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The Work That Counts: Meritocracy and the Misvaluation of Labor
Paquette, Peyton
Paquette, Peyton
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Abstract
Meritocracy promises a just social order, one where position and prosperity follow talent and effort. This thesis argues that promise is a fiction, and a morally costly one.
"The Work That Counts: Meritocracy and the Misvaluation of Labor" exposes the evaluative framework at the foundation of meritocracy: a market-centered conception of value that renders essential human labor invisible. Through analysis of healthcare workers, agricultural laborers, and frontline service employees, this thesis demonstrates that the workers who absorb the greatest physical danger, psychological sacrifice, and economic precarity are precisely those the system rewards least. This is not a flaw in the extension of meritocracy. It is a feature of its logic.
Drawing on political philosophy, labor economics, and sociology, the thesis develops an original framework - socially valuable work - grounded in Martha Nussbaum's conception of the capabilities approach. It argues that work deserves recognition not for what it earns, but for what it enables: the conditions necessary for every person to live a life of full human dignity. The thesis further shows that meritocracy's moral failures compound into political ones, generating the status anxiety and identity-based resentment that destabilize democratic life.
Against this, the thesis proposes concrete remedies: a capability-based living wage, democratic deliberation over social value, and worker codetermination. A society cannot claim to be just while allowing the workers who protect life, sustain health, and hold communities together to labor in poverty and obscurity. Recognizing that contradiction, and building institutions that respond to it, is the moral and political challenge of our modern time.
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2026-05-05
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Political Science