History

"Nobody Wants to Work Anymore"

This trope is older than anyone currently alive today.

Over the past few months, I’ve encountered the following meme online.

A vertical meme titled 'NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE!' with the subtitle 'A brief history of capitalists complaining that nobody wants to work for starvation wages.' Below the heading is a tall stack of newspaper-clipping excerpts arranged in reverse-chronological order from 2022 at the top down to 1894 at the bottom, each labelled with its year (2022, 2014, 2006, 1999, 1981, 1979, 1969, 1952, 1940, 1937, 1922, 1916, 1905, 1894). Every clipping contains some variant of 'nobody wants to work anymore,' illustrating that the same complaint about labor has been recycled in American newspapers for more than 125 years.

Nobody Wants to Work Anymore!

I thought it would be fun to look for the original articles from which these quotes were pulled, so I did that.

Memes like this are cute and are pretty good a making a convincing point, but those quotes lack context and nuance.

Some of the articles aren’t about capitalists complaining about a lack of cheap labor, though, but rather about old people complaining about young people, and how things were better back in the day when they were young and people were hard-working, in their eyes.

If anything is true, this is an old story: people have been saying “nobody wants to work anymore” to describe the current economic situation for a long time here in the United States.

Bonus Content

Other articles showed up while doing these searches on Newspapers.com, so I’d like to share a couple more articles for your enjoyment.

This first one is about a policeman informant who described criminals he helped bust.

This last one is a real gem, though. In Virginia in 1946, a bill was proposed in the House of Delegates to abolish work because “nobody wants to work”, of course.

Last updated on Jun 04, 2023 03:11 UTC