ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the work for vocational educators, focusing attention on the ethical debate over work in late twentieth-century America. The concept of work is separated from the notion of a job on the basis of our ethical understandings. A job is simply a way of making a living; work involves a sense of completion and fulfillment. Workplace democracy also requires that workers appropriate significant power in the operation of a plant or corporation—power that would help protect them from the special dangers posed in the unstable contemporary corporate landscape. Vocational education students must be aware of the possibility of good work and its connection to the foundations of American society. Bad work produces waste, shoddy products, apathy, hostility, alcohol and drug abuse, nihilism, reliance on "experts", and depression. Neoclassicists contend that the skills of workers determine the nature of the labor market.
