Ten years after William Julius Wilson published When Work Disappears, Paul Gomberg (2007) published his book, How to Make Opportunity Equal, a philosophical examination of race and contributive justice. Contributive justice, Paul argues, focuses on what we do and distributive justice focuses on what we get. The distinction between these conceptualizations of justice may well explain President Clinton’s disappointment in Wilson and Wilson’s skeptical views on workfare. Gomberg articulated a counter and compelling argument to John Rawl’s liberal conceptualization of distributive justice: the end of work is less about getting access to work and more about sharing available work. In short, in its most abstract sense, work is never in short supply: there will always be something to do somewhere. The dominant social organization of labor is the problem: it provides no norms and institutions for sharing the work any particular era serves up, whatever type—simple or complex. Why can’t we care about cooperating over the work that must be done for any human being and society to reproduce itself, that is, to survive? What does work mean to us? How can we reverse the norm that assumes limited supplies of work and instead promote institutions where work is seen and experienced as unlimited?

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