I think he means something like "Economic value of a certain function largely decoupled from reward" -- otherwise you couldn't contemplate the possibility of not working at all and having a high baseline reward. You'd have gotten the spirit if you read the rest.
your comment makes even less sense. Economic value is coupled to reward, but value != labor. It's actually Marxist (and to a lesser degree classical Smithian) theories that conflate value with labor. There are plenty of economic theories that generally disregard the relationship between labor and value, except the causal relationship that labor sometimes (but not always) creates value.
Value has value. Labor is labor. Agreed. It's laughable to base assumptions on relating "labor" to "value." The forms of labor that generate value depend entirely on cultures, systems, laws/artificial constraints, and circumstances of an era. It's still worth noting that in a society with post-scarcity such as Star Trek:TNG, which, of course, is almost entirely a result of replicator proliferation, "labor" would have a far more visceral and noticeable correlation with "value." Which human actions would be highly valued in a fantasy where people have the means to bend matter/energy to their will, where no one is without most specialty foods and material objects of choice, where it's almost always a question of what people feel like doing on any particular day?
Many episodes touched on that. Naturally, the value of a person's time sharply rises where no one need give their time. Today there are still vast differences in personalities among people that generates incredible variance in culture and pursuits irrespective of reward. Conjecture that to the maximum. There are things that give incentive to pull away from what one might not ordinarily do. There's specialty teaching; personal performances; lively forms of artistry; types of manual labor for odds and ends not conducive to androids and automation; the never-ending pursuit of happiness and/or power? What might "dirty work" be? It's like thinking of an amalgamation of the present day considerations of elite society equalized through sheer unrestricted access of the masses. I forget how land settlement on Earth works in Star Trek.
No matter the economics...
One might expect that most societies comprised of Earthlings will still start with the world's oldest profession and end with the world's second-oldest profession.
