We really need to change that phrase. It has been a while since even the most foul gas station coffee could be bought with a pocket full of nickels. But lets go with the traditional phrasing, for now.
As mentioned previously, I have an online gig economy job where I make seventeen cents a minute. (Which, semi-related, means I need to work 3 minutes to get that proverbial cheap styrofoam cup gas station coffee.) I have short conversation with English language learners. How many hours a day I work at this job varies, but I think there were days where my entire work schedule might have been a single, 15 minute conversation. For $2.55. There is not a lot of language learning you can do in 15 minutes, but for some students, it is a small part of their daily routine to keep English in mind.
And for me, when I had a single 15 minute appointment of work, it was a workday. A fifteen minute workday is still a workday, for better and worse. For better because it gives some type of feeling of connection and productivity. For worse, because when you wake up in the morning, you get that little sense of "There is something I need to do today...", that little weight of obligation weighing on you. But on those days, I would make sure I was scrubbed and shaved and in a dress shirt and had socks on, even though I was working online and looking at a computer screen. It gave me standards.
As mentioned, working, even minimally, gave me a sense of connection. I had a thing to do ! But, the astute reader might ask: aren't there many other things to do that haven't been quaniticized by our reductive capitalistic system? Can't I write a poem or go dancing with friends or just walk in the park to feel the green grass between my toes? Wouldn't a spontaneous conversation with a stranger mean just as much without the regimentation of having a specific time and rate of pay? Especially when that rate of pay is almost insultingly low?
Nope, it wouldn't. Work and money make things real. It is the payment of money that transforms an interaction from being a notion or whimsical idea to being something definite. This is something that we culturally understand at a deep level. We can refuse social requests by mentioning a work obligation. We can't respond to the same requests by saying "I can't do that, I have to go stare at some clouds that day". The only thing that really matches "work" as a defining, real part of life is education and health care---and sometimes family obligations, and often only those if they are connected to work, education or health care. (Bringing your little brother to /work/school/the doctor is real in a way that going out to look at clouds with your little brother is not).
Because here is the thing: any other promise of my value or worth is alienable. Anything from statements about the universal worth of all people, to feelings of the deepest love, to the solidarity of me as a fellow human being trapped in the capitalist system, and how I have intrinsic worth---all of those things can be rescinded, for no reason, at any time. I can do favors to my friends, work to build my community, and get nothing back. Someone can make protests of undying and eternal love to me---and refuse to pick up the phone the next day. But when I have a work appointment I will get paid and put that money in the bank, and then I know I can always get that money out of the bank--- and depending on the bank, I might get a free clicky pen and lollipop as well. Maybe even a cup of coffee that I don't even have to pay fifty cents for! Work, and the so-called "capitalist system" give me a way to interact with the world that will have definite realities, in the way that the vague promises of a world based on solidarity and my intrinsic worth can't currently offer me.
I don't believe that this will always be the case. Part of the problem is that right now, there is no middle ground between extractive logic and emotional impulse. You are either an account number or a poem, with nothing in-between. But even if it might change in the future, the truth is that work, and both the obligation and remuneration that come from it, are our culture's markers of "real", and notions of solidarity are just that---a notion.