those who work for someone else, he didn’t have complete autonomy in his work life. To be sure, his union contract lifted standards, promoted fairness, and protected workers’ basic dignity, but ultimately it could only mitigate the power imbalance inherent in the workplace, not erase it. None of this challenged my dad’s firm belief that he had a “good job,” but he thought it important to recognize the trade-offs he accepted, and the sacrifices working-class folks often must make in order to get access to the pay and benefits that promise a middle-class life for themselves and their families.

• • •

My dad passed away two months ago, just shy of his 80th birthday, after an eighteen-month battle with cancer. The most important man in my life, he taught me to prioritize family, to live by the principle that no one is more or less worthy or important than anyone else, and to never cross a picket line. He was the inspiration for me to study labor issues past and present by pursuing a Ph.D. in history, even though he had no idea that “labor historian” could be someone’s job, and the ways of the academic world continually amused and baffled him.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on my dad’s work and his complex thoughts on “good jobs,” especially because the lung cancer that claimed his life was likely the delayed effect of the asbestos and other carcinogens he breathed on the job for decades. Still, in the time between diagnosis and death, I never heard him revise his understanding that he had a “good job,” even though he had plenty of choice words for his former employer (and pursued a lawsuit with former coworkers seeking restitution). But his passing has prompted me to ponder just how good his job was, and, beyond that, to wrestle with our collective understanding of what we mean when we talk about “good jobs.”

In American popular usage today, the term “good job” is much deployed but ill-defined. A scan of a few dozen recent New York Times and Wall Street Journal pieces suggests that “good jobs” are simply those with decent pay and benefits, though some add stability, security, and opportunities for advancement as well. Especially among policymakers, the articulated desire to create more good jobs often equates to adding positions in manufacturing, nodding toward a prior era. In a typical formulation, the New York Times summarized the recent remarks of Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who declared “the essence of the American dream” as “having good jobs that are not lost to foreign competition and wages that are high enough to afford homes.”¹ Usually missing from this mix are two important ingredients central to my dad’s definition: a sense of work’s meaning and a voice in the process.

Today everyone seems to agree that “good jobs” matter, as politicians and pundits of every stripe declare their importance and want to increase them. A brief foray into the American past, however, reminds us that it hasn’t always been that way. Not that long ago pairing the word “good” with “jobs” would be considered nonsensical, at least by those holding power and privilege, who saw nothing “good” about the status of performing work for someone else for wages. In the words of historian John Ashworth, “For most of human history the status of the wage laborer has been an extremely humble one,” and “Americans were heirs to a long and venerable tradition of hostility to wage labor.”²

Ashworth traces that legacy from the ancient world of Aristotle, who opined that “no man can practise virtue who is living the life of a mechanic or labourer,” through early modern England, where performing wage labor was widely seen as a badge of servitude, to revolutionary-era America, where Jeffersonian thought lionized the farmer, not the worker, as the ideal citizen of the new republic.³ Of course, in early America, most of those who worked for others were bound persons whose labor was owned by one of Jefferson’s farmer-citizens, whether for life (a slave), a term (a child, servant, or apprentice), or most of adulthood (a wife). This hierarchical ordering of society into households of “independent” masters commanding the labor of their “dependents” was naturalized on the basis of race, age, and gender; further, it extended to all those who worked for others under the operation of common law, which undergirded these households by vesting nearly unlimited power and authority to masters. In short, to work for someone else in early America, even as a wage laborer, meant no rights on the job and little resource to the law.⁴

In the wake of the American Revolution, however, which rejected monarchy, rebuffed a titled aristocracy, and encouraged challenges to authority everywhere, working Americans—in households, at workshops, and on plantations—increasingly demanded personal freedom, equality, and independence, fueling the tensions that led to the sectional crisis that ruptured the union. The American Civil War was a massive labor dispute, in the sense that it centered on a nationwide conflict over the labor system most conducive to sustaining and expanding a republican order. Whose should prevail, the “free labor” North or the “slave labor” South? The North’s most forceful articulator was Abraham Lincoln, whose eloquent ideas about workers, wages, and worthiness reveal the evolution in American thought that bridges the revolutionary generation to our own.⁵

Informed by decades of working people’s arguments for full inclusion in the economic and political life of the republic, and buoyed by his own rise from extreme poverty to successful attorney, politician, and eventually president, Lincoln rejected centuries of elitism by attacking what he called the “mud-sill theory,” whose proponents saw firm and permanent class lines separating the commanders of labor from the performers of it. According to Lincoln, defenders of the mud-sill theory believed “that nobody labors, unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow, by the use of that capital, induces him to do it.”⁶

Lincoln countered with a vision of what he called “free labor,” where the “prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” The ideal republic, as Lincoln saw it, was one that promoted upward mobility, “a just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”⁷

Lincoln and other “free labor” champions envisioned wage labor not as drudgery and a badge of dishonor but as a legitimate life-stage for a young man on the pathway to independence. In essence, they transformed the traditional suspicion of wage labor by celebrating its integration into an American dream of upward mobility. That dream, to be sure, still accommodated persistent, if contested, ideas about the supposed natural hierarchies of race and gender. As Lincoln argued, it was designed for “[m]en, with their families—wives, sons and daughters—[who would] work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops,” and it justified those who remained wage laborers for life because of “a dependent nature which prefers it.”⁸

Free labor advocates trumpeted not the creation of “good jobs,” then, but the construction of policies that would facilitate pathways out of wage labor; the permanence of wage labor in an individual’s work-life still bore the taint of personal failure. At the same time, though, they reimagined those who performed wage labor as worthy of upward mobility and entitled to that promise. This laid the foundation for the emergence of a “good jobs” economy in the decades following the Civil War, as the rapid, massive industrialization of the economy confronted the republic with a new reality, one where an increasing majority of Americans were destined for life as wage workers toiling for someone else. This compelled a further rethinking of the relationship between work, wage labor, and worthiness, but the spur for that reckoning came less from philosophers or politicians than from workers organizing the labor movement, an arduous, unfinished effort that stretched for a century bracketed by the Gilded Age to the Age of Civil Rights, with its greatest impact in the post–World War II decades.

As the nation transformed into a republic of employees, working people and their advocates first invented the idea of “a living wage,” which then evolved into the more expansive “good job.” Beginning in the late nineteenth century, “living wage” proponents argued that workers were entitled to pay that permitted the worker’s family to escape poverty and enjoy the basic minimal standards for a good life (shelter, food, clothing, transportation, and the like).⁹ But it required a strong labor movement, only established in the New Deal and World War II years, to articulate and put the muscle behind a fully fleshed out “good jobs” economy, one where all those who worked for others were entitled not just to decent pay, but also on and off-the-job benefits that promoted stability, security, and flourishing for workers and their families. The labor movement reached its apex of power, prestige, and percentage of the workforce in the prosperous postwar decades that many contemporary Americans long to revive. Indeed, though barely recognized today, that prosperity—more widely shared than at any time before or since—rested on the foundational success of the labor movement in converting heady corporate profits into higher wages and better benefits, as well as normalizing outward (beyond unionized workers) and upward (into the ranks of management) pro-labor innovations across the employment spectrum, including position descriptions, hiring and promotion policies, and worker protections from abuse and harassment. In the two decades after World War II, the working-class standard of living grew by leaps and bounds, and the very idea of the USA as a middle-class society was born (if never fully realized). With it came claims for a “good jobs” economy, one that fully reimagined wage labor as a worthy endeavor and those who performed it as full citizens whose prosperity was the republic’s reason for being.¹⁰

Even as leaders of the labor movement bargained hard for better jobs, they were negotiating with corporate leaders bent on realizing a mass consumer society that relied on relentless efficiencies and economies of scale to lower prices and sell more goods to offset the relatively high labor costs. In effect, millions of American workers gained “good jobs” consisting of decent pay, growing benefits, and employment protections, but failed to realize critical components that make work meaningful and enjoyable, including autonomy, creativity, and input in the work process. Many postwar policymakers and pundits saw this as an inevitable trade off in a modern economy, while even some labor leaders argued that workers should look to find satisfaction in their leisure time rather than on the clock.¹¹

Now, of course, with the decimation of unions over the past few decades, even that narrower definition of “good jobs” premised on stability, security, and high wages has been in rapid decline, hence the urgent, persistent, perennial calls to (re)create more “good jobs.” As my dad would no doubt remind us if he were alive today, “the only difference between a good and a bad job is the union contract.” But I think he would go further than that. When he talked about retiring from “the last good job in America,” he wasn’t only lamenting the decline of organized labor or the ravages of age; he was also asserting a vision of wage work that brought the toiler not just comfort and security, but also meaning, satisfaction, solidarity, and sometimes joy, a vision sorely lacking in the twenty-first century American imaginary of work.

I really hope that he didn’t hold “the last good job in America,” but it will require a revival of organized labor on a massive scale, plus the pioneering of alternative, unforeseen vehicles forged by working people to realize a “good jobs” economy today, one that builds upon the earlier successes of the labor movement while expanding the definition of just what makes a job good.