The evolution of "work value" in France since the 1950s is being examined through the testimonies of workers, police officers, and computer scientists. This crisis of "work value" reflects an individualization of the meaning given to work since the 1950s. To understand these changes, three professional groups were examined in detail: workers, police officers, and computer scientists. The financialization and managerialization of the French economy redefine the meaning of the word "work." What future lies ahead? One year before the presidential election, work has become one of the major themes of public debate. On the left, the discussions mainly focus on working conditions, the search for meaning, and professional recognition. On the right and in the center, the diagnosis is different: the French would have lost the taste for work. Bruno Retailleau proposes "to establish the priority of work," while Gabriel Attal states that "the relationship to work is one of the most central issues." Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in a speech delivered in Saint-Denis, estimates that the relationship to work has changed since 1958. But has the relationship to work really changed? Can we speak of a weakening of "work value"? And why does the question of the meaning of work seem to occupy such an important place today? In order to understand the evolution of the relationship to work since the 1950s, in a book, the author combined the results of statistical surveys with more than 400 testimonies and life stories. This approach has covered many sectors of activity, with particular attention to three professional groups in this article: workers, police officers, and computer scientists. The relationship to work contains several closely interwoven dimensions, far from being a simple matter of personality or individual values. It refers to the importance of an income. Stability allows for the construction of life projects: housing, starting a family, financing consumption or leisure. It contributes to the construction of social and professional identity. In this regard, it is inseparable from a profession, that is, the possibility of identifying with a recognized and valued professional group. Most employees seek to find interest in their work, to attribute social utility to it or to find a form of personal fulfillment in it. This relationship to work is built throughout one's life. Family socializations, successive professional experiences, the transmission—or absence of transmission—of skills and professional rules, as well as career development prospects contribute to shaping how each person perceives their work. This complexity explains the sometimes paradoxical results of surveys on the issue of the relationship to work. The same person can declare to like their job, while criticizing its working conditions and wishing their children to choose a different professional path. Similarly, when an employee says that work occupies an important place in their life, this statement can cover different meanings. It can reflect a personal investment in the activity carried out, but also refer to the need to have a job to earn a living and maintain a place in society. The ambivalence of the relationship to work, between satisfaction and rejection, can only be understood with concrete situations. This is why the author proposes to discover the relationship to work of workers, police officers, nurses, and computer scientists. Before discussing the relationship to work today, let us look at the past. The idea that workers in the 1950s and 1960s would have given central importance to work needs to be nuanced, particularly for workers. In a study conducted in 1959, the people surveyed had to choose which activity gave them "the maximum satisfaction" among work, family, and leisure. Only 25% of skilled workers and 15% of qualified workers placed work at the top, far behind family and even leisure. The testimonies confirm this trend. An ex-winder who gave up her desire to go to school to help financially support her family says that when she was young, in 1963, she had "fun and work on the agenda." If one works a lot during the Thirty Glorious years, it is often to improve a still modest standard of living and access the consumer society in full swing. In the 1950s and 1960s, many police officers came from the working class. Entering the police force to escape the factory, unemployment, or, for some, the compulsory work service (STO), they bring into their new profession a professional culture marked by the ideal of well-done work and collective defense of the group's interests. In this perspective, carrying out one's job correctly consists above all of maintaining public tranquility, by favoring prevention over repression. This culture is passed on on the ground, from the experienced to the new recruits. Starting in the 1970s, several changes come to weaken this model: increase in mobilities, growing politicization of security issues, increase in the level of education of recruits, and more recently, development of performance-oriented logics and "numbers policy." Police officers experience more difficulty in collectively constructing the meaning of their activity. The transmission of the profession is no longer sufficient: "the wisdom of the veteran should be taken into account in many difficult situations, to avoid this impulsive side, calm a little the passions and temper," laments a 35-year-old police officer interviewed in 2003. The interviews conducted in 2018 by Marc Nino reveal police officers even more isolated, with positions not always compatible, facing the difficulties of their profession. Similarly, a ten-year study (2007-2017) of the same police station by researcher Élodie Lemaire reveals a decline in collective support among colleagues facing a "numbers policy" and an individualization of careers that hinder cooperation. The life stories of computer scientists show how the meaning of work is linked to the sharing of a common interest in technology. An ex-computer scientist who worked in cybersecurity explains: "It was a hyper-technical service with people who really wanted to work in technology, so it was really very nice. It's something that keeps galloping, because technology is advancing permanently." This retired computer scientist recalls his first job: "I arrived in this world, and it was super nice because there were a lot of young people coming from everywhere, there were all the fields, and we had a lot of fun, we worked well." The testimonies reveal an evolution between professionals born in the 1970s who describe a profound transformation of their work environment during the 1990s and 2000s. Following takeovers, privatizations, or strong company growths, they observe the emergence of managers more focused on management and their career plans than on technical mastery. "We had a parade of people, we called them Excel engineers. They arrive with their uniforms to explain to you how you should work," explains this former industrial computer specialist. This evolution increases the distance between those who design and carry out the work and those who organize it. The slogan of May 1968 "not to waste one's life to earn it" would undoubtedly have found an echo as well in the 1950s as after the Covid-19 pandemic. It testifies to recurring—perhaps metaphysical—questions about the place of work in our existence. What appears more specifically since the 1990s-2000s is not so much a decline in attachment to work, but a transformation of its foundations. Under the effect of the financialization of the economy and rationalization processes, organizations have experienced an increased division of labor, personalization of careers, and growing distance between producers, professionals, and managers, disincarnated managers. In this context, questions of social utility, professional ethics, and consistency with personal values are becoming increasingly acute. More than a crisis of "work value," contemporary changes seem to reflect an individualization of the meaning given to work.