Work is a central conduit to justice for the disability rights movement, which claims that through work, persons with disabilities may find meaning, belonging, and a sense of worthiness, and be taken seriously as rights-holders. Proponents of the right to work argue that over time, a combination of work, public education, and activism will erode social, cultural, and political barriers to full participation in society. But this emphasis on the right to work necessarily excludes people who cannot work and undermines their claims to other rights. A disability rights program founded on a work ethic that goes along with the right to work draws lines of inclusion and exclusion, cultivates harmful ideas of worthiness, produces a duty to work, and de-values alternative modes of living. Solutions to better deal with the fraught intersection of work and disability are thus unlikely to emerge from singling out the disability rights movement. Only if we cast the net wider and grapple with the root problems of the work ethic in tandem – by addressing issues of time, valuing alternative ways of being, building social, economic, and political scaffolds to make visible people's experiences at and expectations of work, and, potentially, exercising the refusal to work – can work become a place of empowerment and flourishing for all. [Résumé d'auteur]