There’s a great deal of anxiety about the current state of the labor market, and the direction in which we are heading. For many workers throughout the post-industrialized world, the post-war growth in wages has stagnated and, in some places, reversed. More workers than ever are employed on precarious contracts, working shifts on demand with no guarantee of future employment. Technology has enabled greater surveillance and monitoring of staff, in the office and at home, during work hours and outside of them. And though the amount of time that individuals spend at work has steadily declined in recent decades, progress on this front has been dishearteningly slow, and almost absent in the United States. In this constellation of factors, some commentators see the beginnings of a social crisis, one that risks being very seriously exacerbated by the march of technology, and artificial intelligence in particular. Others believe that we’re already in the depths of one.
Given this social and economic context, it’s hardly surprising that legal, moral, and political philosophers are becoming increasingly concerned with the appropriate design and regulation of labor markets. After all, governments and other policymakers require theoretically-informed practical guidance to assess the appeal of competing arrangements, as well as to determine the justifiability and limits of particular policy proposals. In Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation, my aim is to contribute to these discussions. I seek to do this (a) by presenting and defending a distinctive way of theorizing about the demands of justice in the labor market, which I call the empowerment model, and then (b) by integrating these commitments with a host of empirical findings from across the humanities and social sciences to shed light on ongoing disputes about a range of issues, from the four day work week to the appropriate role of higher education.
In a nutshell, the empowerment model holds that, within limits, the goal of labor market policymaking should be to secure individuals’ equal bargaining power. A notable exception then arises when individuals judge that the costs of doing this are too much, in which case policymakers should instead protect workers against the specific disadvantages to which their lack of equal bargaining power would otherwise give rise. This deceptively simple statement masks several philosophically knotty complications, explored in Chapter 1, relating to the content and nature of the limits, what an equal distribution of bargaining power requires, and what it means for individuals to judge the costs of securing it as excessive. But the crucial point to emphasize is the empowering nature of this approach, which manifests in two ways. First, the empowerment model generates reasons to enhance the bargaining power enjoyed by less advantaged members of society. This is empowering since it means granting these individuals a resource on which they can draw to negotiate terms of employment that they themselves regard as favorable. Second, since the empowerment model is sensitive to what individuals judge as too costly, it empowers those individuals to be partial authors in the design of the social and economic institutions under which they live. For institutions to be justifiable, then, they must take seriously the views of those subject to them. These foundational commitments of the empowerment model are what distinguish it from some of the leading rival approaches to theorizing about justice in the labor market, such as the occupational harms model (discussed in Chapter 2), which holds that the goal of policymakers in this domain should be to protect individuals against various unavoidable occupational harms—that is, against particular harms that they suffer because of their need to participate in labor markets.
Understood in this way, proponents of the empowerment model are committed to a form of ambition-sensitivity. What this means is that, when justifying the exercise of political power, we should consult and defer to the attitudes, preferences, and values of the population over whom political power is exercised. In the present context, this implies that governments’ reasons to promote particular kinds of occupational opportunities—such as those with higher wages, with regular work hours, or with opportunities for creative expression, say—are largely explained by the fact that, and to the extent that, individuals themselves value those opportunities. If this is correct, then there is much to be learned and gained by studying empirical research into the content and strength of individuals’ preferences in this domain (for example, see here).
This aspect of the empowerment model is one that I find intuitively compelling. In other words, it makes sense to me that we should prize the views of workers over whom political power is exercised, and afford those views special significance in an account of the demands of justice in the labor market. But beyond this, such an approach has deeper theoretical appeal. This is because, by affirming ambition-sensitivity, we can avoid having to take a stand on a series of controversial ethical disputes about the value of work, or different kinds of work, over which individuals will inevitably remain divided. In doing so, then, this approach yields an account of justice in the labor market that is capable of meeting the demands of anti-perfectionism that are championed and cherished by John Rawls and his many followers.
This result is especially noteworthy given the seemingly perfectionist nature of much of the burgeoning philosophical literature on work and its future. Many moral and political philosophers readily make controversial ethical judgments about the value of work, or different kinds of work, undeterred by the fact that those claims are unlikely to garner widespread endorsement in a liberal society. Indeed, some commentators even assume or contend that, since an attractive anti-perfectionist account of justice in the labor market is unavailable, we must reach for such claims (see here and here). I do not doubt that there is much to be learned from these discussions, particularly when we reflect on the value of work in our own lives or in the lives of others close to us. But when we turn our attention to matters of political morality, the relevance of these claims is far from obvious. It’s this assessment that illuminates the empowerment model’s distinctiveness, and the contribution that it makes to theorizing about the demands of justice in the labor market.
Many thanks to Martina Valković for the invitation to contribute to the Blog of the APA and for her editorial comments on a previous draft.
Tom Parr
Tom Parr is a Reader in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. His research interests are in normative political philosophy and, in particular, in normative questions that lie at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and economics.
