So how do we know what quality work is? It is important to consider it through the lens of the person looking for work as different people will have different motivations.

​For instance, students looking to earn extra money for tickets to a concert are likely to have very different motivations to someone who is hoping to settle down and buy a house or start a family. In order to ensure quality work is available for all, these different characteristics have to be factored in.

Taylor Review on Modern Working Practices, p.12 
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The Smith who emerges from this research is not the narrow-minded apologist of self-interest, but a moral philosopher and social scientist with a rich and complex system of thought, an 18th-century scholar of impressive breadth of knowledge and deeply humanistic convictions. 

Lisa Herzog, Inventing the Market, p. 17.

​...all taken as evidence that he was no supporter of laissez-faire. Indeed, some have gone so far as to claim that Smith was a proto-Marxist.

James Otteson, 'Adam Smith on Virtue, Prosperity and Justice', 72.

​Much like many progressive critics of current inequality, like Stiglitz, Krugman, Hacker and Pierson and others, Smith targets rentier practices by the rich and powerful as distorting economic outcomes. And although he strongly criticizes some regulation, I show that it is regulation favoring the rich and powerful that he attacks. The concern with the welfare of the laboring poor is palpable throughout the book. 

​Deborah Boucoyannis, Contrary to popular and academic belief, Adam Smith did not accept inequality as a necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy.

Rand acknowledged in the book's introduction that the term 'selfishness' was not typically used to describe virtuous behavior, but insisted that her usage was consistent with a more precise meaning of the term as simply "concern with one's own interests". 

Wikipedia.
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Besides, all natural passions and psychological traits are, from a moral point of view, ambiguous and mixed. Some virtues or affectations, such as benevolence, may come close to being considered an unqualified good, but others, equally natural, although not an unqualified good, are equally necessary.

The worth of any of these passions, principally what Smith calls the unsocial and selfish passions, such as resentment, indignation, and self-love, cannot be determined simply from a description of the passions themselves but only from an account of their appropriateness to specific occasions. For Smith, each passion was distinct, and to redescribe the vast range of human motivation in terms of self-interest obscures its nature.

Self-interest is just one among a whole range of motives, and it varies in its applications.

Pratab Bhanu Mehta, 'Self-Interest and Other Interests', in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, at 248, 249.

Selfishness — a virtue? Ayn Rand chose this book’s provocative title because she was on a mission to overcome centuries of demonization. “In popular usage,” Rand writes, “the word ‘selfishness’ is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends . . . and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

“Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word ‘selfishness’ is: concern with one’s own interests. 

“This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.”

​Selfishness, however, does not mean “doing whatever you please.” Moral principles are not a matter of personal opinion — they are based in the facts of reality, in man’s nature as a rational being, who must think and act successfully in order to live and be happy. Morality’s task is to identify the kinds of action that in fact benefit oneself. These virtues (productivity, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, pride) are all applications of the basic virtue, rationality. Rand’s moral ideal is a life of reason, purpose and self-esteem.

'The Virtue of Selfishness', Novels and Works of Ayn Rand, at Aynrand.org