Modern capitalist societies are defined by several important socioeconomic cleavages that shape the political arena. Differing political attitudes are commonly related to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the people that hold them. This study argues that a perspective essential to understanding these cleavages and how they relate to political attitude formation is the meaning people attribute to the act of working – what role work plays in their personal lives, how it is manifested in their social relations and why they engage in such an activity in the first place. Using latent class analysis to examine data from the 2017 European Value Survey (EVS 5) regarding 12 European advanced economies, I inductively identify three distinct classes of people who attach different meanings to work: a traditional work ethic class, a post-productivist class, and an intermediate class. I find that attaching different meanings to work is correlated with important labor market cleavages (gender, age, education, occupation, and insider/outsider status) on the one hand, and with economic policy preferences on the other. These findings imply that while socioeconomic status may determine one's economic interests, and that these interests may predict economic policy preferences, another path may exist – socioeconomic status predicts the meaning one attributes to work, and the meaning attached to work predicts economic policy preferences.