Transcription
In 1894, a reader of the Rooks County Record in Stockton, Kansas, wrote into the paper with a complaint that might sound familiar. With all of the minds of the county shut down by strikers, "What will the poor editor do for Cole next winter? It is becoming apparent that nobody wants to work these hard times."
Now, this was during the panic of 1893, the worst economic depression the country had seen since the Civil War. Banks were collapsing, factories were closing, and 180,000 coal miners had just walked off the job across five states in one of the largest strikes in American history. But the letter writer's takeaway from all of this wasn't that workers were fighting for survival wages during a financial collapse. It was that coal miners from the 1800s had gotten lazy.
In 1905, the Edgefield advertiser complained that labor is scarce, high, and very unreliable. None want to work for wages. 1916 and a Bing Hampton Press in New York article bemons that nobody wants to work as hard as they used to. 1922, a reader of the Malbury News in Kansas writes in to ask, "What is the cause of unemployment and hard times?" The answer from business owners was the same as it was in 1894. Nobody wants to work.
1937, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, unemployment still above 14%, and peach farmers in Pennsylvania can't find anybody willing to pick fruit for poverty wages. Nobody wants to work. 1952, 1969, 1979, nobody wants to work. 1999, Two brothers closing their shoe repair shop after 53 years. Tell a reporter, "Nobody wants to work anymore. They all want to work in front of a computer and make lots of money." 2006, 2014, nobody wants to work. And then in 2022, a Forbes survey finds that one in five executives says no one wants to work anymore in the tightest labor market in decades with unemployment sitting near historic lows.
So yeah, if unemployment is too high, it's because nobody wants to work. If unemployment is too low, it's because nobody wants to work. And if the headlines are to be believed, nobody has wanted to work for 130 straight years now. And you know what? They might have a point. Not many people do actually want to work. Most people do not dream of labor. They work because they need to work. So at some point we have to ask whether you are just as lazy as your great great grandfather or if there is some other reason why people are foregoing this essential component of basic life. There's a shortage of skilled workers as well. The construction industry says it needs to hire more than 200 this year.
Okay, so let's go back to that 1894 letter. The coal miners were on strike across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, and Illinois, walking off the job during the bituminous coal strike because wages had been slashed during the financial panic. Great name, less great circumstance. The mine operators had cut pay by as much as 30% in some regions. And when miners organized to resist, the owners brought in armed guards and replacement workers. Local newspapers shockingly largely sided with the operators. So the letter didn't say workers are striking for better pay. It said nobody wants to work. That took a collective political action and turned it into an individual character flaw, which is a much easier thing for the public to dismiss.
About 50 years later in 1945 towards the end of the Second World War, factories had been running at full capacity for four years, producing ships, tanks, and ammunition. And well, it turns out wars can be quite lucrative. Within America specifically, corporate profits during the war had been absolutely enormous. Adjusted for inflation, manufacturing profits had roughly doubled between 1939 and 1944. Millions of workers who had put their lives on hold came home expecting a share of what their labor had produced. Wages had been frozen during the war under the National War Labor Board's Little Steel formula, which capped raises at 15% even as prices rose far beyond that.
What followed was the biggest strike wave in American history. Between 1945 and 1946, more than 5 million workers walked off the job. Steel, auto, electrical, meat packing. Major unions shut down the country's largest industries, and their demand was straightforward. Wages that kept pace with the profits their work had generated during the war. General Motors alone faced a 113-day shutdown. The United Auto Workers demanded a 30% raise and offered to open the company's books to prove GM could afford it. This was before rigorous public reporting standards from public companies. Either way, and to nobody's surprise, GM refused to let anyone see the books.
Now, all things considered, this was a pretty reasonable ask. Workers wanted a raise, and they were willing to prove the money was there. But again, this is not how it was covered. The press framed it as chaos. Editorials ran with a familiar refrain. Workers had gotten greedy. Unions had gotten too powerful, and nobody wanted to work anymore. And well, as dumb as it sounds in hindsight, it worked.
In 1947, Congress passed the Taft Hartley Act over President Truman's veto. It banned closed shops, allowed states to pass right to work laws, required union leaders to sign anti-communist affidavits, and critically, it enshrined in law the employer's right to actively campaign against unionization during organizing drives. Before Taft Hartley, a third of the American workforce was unionized. Within a generation, that number started a decline that would continue for 70 years. By 2022, union membership in the private sector had fallen to just over 6%.
Now, regardless of if you personally see this as a 24% or an 80% drop in union membership, this has had a disproportionate impact on all workers. With a strong union presence, other workers, even those outside the unions, had some power over their employers because union roles could raise the bar on what was reasonable pay and conditions for a given role. If those non-unionized workers didn't meet those demands, they could always try to leave for a unionized workplace or get workers from their own company to join. The Taft Hartley Act made this competitive matter significantly more one-sided.
Following this ruling, right to work provisions spread through state legislators. Southern and western states adopted them almost immediately, creating a geographic race to the bottom for who could offer up more easily exploitable workers. Manufacturers started moving operations to right to work states where organized labor had no foothold, hollowing out the union strongholds of the industrial Midwest. Union leaders called it the Slave Labor Act. But the political groundwork had already been laid by two years of nobody wants to work anymore coverage.
But delegitimizing a fight for better conditions is just the most obvious application of these seven words. Over 130 years, the same complaint has been weaponized to gut safety nets, shift training costs onto the taxpayer, open and close borders, or just blame the youth for whatever it is we need to blame them for this week. So, it's time to learn how history works. to find out why nobody has wanted to work for 130 years and counting.
This video is sponsored by the book from Hungry Minds. Hungry Minds is an international creative group of artists, scientists, architects, and designers who work together to make cultural projects that feel both beautiful and useful. Their latest release, The Book, the ultimate guide to rebuilding a civilization, is a stunning illustrated encyclopedia of humanity's greatest inventions and discoveries. 400 pages and 180 topics covering everything from agriculture and engineering to medicine and manufacturing, all rendered in incredible illustrations that blend engineering diagrams with a medieval art style. What I love about it is that it is not a survivalist manual or a dry textbook. It is a captivating visual journey through how civilizations actually figured out the basics and why understanding those basics still matters today, even if you never have to rebuild anything from scratch. It raised over $2.3 million on Kickstarter and became an international bestseller. And flipping through it, you can see exactly why. It is a collectible, high-quality hard cover, and there is even a hidden quest woven through the pages, a secret puzzle to solve as you read. It makes the perfect gift for the curious person in your life, or honestly for yourself. For a channel like ours that is constantly exploring how the past shaped the present, this was a natural fit. Get your copy of the book at the link in my description or scan the QR code on screen and use my code how history works 10 for a special discount.
In 1937, the Gazette and Daily in York, Pennsylvania ran a headline about a shortage of labor. Peach farmers in York and Adams counties said, "Nobody wants to work anymore." They needed 15 to 25 pickers per orchard, but were only getting two to five showing up. But this is 1937 during the Great Depression. Unemployment was still above 14%. It was not exactly a labor market where people had the luxury of being picky. Am I right, lads? Oh, brother. This guy stinks. Um, anyway, what was actually happening was that the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, was putting millions of Americans to work on federal projects, building roads, bridges, schools, parks, and post offices, and paying them slightly better than what the peach farmers were offering for backbreaking seasonal work in the sun. The WPA paid $55 a month for steady work. The orchards were paying less than that for seasonal labor with no guarantees of hours beyond the harvest. Workers weren't lazy. They just had a marginally less terrible option. Farmers and industrialists across the South lobbied to have WPA projects shut down during harvest season so that workers would have no choice but to pick crops at whatever wage the farmers felt like paying. One California agricultural leader literally said the solution was to starve them out, which um, yikes. The WPA actually had to issue a formal press release in June of 1937 titled labor shortage charges refuted by WPA pointing out that only 3% of WPA workers were in areas where farm labor was even supposedly needed.
The same thing happened in 1940. Wisconsin's governor Julius Hail said the trouble is everybody is on relief or a pension. Nobody wants to work anymore, while pushing to cut government employment programs. And again in 1979, a dry cleaner in New Orleans told United Press International that a woman laughed in his face when he offered $3 an hour because she could clear $16 a week on welfare. His conclusion was the same one from 1894, from 1937, from 1940. Nobody wants to work anymore. The government puts everybody on welfare when they ought to be working. $3 an hour in 1979 was about $15 in today's money. Depending on which inflation calculator you use, give or take.
Now, the third reason why this dumb little line has so much staying power is one that most people don't consider, and it might be the sneakiest of the lot. Nobody wants to work has been used for over a century to offload training costs from employers onto the taxpayer. For most of American history, employers trained their own workers. Apprenticeships were how you learned a trade. A young person would spend years working under a skilled craftsman, and the employer footed the bill because a trained worker was worth the investment. But after the industrial revolution, machines made it progressively easier to replace skilled craftsmen with cheaper, less experienced workers. The old apprenticeship system started to collapse under the weight of industrial production. Unions and businesses fought over how much to pay trainees, and the compromise they eventually landed on was make the government do it. The Smith Hughes Act of 1917 created federal funding for vocational education and workforce training. Taxpayers picked up the bill that employers used to pay.
A Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor report from 1907 had basically written the obituary for the American Apprenticeship a decade earlier, noting that from the introduction of the first labor saving machine dates the decline of the apprentice. Yet the government funded vocational tract was largely a flop. By 1926, an influential educator named George Counts reported that the new career courses were playing a relatively humble role in the curriculum. Working-class families rejected any second-tier educational tract that assumed their kids shouldn't try for college. So that left us with the worst of both worlds. Employers stopped training workers. Government training programs weren't producing enough skilled labor. And employers started complaining that nobody wants to work anymore. When what they actually meant was nobody shows up pre-trained at the wage we want to pay.
By the 2010s and 2020s, this had become one of the most reliable corporate talking points in America. Skills gap articles were everywhere. Employers saying they had thousands of open positions and nobody qualified to fill them. But what was almost never mentioned in those articles was what the positions actually paid or what the employers had invested in training over the previous decade. American companies were investing roughly half the amount in workforce training as a share of GDP compared to 20 years earlier. I mean, if you've ever seen a job posting for an entry-level position requiring 3 to 5 years of experience, that is the logical endpoint of a 100-year process where employers gradually convince themselves and the general public that training workers was somebody else's job.
Now, it all sounds bad, but it gets worse. Nobody wants to work has been used to open the door for cheaper imported labor and then to slam it shut again the moment those workers are no longer useful. In the 1860s, the Central Pacific Railroad recruited roughly 20,000 Chinese immigrants to build the Transcontinental Railroad, one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in our history. They did backbreaking, dangerous work through the Sierra Nevada mountains, tunneling through granite with hand drills and black powder, working through avalanches and harsh winters. They were paid less than white workers doing the same job, and they were less inclined to unionize. The railroad companies framed this as a labor shortage problem. There simply weren't enough Americans willing to do the work. Nobody wants to work.
When the economy crashed in 1873 and suddenly there weren't enough jobs to go around, the narrative flipped overnight. Chinese workers were stealing jobs. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, one of the most explicitly racist pieces of immigration legislation in American history. The workers who had been recruited to fill a labor shortage were now the cause of a different one.
The same pattern played out again in the mid-20th century with the Bracero program. Starting in 1942, the US government brought in millions of Mexican agricultural workers on temporary visas to fill supposed labor shortages on American farms. The program ran for 22 years. Bracero workers were routinely underpaid, housed in poor conditions, and had wages skimmed through mandatory savings programs that many never received back. When the program ended in 1964, the door closed and deportation campaigns ramped up. The workers who had been needed for two decades were suddenly unwelcome.
In the 1990s, the cycle came back in a different industry. Technology lobbyists started claiming severe labor shortages in IT and engineering. The narrative was straightforward. American workers were not up to the task. There weren't enough computer science graduates and companies needed foreign talent to fill the gap. The solution was the H-1B visa. The Immigration Act of 1990 created the program and the original intent was a modest temporary worker visa capped at 25,000 per year. But employer lobbying groups, particularly the American Council for International Personnel and the Business Immigration Coalition, got the cap raised to 65,000, and fought any requirement to prioritize American workers before sponsoring foreign ones. The economic logic was straightforward. H-1B workers were tied to their sponsoring employer, which meant they were far less likely to negotiate aggressively on salary or push back on working conditions. The stated goal was filling a shortage. The practical effect was a workforce with less leverage to negotiate. The rationale was always the same. Nobody wants to work and nobody is qualified. But a National Science Foundation study that had been used to justify the so-called scientist and engineer shortage was later shown to be deeply flawed. There was no shortage of capable American workers. There was a shortage of American workers willing to accept the wages being offered.
The complaint about who wants to work has always been calibrated to whatever the employer needs at any given moment in our economic history. When cheap labor is needed, the door opens. When it isn't, the same workers get blamed for being there.
And then there's maybe the most evergreen function of all. Nobody wants to work is an extraordinarily good excuse for when a business simply cannot get it [ __ ] done. The 1922 clipping from the Malbury News in Kansas is beautiful. A reader writes in asking, "What is the cause of unemployment and hard times?" and reports that the manufacturer and businessman say it's because nobody wants to work anymore unless they can be paid enough wages to work half of the time and loaf half of the time. The working man's response in the same letter was that hard times were caused by the determined stand the employees have made to beat down wages. And the letter ends by asking, now why is it these things exist during a Republican administration? That letter is 104 years old. 104. It could have been posted on Reddit yesterday.
The 1999 clipping is great, too. Two brothers closing their shoe repair shop after 53 years. Nobody wants to work anymore. One of them says they all want to work in front of a computer and make lots of money. Which, well, yeah, duh. People did want to work in front of computers in 1999 because that is where the money was. The shoe repair business didn't fail because workers got lazy. It failed because the economy moved on and the business didn't. You're trying to repair shoes in the '90s. Get with the times.
Same energy with the 2006 letter to the Ventura County Star about someone who can't find a contractor to do home improvements. It almost seems like nobody wants to work anymore. Or it's the middle of a housing boom. Contractors are booked solid for months and the person writing this letter isn't offering enough to jump the queue. The through line across all of these is the same. When a business is struggling, nobody wants to work is a far more comfortable diagnosis than my business model doesn't pay enough to attract the workers it needs. Or for larger companies, it's just a great excuse to handwave away a bad quarter.
Now, of course, if you have been paying any attention to anything, it's pretty clear how after COVID this phrase came back harder than it had been in years. The 2022 Forbes piece in Fair's collection cites a survey where one in five executives said no one wants to work anymore. Restaurant owners, hotel chains, retail managers, all repeating the same seven words that the Rooks County Record published in 1894. But what actually happened during COVID was that a pandemic gave millions of workers the breathing room to reconsider whether $12 an hour was worth risking their lives for. And a lot of them decided it wasn't. Governments around the world sent out stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits by an additional $600 per week. And for a brief window of time, the lowest paid workers in the country had a genuine alternative to showing up at a job that paid poverty wages with no sick leave during a global health emergency. The business lobby's response was immediate and predictable. Governors in 26 states pulled out of the expanded unemployment program early, months before the federal deadline, explicitly to force workers back into the labor market. The stated reason was always the same one. Nobody wants to work. Oh, well, actually this time we rebranded it slightly to the great resignation. Oh, and uh, best part was that researchers actually went and studied what happened in those 26 states. They compared employment outcomes in states that cut benefits early against states that kept them. The difference in employment was minimal. The main effect of cutting benefits early was that workers in those states lost income.
And if you want to know whether any of that pushing back actually works, whether workers gaining leverage ever makes inequality better in the long run, or whether it just keeps getting worse no matter what, go watch that video next. And don't forget to like and subscribe to keep on learning how history works.