This is slightly off topic. Work is rather a vague term. If you break it down into it's components: effort, compensation, social-benefit, etc. then you can start to assign relative merit to different kinds of work. For example financiers which might be categorised as: high compensation, low to moderate effort and low social benefit and janitors: low compensation, moderate effort, low compensation. Now you can start to make value judgements about how different types of work are rated or (should be) valued by the general public or society as a whole. You can also factor out the ideological or moral components attributed to work by various political factions and start to answer interesting questions such how much should teachers be paid and what jobs which are low compensation, low social benefit should we be automating as fast as possible.