"That's one way to look at it. Another is, if you aren't going to get the minimal acceptable demands (in this case, full employment in the public sector, etc., etc.) for the foreseeable future, why not reach for the sky? What's the argument against it? Serious question; I haven't heard one."
The argument against it is that you have to operate on sentiments, ideologies and thematics as they actually exist in the populations (classes) you want to mobilise. Reaching for the sky is fine if you don't expect to achieve anything. It won't matter then whether you are preaching to more than the converted. If you want to mobilise people, you have to articulate the elements of their extant ideologies in a new, leftist polarisation.
'Work' is one of those elements, a sign that, as Volosinov put it, is subject to social multi-accentuality. The basis of this multi-accentuality is social antagonism. When it comes to work, the ruling class extol labour as an attribute of respectability, a cultural marker; workers tend to have a different reason to valorise labour, viz. the access to the wage and the means of self betterment that it promises, and the general quality of life that full employment and strong bargaining power promises. For the bourgeois, the worker has a duty to labour; the worker is far more likely to claim a *right* to work. Political interventions which organise such thematics around demands liable to improve workers' living standards are far more apt at galvanising people than wish lists. Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone from Virgin Media