War, Work, and the Fragile Ladder of Dignity

War ripples through societies in three widening circles. The first is those killed in the war zone, whose ordinary lives are abruptly cut short. The second is the survivors in those same communities, who must live with devastation and the lifelong pain of loss. The third circle consists of those whose livelihoods are disrupted far from the front lines, in ways the world rarely has time to notice.

It is this third circle that we too often fail to see.

Consider the recent US–Israel war on Iran. The children killed belong to the first circle; their surviving parents to the second. But thousands of migrant workers across the Middle East—whose jobs, incomes, and futures have been thrown into uncertainty—belong to the third.

War does not destroy only lives and infrastructure. It quietly kicks away the fragile ladders of dignity that millions of workers have spent a lifetime climbing.

My research focuses on dignity at work. What war reveals is that a person’s sense of dignity is shaped not only inside workplaces; it is profoundly influenced by forces far beyond them. For millions of migrant workers, that sense of progress is built slowly through work—but it can be destabilized overnight by geopolitical shocks entirely outside their control.

I have seen this up close.

I have known Ramesh* for as long as I can remember. We grew up in the same village in southern India. As a boy, he lived with an abusive father and the absence of opportunity in a region where agriculture was steadily collapsing due to water scarcity. One day, after a particularly severe beating, his grandmother pressed a few rupees into his hand for a bus ticket and told him to leave.

Chennai offered Ramesh his first taste of freedom in the mid-1990s. But freedom did not mean stability. The jobs he found barely covered his living costs. Then came an opportunity: work as a backhoe operator in Saudi Arabia. That decision changed his life.

Over time, the money he sent home transformed his family’s prospects. He built a house, got married, and raised two children. Last year, his daughter secured admission to an engineering college.

A few weeks ago, Ramesh returned home for his mother’s funeral. Two days before the latest escalation in the Middle East, he boarded a flight back to Saudi Arabia. Today, like millions of migrant workers across the region, he cannot be certain about further work or his future.

Emergency alerts and the sound of intercepted missiles have shattered a sense of stability that took decades to build. Many workers have been asked to stay indoors—a measure that may protect white-collar employees but can devastate the livelihoods of those who depend on daily physical work.

Ramesh could not have imagined that his decades-long journey toward dignity through work would prove so fragile.

His story is not unusual. It reflects the experience of millions of migrant workers across the Middle East. Of the roughly nine million Indians living in the region, most are low-wage workers whose remittances sustain families back home. Across South and Southeast Asia, entire communities depend on these income flows. When economies in the Gulf slow or stall, the consequences ripple far beyond the region.

In several Middle Eastern countries now touched by conflict—Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Qatar—foreign-born residents make up the majority of the population. A small number of wealthy expatriates have been drawn by low taxes and investment opportunities in these locations. But the overwhelming majority are low-wage workers performing the labor that sustains these economies—often with limited rights and little pathway to permanent residency.

Many live under systems such as the kafala sponsorship model, which has long been criticized for enabling exploitation. Reports have documented large numbers of workers living in conditions that meet definitions of modern slavery. War will make these vulnerabilities only more acute.

And yet, despite these conditions, migrant work has offered something powerful: predictability, self-worth, and a sense of forward movement. It provides what might be called a “dignity ladder”—an imperfect but tangible pathway through which individuals can improve their lives and those of their families.

War does not just destroy lives. It disrupts that ladder.

More than seventy years ago, Dwight Eisenhower warned that every weapon built ultimately represents resources taken from those who hunger and are not fed. Today, the costs of conflict extend even further. In a deeply interconnected global economy, wars do not only devastate nations; they destabilize the fragile systems through which millions of people construct meaning, security, and dignity through work.

This is why the consequences of war cannot be understood only through casualties or infrastructure damage. They must also be understood through what they do to people’s dignity. As conflict resolution specialist Donna Hicks has written, “Dignity is our highest common denominator.” That is precisely why the effects of war cannot be contained to the battlefield alone.

That insight does not stop at migrant workers.

What the current moment reveals—perhaps uncomfortably—is that dignity at work is fragile everywhere. The same underlying vulnerability that affects a migrant laborer in the Gulf—the dependence on institutions that can withdraw stability without warning, and environments where it is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve workers’ dignity—also exists, in different forms, across workplaces globally.

In Australia, signs asking the public to treat employees with respect are becoming increasingly common—appearing in post offices, on public transport, and across schools and hospitals. These reminders would not be necessary if such behavior were the norm.

The pattern is not confined to one country. In the United Kingdom, concerns about workplace treatment have become acute; a survey within the National Health Service found staff abuse occurring at “unacceptable levels.”

This is not surprising. In recent years, I have encountered some of the most striking violations of dignity not in fields or factories, but in corporate offices. In one meeting, a senior board member repeatedly spoke over a chief executive, dismissing her contributions until she eventually stopped trying to be heard. She resigned not long afterward.

Across sectors and geographies, similar patterns emerge. Workers describe everyday humiliations, subtle exclusions, and environments where their worth feels conditional. As Jeffrey Pfeffer has argued, harmful workplaces are not confined to physically dangerous industries; many modern professional environments are deeply stressful and, at times, health-damaging.

The point is not to equate these experiences with those of migrant workers in conflict zones. It is to recognize a shared thread: dignity at work is more fragile than we often assume.

As Kristen Lucas has argued, workplace dignity is best understood as “the self-recognized and other-recognized worth acquired from (or injured by) engaging in work activity.” That definition matters because it captures something many organizations still fail to see: work is never about only income or output, but also about whether people feel seen, valued, and respected.

If workplaces are meant to recognize people as fully human, many are falling short. Surveys suggest that only a minority of workers feel fully respected at work, and large numbers who experience mistreatment never report it. These are not isolated problems of morale; they point to a systemic failure to value dignity as a core organizational concern.

Workplaces today are becoming more transactional, more surveilled, and less forgiving. Layoffs framed purely in terms of efficiency, the increasing replacement of human roles with algorithms, and performance systems that reduce individuals to metrics all send a similar signal: your value is conditional.

This is a mistake.

As business ethicist Nien-hê Hsieh asks, the central question is whether and how managers, organizations, and economic institutions should be guided not only by efficiency, but also by values such as freedom, fairness, and respect for basic rights.

Dignity is not a peripheral concern. It is foundational. The enduring strength of modern economic systems has not come only from innovation or competition, but from their ability—however imperfect—to offer people a sense that their lives can improve through work.

For migrant workers like Ramesh, that promise is explicit: migration offers a chance to escape violence, support family, and build a future. But the same underlying promise exists, more subtly, across all forms of work: that effort will be met with recognition, that contribution will carry meaning, and that individuals will be treated with a basic level of respect.

When that promise erodes, so does trust—in organizations, and eventually in the broader system itself.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that human beings must be treated as ends in themselves, never merely as means. Applied to work, this is a simple but demanding standard: economic systems must not depend on devaluing people.

Meeting that standard requires more than rhetoric. It requires attention and, critically, measurement. What organizations do not measure, they rarely manage. Despite the prominence of the concept in corporate values statements, systematic efforts to understand whether workers actually experience dignity remain rare.

A simple starting point is to ask workers directly how they experience dignity in their work. From there, organizations can examine the conditions that shape those experiences: safety, belonging, respect, voice, privacy, fairness, development, and trust. These are not abstract ideals; they are observable, improvable features of everyday working life.

The broader point is straightforward. If dignity is treated as incidental, it will continue to erode. If it is treated as essential, it can be strengthened.

The stakes extend beyond individual organizations. Workplaces are among the few institutions where diverse groups still interact daily toward shared goals. If dignity erodes there, social fragmentation elsewhere is likely to accelerate.

Sociologist—and former Weatherhead Center Director—Michèle Lamont has argued that societies must move from valuing people based primarily on what they have to valuing them based on who they are. Work remains one of the central arenas in which that recognition can either be realized or denied.

Today, the world is wealthier than at any point in history, and roughly six in ten adults are in the workforce. This makes the question of dignity at work not marginal, but central to how societies function.

Capitalism has endured not because it eliminated inequality or power imbalances, but because enough people believed their lives could improve within it. That belief rests, in part, on dignity—a sense that one’s efforts matter and that one is treated as a person, not a disposable input.

War exposes how quickly that sense can be shattered. For migrant workers across the Middle East, the current conflict is not only a geopolitical crisis; it is a disruption of the fragile pathways through which they have built dignity over decades.

But the lesson is broader. The same fragility exists, in different forms, across the global workforce.

The question, then, is not only how to end wars or manage economies, but how to preserve the conditions under which people can build dignified lives through work.

For Ramesh and millions like him, migration was never only about income. It was about stability, self-worth, and the possibility of a better future for their children. It was about climbing, step by step, a ladder that gave their lives direction and meaning.

The tragedy of war is not only the destruction it brings to nations. It is the quiet way it reaches into that third circle—into lives far from the battlefield—and shakes the very foundations on which that dignity is built.

And in doing so, it reminds us of something we too often forget: the systems we rely on are held together not only by power or profit, but by a simple, enduring human expectation—the desire to be treated as if we matter.

*Name has been changed to protect privacy

Contributing Bio

Senthil Nathan is a Fellow at the Weatherhead Scholars Program where his research focuses on dignity at work; business ethics; and responsible sourcing. He is the CEO of Fairtrade Australia New Zealand and serves on the board of the Australian Council for International Development. He also hosts the Business and Society podcast, where he explores ideas at the intersection of business and society with some of the world’s most influential thinkers.