The country’s “turn to production” in the late 1920s rendered “nonproductive” domestic labor irrelevant for socialism. Domestic workers were encouraged to participate in the Five-Year Plan by subscribing to state loans, agitating their friends and family in the countryside for collectivization, or by participating in state campaigns. The focus on activities outside domestic workers’ professional responsibilities signaled that intensification of domestic workers’ labor would not increase production. As the country was heading full speed toward socialism, there was renewed optimism about socialization of housework and disappearance of domestic labor, paid or unpaid. To facilitate the transition process, the labor union developed special programs that aimed to transfer domestic workers into the industries that were suffering from labor shortages. On the one hand, the new policy of mobilization of domestic workers into industry and the service sector created new opportunities for women employed in domestic service. On the other hand, it left housework without formal economic meaning for the socialist project and marginalized those women who remained in service.

The chapter makes two arguments. First, the work done in public institutions is meaningful to employees simply because of the organization's publicness. In democracies, governments and public institutions are entrusted to make rules, provide public goods, and oversee common-pool resources. The chapter suggests that workers in public organizations find their jobs to be socially valuable and are motivated by the impact of their daily activities on society at large. The second argument advanced by the chapter is that public organizations can use a number of tools to leverage the meaningfulness of public work. Organizations can design work that creates direct contact between public employees and beneficiaries or alternatively use self-administered interventions to connect employees to beneficiaries. Job crafting is then discussed as a means to improve the meaningfulness of public sector work, and several considerations for public sector job crafting are discussed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of career counseling as a tool for helping public workers fulfill their perceived calling.