Today, many people would say that if you do not work, you are not a "good" person. This can seem strange if one considers that most jobs these days are divorced from human survival and often from any fundamental value of any kind. A person who "works" in the sales department of a widget factory is a "good person" because he works, someone who does not work is presumed to be a "bad person" solely because he does not work. Despite these presumptions, when the widgets made by Widgets Inc. are not actually important in any tangible way, one might still find themselves asking whether working in the sales department can, in of itself, make someone into a good person. If we consider traditional values, work was originally acknowledged as being something that rational people wanted to avoid doing too much of. But work was also associated with human survival, so those who were "good" were usually found working, particularly as the dilemmas associated with slavery mounted (previously, the dilemma wherein one doesn't want to work but work must be done and getting it done is "good" was sometimes solved by making other people do the work). Ultimately, the traditional values that viewed any kind of drudgery as a metaphysical stigma were supplanted by new forms of traditional values (particularly in Protestant Christianity) that viewed work as a noble sacrifice. What we see then is that the concept of being a "good person" and "doing good" were conflated into working. This happened because working resulting in good things for people. Today, the idea of working is being divested from all other moral values, meaning that a person can be "bad" in practically every way but so long as they work hard, they may still be considered "good" by many people. While this is a problem that people will need to assess as jobs are "lost" to automation, instead of discussing it and the future I would prefer to go even further back because I think it is in the past where the real answer to this dilemma can be found. We will eventually have to accept that "working" is not always good in of itself, only being good is good in of itself. But what is being good? The earliest philosophies generally did not distinguish between "good and evil" in the first place. Instead they talked about the metaphysical unity of all things and the goal of spiritual transcendence. The concept of "good and evil" was an easy method for explaining the quest for transcendence: things that encouraged one to transcend their selfish individual existence, such as meditation and charity, were "good" while things that did not encourage transcendence were "bad". Over time the concepts of good and evil became increasingly politicized, until they became almost completely divorced from transcendental ideas. It was only after the divorce occurred between "transcendental" and "good" that the concept of good was itself conflated into another idea, that of the "work ethic". Today "working" has finished taking ideas from "good" and is divorcing itself from those ideas. I believe that ultimately, "work" as a value cannot stand on its own and that eventually, neither can "good and evil". The course of history has been to separate these ideas (and ourselves) from transcendental truth through a processes of partial absorption and divorce. Imaginary "rights" (none of which actually exist) have helped this process along. Even so, the same forces that contributed to the atomization of traditional structures will also ultimately destroy their products, eventually leaving only the truth behind.
I was watching a TV travel docu some years ago, and the presenter said about an Amazon(?) tribe "They have no word in their language for "work", they just go and do what needs to be done". I like that..
A related idea that I didn't get to in writing the OP was that people used to value "asceticism" which basically means spiritually training yourself, which included physical training for those capable of it. In Christianity it eventually became identified with rejecting material wealth, which was really only a path towards ascesis and not necessarily ascesis itself. The work ethic consumed not just the idea of "good", it also consumed the concept of ascesis for most people. So now the only form of asceticism taken seriously is hard work but with few exceptions, the work ethic probably won't be able to hold merit for most people forever.
My late father was a workaholic (and I mean that quite literally); he once said to my mother- "That factory's my life", and he threw every fibre of his mind and body into it. Eventually it sent him half-nutty and he showed a classic major symptom of overwork, namely a complete loss of perspective on life, unable to distinguish between the important things in life and the unimportant ones. I've seen it in other people too over the years, the main common denominator seems to be that they were all very shallow people with hardly any spiritual depth. Funnily enough I didn't take after my dad in the slightest and have always had a healthy christian outlook on life, namely that this material world has no importance in the grand scheme of things- "Don't love the world or the things in it,otherwise the love of God is not in you" (1 John 2:15-17) "Set your mind on things above,not on things on the earth" (Col 3:2) "A friend of the world is the enemy of God" (James 4:4) "You were dead when you followed the ways of the world" (Eph 2:1/2) "You died with Christ from this world, so don't keep submitting to its rules" (Col 2:20) "For we look at things unseen rather than the seen, for the seen are temporary,but the unseen are eternal" (2 Cor 4:18 )
It is not just the work that should be considered. People work to earn money to support themselves and their family. Getting paid for physical labor is looked at as honest and noble. Your physical effort is what you are selling. Now using knowledge or special abilities to earn a living is also good but physical laborers have always been looked at as the salt of the earth.
The best thing about working is that you are really supporting the continuation of life being with the 7 billion plus functioning as one earthly living structure.
Food for thought- Jesus's cousin John was a young world-rejecter living rough in the middle of nowhere eating wild food and dressed in near-rags, and never had a job as far as we know, sometimes going in town to yell insults at the snooty priests and corrupt rulers. Jesus's verdict on him? - "John is the greatest man ever to be born" (Matt 11:11)
Like I said, John called the snooty priests and rulers every name under the sun and they eventually cut his head off, so whose side are you on, his or theirs? They even said Jesus was nutty, but the world needs daredevils like that to spice it up a bit, we don't all want to be little goody two-shoes..
