Does Work Necessarily Have Disutility?

I just had an incredibly interesting conversation with my father inspired by my earlier post arguing, with perhaps somewhat overly provocative rhetoric/title, that liberals shouldn't push for a "jobs guarantee," they should push for an "ability to have a decent life guarantee" independent of whether someone is currently "employed." Among the things that came up was the way that economic thinking can be somewhat blinkered, and can draw conclusions that aren't necessarily true, and also my assertion that "work sucks," or more technically that most things people do as paid labor have negative net utility for the people doing them. But thinking about it in more depth, I'm not sure that's true. The inference from which one would draw that conclusion is that just about no one would actually do their job if they weren't being paid for it. You'd think that something with net positive utility, all things (other than money) considered, would be something you'd willingly volunteer to do, even in the absence of compensation.

The problem with that inference, though, is that we live in a society where one simply must have a certain amount of income in order to live a basically comfortable life, and the only way for most people to get that income is to get someone to pay them to do stuff. Even if, say, I would rather have a career as a law professor and write various books and articles and teach classes and such than just not do any of that, independent of the compensation issue, I still need to get some money somehow. And the fact that I can do that stuff, assuming I can (which is what, in my case, the next decade or so will determine), and the fact that it's stuff other people would like to see done gives me power. Given that I need some income in order to live a decently comfortable life, it much behooves me to use that power as leverage over people who have a bunch of money to get them to give me some of it. That's just as true if the job has net positive utility to me as it is if it has net negative utility. I have a strong incentive to effectively pretend the work has disutility, so that I can credibly say to potential employers that I won't do the work unless they pay me at least X or whatever. More generally, assuming I'm at least somewhat selfish, I might as well use this leverage to just get as much money out of my employer as I can, even beyond the point of relative comfort, even if I would in theory be willing to do the job for free.

Now, this doesn't really have any consequences for the question of whether we should have the government give people money only if they do work in exchange for it or just because we don't want them to starve. The kind of work in question almost certainly would have significant disutility, and besides, just because I like doing something doesn't mean you should coerce me into doing it. But both just for thinking about society and for various kinds of reformist policy thinking, it's an important dynamic to understand. People don't, and shouldn't, be paid the bare minimum amount that would compensate them for the disutility of their labor. That workers have ways of exerting power to get more than that bare minimum compensation is among the great victories of modern liberalism. And it means we can't necessarily infer from the fact that no one would, in the real world, do their job for free the fact that their work has negative utility in some theoretical sense. It's more complicated than that.