asking what society would do with work after the war was
over.
Many factories in Europe and the United States had been
used to manufacture arms and supplies for the allied forces,
but that was soon ending. During the war, production had
gone through the roof; economies had thrived. And there
was a clear and definite purpose for the work: to supply the
allies with enough goods so that they could win the war.
What would the factories and their workers do now, in a
time of peace? How would people work when there was no
central purpose to unite them? Sayers feared they would
return to an inferior work ethic, which could create long-
term problems for the West.
“The habit of thinking about work as something one
does to make money is so ingrained in us,” she wrote, “that
we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it
would be to think about it instead in terms of the work
done.” If we could make this change and think of work the
same way we think of play, treating it as something we do
for pleasure, it could change the world.^8 In essence, Sayers
was saying that the same attitude we have toward the
pursuits we enjoy doing, we should have toward work,
going on to say that work is not a means to an end. It is the
end.
Every worker has a moral responsibility to ask deeper
questions of the work. She wrote, “We should ask of an
enterprise, not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’ ”^9 When you
do what Sayers calls serving the work, you do what you