Good Work (Schumacher)

Good Work is both the title of Schumacher's 1979 posthumously published collection and the conceptual framework that organized his later lectures and writings. The criterion specifies three things that good work produces at once: goods that serve the community, development of the worker's faculties, and conditions for cooperation rather than isolation. The evaluation is conjunctive, not disjunctive. Work that produces excellent goods while stunting the worker is not good work. Work that develops the worker while producing nothing useful is not good work either. Work that produces goods and develops workers while destroying communities is not good work. All three criteria must be satisfied for the evaluation to stand, and the conjunction is what makes the criterion demanding — and what makes mainstream economic evaluation, which typically satisfies only the first criterion and sometimes not even that, inadequate as an account of what work is for.