A few weeks ago, some friends and I were swapping tales about the worst jobs we'd ever had. There were some howlers: from changing faeces-stained linen at a holiday camp for £2.50 an hour, to spending 12 hours a day measuring gravy cubes to ensure they were all the same size. For my part, I recounted the time I worked in a restaurant and was made to purposely burn my fingers so that they would develop the calluses needed to carry hot crockery.

The level of value we place upon paid work has often baffled me. I've never understood why it is so readily championed as the route to dignity, self-worth and financial security when for so many people, work is undignified, demoralising and underpaid. It's strange that when David Cameron boasted that his party backs the "workers" over the "shirkers", he failed to initiate a conversation about the reality of working life for most of the population.

Critics of the government talk frequently about the flaws in plans for getting people into work: from workfare being labelled contemporary slave labour, to benefit sanctions being unrealistic and inhumane. But the wider social implications of these plans are rarely discussed. We are yet to address the fact that a cocktail of work programmes and benefit sanctions creates a culture in which the only respectable option becomes paid work – any paid work. As Peter Dwyer and Nick Ellison wrote in their 2009 paper, Work and welfare: the rights and responsibilities of unemployment in the UK:

"The individual's responsibility not only to find work but to have life shaped by work – become embedded and ultimately 'assumed'. Over time, assumptions are institutionalised and so become part of a new consensus about work and welfare."



It is a consensus seeping into the attitudes of welfare claimants themselves. In 2011, Professor Tracy Shildrick of the Social Institute at Teesside University noted that many of society's lowest earners prefer to work even if benefits leave them better off, because they believe that "getting by" is a more respectable option to living on welfare. Shildrick interviewed an intermittently employed care worker, Andre, who told her: "The whole thing repulsed me, signing on. I just couldn't be doing with it; sponging off the state."

However, the unquestioning acceptance of paid work as the only valid way of occupying one's time has some obvious problems. For one thing, society is not divided between lazy scroungers and paid workers. The lauding of paid work devalues other important forms of unwaged activity, such as childcare, community volunteering or coping with illness and disability. These activities are the sort that should be willingly funded by taxpayers as contributions towards a collective and compassionate society – not dismissed by the government as barriers to paid work.

Viewing paid work as an end in itself also prevents a discourse on what work itself is actually like. The government's back-to-work initiatives come hand in hand with the weakening of the employment regulations won after decades of struggle by trade unionists. The government tells us that weakening these regulations is a necessary measure to "incentivise" employers to take on new staff, but work cannot transform people from poverty to dignity if the labour market becomes so casualised that workers must accept inhumane conditions for lower wages. Indeed, the great scandal of benefits is that so many go to people whose wages are simply too low to live on.

In his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Professor David Harvey argues that we should not view neoliberalism as a bundle of characteristics, but as a political project to accumulate capital for a small group of wealthy people. So perhaps it is worth examining this quintessentially neoliberal government's policies on work, not in terms of their individual effects, but as part of a wider project to permanently transform the relationship between work and welfare. Now welfare is not something offered to those who need it, but something that can be used as a sanction for an individual who has failed in their primary goal to get a paid job. The erosion of welfare as a marker of compassion is transforming us from a caring society to a working society.

Earlier this month, the Daily Mail's Dominique Jackson made an ill-advised attempt to rehabilitate the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "work sets you free." But it wasn't her bizarre Nazi apology that caught my eye the most; it was her reasoning behind it: "There is dignity to be gained from any job, no matter how menial, and for young people at the start of their careers, there are valuable lessons to be learned from any form of employment." Jackson is wrong: there is no dignity in risking your safety and self-respect for wages you can't even live on. Dignity comes with the recognition that we are not simply workers that create value; but human beings who have value, innately.