“The so-called dignity of work — that’s like hearing a fingernail on a chalkboard,” Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., told fellow lawmakers as the House Ways and Means Committee debated President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better social policy package, which went on to pass the lower chamber last month.

“That’s the same kind of rhetoric they’ve always used to describe the situation of welfare recipients,” Moore continued. “You’re supposed to just go to work, take any old kind of job, even if you have no child care.”

But while Moore — a one-time welfare beneficiary who raised three children as a single mother — chafes at the phrase, her party’s leaders have adopted it as dogma. Biden regularly refers to the “dignity of work” in his speeches. Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have picked up the language, too. The White House even released a highly produced, 90-second video this summer in which a half-dozen Cabinet members lined up to answer the question: “What does ‘dignity of work’ mean to you?”

The “dignity of work” is also a motto for Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W. Va., who signaled this past week that he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better legislation. When asked last year what it means to be a Democrat, Manchin replied that “the dignity of work … has to be our driver.”

This isn’t just semantics. The disagreements among Democrats highlight a deeper fissure on the political and intellectual left, with stakes that are substantive as well as symbolic. For some, the phrase reflects the party’s continued commitment to its historic blue-collar base — and perhaps a wistful hope that the party can win that base back. For others, it recalls the Democrats’ devil’s bargain with Republicans in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and other party leaders embraced policies that pushed nonworkers off welfare rolls. To them, the phrase embodies ideas at odds with the party’s increasing emphasis on gender equity, racial justice and disability inclusion.

Both sides have a point. All workers do deserve to be treated with dignity. Used in that sense, the phrase can help motivate progressive policies on occupational safety, employment nondiscrimination and labor market competition. But any intimation that the sole or primary pathway to dignity lies through paid work has troubling implications in a country that is home to 100 million nonworking adults, roughly three-fifths of whom are women and a quarter of whom cite disability as their reason for remaining outside the labor force.

Democrats don’t need to drop “dignity of work,” but the phrase should be handled with more care. Biden and other Democratic leaders will fare better in the eyes of history — and probably at the ballot box — if their effort to communicate respect for working Americans doesn’t wind up relegating people outside the paid workforce to society’s margins.

Biden isn’t the first Democratic president to use “dignity of work” as a rallying cry. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, who that year launched the War on Poverty, declared, “We will not be satisfied until every man knows the dignity of work and every man understands the rewards of labor.” The statement was a head-scratcher (aside from gender): 100% labor force participation is neither attainable nor desirable in a country as large and diverse as ours.

But LBJ’s appeal to the “dignity of work” tapped into widely shared sentiments about the importance of labor — sentiments with deep roots in Catholic social teaching and Lutheran theology, as well as the Marxist philosophy of some on the party’s left fringe. For postwar Democrats seeking to unite working-class voters across racial, religious and regional lines, the “dignity of work” was useful rhetoric.

In subsequent years, the two parties waged a tug-of-war for ownership of the phrase. Republican President Ronald Reagan argued that Democrats’ support for higher taxes was incompatible with the “dignity of work.” Later, Clinton claimed the motto. “Our work won’t be done until all Americans enjoy the dignity of work,” he said in a September 1994 radio address.

Rolling off Clinton’s tongue, “dignity of work” became an argument for pushing single parents off welfare unless they found jobs. For true believers, the 1996 welfare law allowed low-income individuals to elevate themselves from dependence on government largesse into worthiness through gainful employment. More cynically, Clintonite supporters of the law also argued that by casting nonworkers overboard, Democrats would free their party and their policies of the “taint” left by cash handouts to the poor — a stain that, supporters said, turned many moderate voters off.

The Clinton effort had mixed results. The 1996 law did reduce the number of welfare beneficiaries, and it may have contributed to Clinton’s nine-point margin over Republican Bob Dole in that year’s election. But another consequence was a rise in the number of single mothers who are “disconnected” — that is, neither working nor receiving cash assistance.

The single parents and children who bore the brunt of welfare “reform” were disproportionately Black and Hispanic, which helps to explain why some on the left now hear “dignity of work” as a racist dog whistle. President Donald Trump’s embrace of the rhetoric only reinforced that perception. Trump praised the “dignity of work” as “a really good term” — which, for some Democrats who would switch to chocolate ice cream if they learned that the 45th president preferred vanilla, is enough to drop the phrase. Trump’s administration also deployed the term more perniciously: Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said cutting hundreds of thousands of nonworking adults off from food stamps would restore “the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population.”

Now some Democrats are trying to cleanse the phrase of its past, and they’ve sought to expand the notion of “work” to include a broader range of activities. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio — who crisscrossed the country in 2019 on a “Dignity of Work” tour before announcing that he wouldn’t run for president — has been especially explicit in erasing the distinction between paid and unpaid work that was so central to Clinton’s usage. “All work has dignity, whether you punch a clock or swipe a badge, whether you’re on salary or work for tips, or whether you’re caring for children,” Brown said in a Senate speech in September. “Raising children is work.”

A sufficiently capacious definition of “work” can soften the phrase’s rough edges. But that act of linguistic legerdemain is not cost-free. Parenting certainly requires great effort, but the value of caring for children does not lie in its similarity to paid labor. Parents deserve society’s respect and support, but not because they are analogous to workers on an assembly line or in an office park. (Children themselves offer a challenge to the notion that human dignity is rooted in labor: While the ascription of dignity to fetuses is a flash point in the abortion wars, all sides agree that children have dignity long before they can enter the workforce.)

Biden, meanwhile, has seized on the “dignity of work” without any acknowledgment of the phrase’s history (though he of course debated — and voted for — the 1996 welfare law). He repeats the same riff on work and dignity that he gave in a May 2021 speech in Cleveland: “My dad used to say, ‘Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in the community. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, ‘Honey, it’s going to be OK.'”

For Joe Biden Sr., the president’s father, the “dignity of work” probably did not mean taking “any old kind of job.” In his autobiography, Biden recounts that his father resigned as manager of a car dealership after the owner tossed a bucket of silver dollars on the floor at a Christmas party and watched workers scramble for the change. “He’d quit his job in protest,” Biden writes with apparent pride.

When Biden refers to the “dignity of work” now, though, he leaves out the silver dollar anecdote — and leaves listeners to guess which sense of the term he means to invoke: that workers ought to be treated with dignity or that dignity depends on work.

The social policy package that Biden is now trying to revive over Manchin’s objections reflects the competing visions of the “dignity of work” within the Democratic Party. The expanded child tax credit coheres with Brown’s view that “raising children is work.”

On the other hand, Democrats haven’t totally shed their Clinton-era reluctance to provide financial support to people outside the labor force. The version of the bill passed by the House would fund the expanded child tax credit for only a year. That’s partially a concession to cost, but it also reflects a choice to prioritize other spending items that benefit only workers — for example, a four-week paid-leave guarantee with a $200 billion price tag. You can’t claim paid leave if you don’t have a job.

And even a one-year extension of the child tax credit appears to be too much for Manchin, who has repeatedly criticized the lack of any work requirement for the credit. Apparently for him, “raising children” doesn’t count.

Even if Build Back Better becomes law, the tension over work will linger among Democrats. More than a fight over any particular policy, the “dignity of work” debate reflects a disagreement about what — and whom — the Democratic Party is “for.” Is it the party of the “working class” and “working families” — a phrase that strangely defines entire households based on what some of their members do for roughly a quarter of the hours in a week? Or is it “the party of the poor,” as the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Democrats more than a century and a half ago?

In an earlier era, the difference between these two definitions was largely one of age and gender. After World War II, nearly all adult men — including poor adult men — participated in the labor force. But the overlap between workers and the poor has shrunk: According to the Census Bureau, only 5% of workers live below the poverty level, and only 20% of people in poverty work year-round. Being the working-class party and the party of the poor aren’t antithetical, but they aren’t identical either.

When resources are limited, because of both economic constraints and political constraints imposed by centrist lawmakers whose votes are key, Democrats must make hard choices between the interests of workers and the interests of the poor. For example, the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel — for decades one of the most influential thinkers on the left and more recently an advocate of recentering the Democrats’ message around the “dignity of work” — has proposed a payroll tax cut that would be partially offset by a new consumption tax. That would generally benefit workers, who pay the payroll tax, and harm nonworkers, who don’t earn wages but still buy goods and services.

Is there a path forward for Democrats that navigates the conflict between the interests of workers and the interests of the poor without sacrificing the party’s historic commitment to both? Joe Biden Sr.’s silver dollar anecdote suggests one approach. The dignity of work — understood as the idea that all workers ought to be treated with respect — depends on employees being able to leave demeaning jobs, just as Joe Sr. walked out the car dealership door more than 60 years ago. Viewed this way, the dignity-of-work ideal justifies social and economic programs that provide benefits to nonworkers — the very sort of programs that Clinton (and Trump) sought to cut. A robust safety net for nonworkers enhances the bargaining power of employees, making exit a live option rather than compelling them to “take any old kind of job.”

This gloss on the “dignity of work” would be less an innovation than a restoration of an earlier sense of the term, rooted in the thought and rhetoric of the 1960s civil rights movement. Near the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. embraced the idea of a universal basic income — which would guarantee a minimum standard of living for nonworkers — while continuing to emphasize that “all labor has dignity.” For King, these two ideas were entirely compatible: The existence of a social safety net ensured that workers could quit, strike, and demand higher wages and more humane working conditions.

That allowed King to celebrate the contributions of workers. “The person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician,” he told striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, two weeks before his assassination. But it didn’t require him to deny the dignity of others. Dignity, he recognized, need not be a zero-sum game.

Today, King’s framing provides a way to reclaim the rhetorical power of the “dignity of work” while rejecting the uglier aspects of the term’s more recent past. We can simultaneously express the twin ideas that workers are deserving of dignity and that the 100 million nonworking adults, not to mention children, are, too. This wouldn’t require Democrats to discard the “dignity of work” as a core value. But it would allow them to reaffirm their commitment to labor without devaluing a large swath of the population along the way.

Daniel Hemel is a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a visiting professor at New York University School of Law.