In factories across the United States and Europe, machines are humming, assembly lines are ready, and wages are rising. There’s just one problem: no one wants to work.
It’s not just a Gen Z problem, though they’re the latest group being blamed. It’s a generational, cultural, and economic shift that’s hollowing out entire sectors – especially manufacturing – and threatening the social fabric of nations built on the dignity of labor.
We are drifting into a dangerous new reality: a society where millions are either unwilling or uninterested in working, while a small elite class hoards wealth, controls technology, and reshapes the economy in their image.
The manufacturing labor crisis: Nobody wants the jobs
Even as government incentives and tariffs attempt to bring manufacturing back home, employers struggle to fill vacancies. Jobs exist. Pay is up. Workplaces are cleaner, safer, and often infused with cutting-edge automation. But applications aren’t coming in.
Why?
Because in too many places, people simply don’t want to work.
There are plenty of exceptions – millions still get up early, put in long shifts, and try to support their families. But there’s also a growing culture of avoidance.
One that sees physical or repetitive work as beneath them, or unnecessary thanks to a government that will cover the basics: rent, food, utilities, entertainment.
And this isn’t limited to one country. In the UK, across Europe, and in the US, entire welfare systems have created a structure in which not working is not only survivable – it’s sustainable. It’s even comfortable.
The robots can’t save us from our own laziness
We were promised that automation would liberate us from drudgery. That AI, robots, and software would handle the boring stuff so we could focus on creativity and freedom. But the machines can’t fix a cultural problem.
Companies have tried everything: gamifying tasks, making work “fun”, and redesigning factories to feel more like tech campuses. Still, the fundamental truth remains: work is work. And a generation raised on dopamine hits and passive entertainment often wants no part of it.
This isn’t just about jobs. It’s about a collapse in the value of effort. An infantilised culture has emerged – one where the slightest inconvenience is seen as trauma, and responsibility is someone else’s problem.
We’ve lost touch with the idea that meaning comes from contribution – not comfort.
Universal basic income: The road to totalitarianism
Amid all this social and economic uncertainty and indeed chaos, enter Universal Basic Income – the idea that the government should pay everyone a set amount each month, no questions asked, regardless of whether they work or not.
Supporters call it compassionate. I call it dangerous. And a paving of the way to outright communism or worse – fascism maybe. Or a mongrel blend of all these “isms” mixed with today’s techno-mind-reading micromanagement AI supercomputer-controlled society which is much worse than Orwell’s 1984.
If people are already turning away from factory jobs that pay and produce, what do we think happens when everyone gets money for free? The UBI fantasy doesn’t create innovation — it subsidizes stagnation. It doesn’t level the playing field – it lowers the bar until no one needs to try.
For a nation like the US, founded on hard work and ambition, UBI is a poison pill. It may usher in a kind of bureaucratic communism, where effort is optional, and dependency is permanent.
And let’s not forget: the money for UBI doesn’t appear out of thin air. It comes from the productive few — and ends up in the pockets of those who no longer feel the need to contribute.
Meanwhile, the working poor are drowning
While one class checks out entirely, another is grinding just to stay afloat. Millions of working Americans – and their counterparts around the world – juggle two, three, even four jobs just to make ends meet.
The irony? Many of these workers earn less after taxes and expenses than some welfare recipients receive in subsidies and benefits. The system punishes those who try and rewards those who opt out.
The result is growing resentment. A widening rift between those who work and those who don’t. And a collapse in national morale.
Financialization: The parasitic effect in the economy
And hovering above it all is the billionaire elite – a small cadre of tech moguls and financial engineers who control trillions in assets, pay almost nothing in taxes, and extract wealth from the economy without creating much of anything real.
They don’t build. They speculate. And they profit from a system designed to keep most people down – either by overworking them or paying them to disappear quietly into the digital background.
This is the real tragedy: the destruction of the middle class – the working engine of any stable society. A nation cannot thrive on hedge fund profits and digital advertising revenue alone.
We need factories. We need effort. We need the dignity of labor to mean something again.
What’s the endgame?
If current trends continue, the future looks bleak: a two-tier society of the working poor and the non-working subsidized, all governed by an elite class of untouchables.
The result is rising crime, social dysfunction, and even emigration by the productive class – people fleeing cities, countries, or entire continents just to escape the rot.
In the UK, it’s been reported that millionaires are leaving in droves – one every five minutes or something. Who stays behind? Often, it’s the criminals, the career-dependent, and the bureaucrats.
That’s not just a drain on national talent. It’s a slow death spiral.
We need to place greater value on work
We are in danger of forgetting the very thing that made our societies prosperous in the first place: the willingness to work. To build. To contribute. Not just for a paycheck, but for a sense of purpose and shared responsibility.
We cannot automate, subsidize, or meme our way out of this. And no amount of universal income or billionaire-funded techno-utopianism will restore the spirit of a broken workforce.
Only work can do that.
It’s probably a losing battle because, nowadays, “the hustle” – by which I mean wheelin’ and dealin’ and doing whatever you need to do, including commit crimes, to get money (while at the same time getting welfare payments because your bogus disability claim based on you being hypersensitive to daylight so much so so that you go deranged and start crying at slightly opening the curtains was accepted) – is given greater respect than work. We’ve got to respect people’s humans rights, right?
People who get up and go to work every day are not only no longer given the respect they deserve, they are seen as easy prey for scams and crimes of all types because they’re boring squares – or whatever the insulting terms are nowadays. And they are not home or hanging around the neighbourhood to do anything about it.
As the economist Milton Friedman said: “We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.”
But then, Friedman could be said to be the godfather of the monetary polices which have led to the over-financialization of almost all mature market economies in the West, which, in turn, led to the elimination of any “work” that involved any greater effort than shouting “buy buy buy” or “sell sell sell” once in a while.
It’s complicated.
