“Nobody Wants to Work Anymore”

Over the past few months, I’ve encountered the following meme online.

I thought it would be fun to look for the original articles from which these quotes were pulled, so I did that.

• 1894 – The Stockton Review and Rooks County Record (Stockton, Kansas) – April 27, 1894 – Page 4
• 1905 – Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield, South Carolina) – December 20, 1905 – Page 2
• 1916 – Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, New York) – October 24, 1916 – Page 8
• 1922 – The News-Journal (Mulberry, Kansas) – May 5, 1922 – Page 4
• 1937 – York Daily Record (York, Pennsylvania) – September 16, 1937 – Page 7
• 1940 – Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wisconsin) – March 22, 1940 – Page 4
• 1952 – Alabama Journal (Montgomery, Alabama) – June 2, 1952 – Page 4
• 1969 – The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia) – May 9, 1969 – Page 71
• 1979 – News-Journal (Mansfield, Ohio) – May 9, 1979 – Page 39
• 1981 – The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida) – April 23, 1981 – Page 242
• 1999 – Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida) – November 10, 1999 – Page 181 (Part 1) & 186 (Part 2)
• 2006 – Ventura County Star (Ventura, California) – August 14, 2006 – Page 15
• 2014 – Germantown News (Germantown, Tennessee) – January 29, 2014 – Page 13
• 2022 – Forces.com – January 19, 2022

Memes like this are cute and are pretty good a making a convincing point, but those quotes lack context and nuance.

Some of the articles aren’t about capitalists complaining about a lack of cheap labor, though, but rather about old people complaining about young people, and how things were better back in the day when they were young and people were hard-working, in their eyes.

If anything is true, this is an old story: people have been saying “nobody wants to work anymore” to describe the current economic situation for a long time here in the United States.

Bonus Content

Other articles showed up while doing these searches on Newspapers.com, so I’d like to share a couple more articles for your enjoyment.

This first one is about a policeman informant who described criminals he helped bust.

• 1999 – Republican and Herald (Pottsville, Pennsvylania) – June 20, 1999 – Page 8

This last one is a real gem, though. In Virginia in 1946, a bill was proposed in the House of Delegates to abolish work because “nobody wants to work”, of course.

• 1946 – The Richmond News Leader (Richmond, Virginia) – February 12, 1946 – Page 1