"It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work"
About this Quote
The subtext is not that workers are lazy or that bosses are cartoon villains. It’s that the system trains each party to pursue an impossible asymptote. Capital wants frictionless production; labor wants security detached from vulnerability. Schumacher’s real target is the ideology that pretends these are merely technical problems solvable by “efficiency,” rather than structural tensions baked into wage labor itself.
Context matters: Schumacher wrote in the shadow of postwar industrial expansion and the rise of managerial “scientific” thinking, later culminating in his Small Is Beautiful critique of bigness, automation, and growth-for-growth’s-sake. The quip anticipates our current era with eerie accuracy. Employers chase automation, outsourcing, and AI to minimize headcount; employees, watching volatility and burnout metastasize, chase passive income, gig “freedom,” and early retirement hacks. Both sides are responding rationally to incentives, yet the shared result is a thinning sense of mutual obligation.
The sentence endures because it refuses to flatter anyone. It forces a harder question: if both ideals are escapist, what would a sane economy ask people to want instead?
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Schumacher, E. F. (2026, January 18). It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-might-be-said-that-it-is-the-ideal-of-the-8162/
Chicago Style
Schumacher, E. F. "It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-might-be-said-that-it-is-the-ideal-of-the-8162/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-might-be-said-that-it-is-the-ideal-of-the-8162/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
