Work, in the words of Karl Marx, is a “means of life” in two senses. It is, first of all, an instrument for human life. It is the activity by which we reproduce ourselves from day to day, from year to year, from generation to generation. But work also forms, so to speak, much of the matter of human life, at least for most people in any society with which we are familiar. Whenever we are working, our activity of working just is our activity of living, during that stretch of time. In other words, we live not just as a result of, but in, our work.
As a certain sort of instrumental activity, work can be better or worse by being more or less useful for society. But as an activity that forms part of the worker’s life, it can also be better or worse for the worker herself qua worker, by virtue not just of its results but of its intrinsic qualities. Good work in this latter sense is, for instance, skilled work that affords workers opportunities for meaningful social cooperation and autonomous decision-making and is performed in decent—safe, dignified, not unreasonably hard—conditions.
Many political philosophers argue that every person is entitled, as a matter of justice, to real access to good work in some such intrinsic sense. They have defended this claim on various grounds, including individual freedom or autonomy (see, e.g., work by Adina Schwartz, Martha Nussbaum, Beate Roessler, Rafeeq Hasan, and Elizabeth Anderson), self-respect or social equality (see, e.g., work by Paul Gomberg, Jeffrey Moriarty, Samuel Arnold, Andrea Veltman, and Caleb Althorpe), and other fundamental human interests (see, e.g., work by J. B. Murphy, Adrian Walsh, Pablo Gilabert, Ruth Yeoman, Veltman, and Anca Gheaus and Lisa Herzog).
On any reasonable understanding of good work, reality falls far short of this ideal. In every modern society, many people spend the bulk of their waking hours performing unskilled and lonely work with little room for autonomous decision-making, subject to the arbitrary power of bosses, often in hard, unsafe, and undignified conditions. If there is a right to good work, justice accordingly demands a transformation of the content and conditions of real-life work on a large scale. What concrete institutional changes would be required to effect this transformation? As I argue at greater length in a recent article, this is a difficult problem that requires not one or two isolated policies but a fundamental transformation of our economic institutions.
To see why, let us begin with another question. Why is so much work so bad? I think a large part of the answer must be that the content and conditions of work are generally controlled by employers who often have an interest in degrading the quality of work for two quite different reasons. First and most obviously, degrading the quality of work is often more efficient and hence more profitable. Higher rates of work might be more onerous and dangerous for workers, but it also makes them more productive. An extreme division of labor, which reduces each job to the mind-numbing repetition of one tiny operation, might be boring and deprive workers of the opportunity to exercise skill and autonomy, but it also increases output per unit of labor time (this was already theorized by Adam Smith) and reduces labor costs since skilled labor is more expensive (this is a simplified version of an argument due to Henry Babbage).
A second reason why employers have an interest in degrading work is a function of the hierarchical structure of the typical firm. As Harry Braverman argued in his important 1974 book Labor and Monopoly Capital, much of the extreme routinization of work in the twentieth century can be explained by employers’ need to control a necessarily recalcitrant workforce. In particular, since the reliance on the knowledge and skill of well-rounded craftspeople gives those workers significant power to control the rate and other conditions of their work, deskilling work gives employers more power over their employees and more direct control over the production process. As Braverman shows, this was the quite explicit aim of the “scientific management” pioneered by Frederick Taylor.
The context of our problem, then, is a class struggle: the struggle between those who immediately control the content and conditions of work and have an interest in degrading it, and those who do the work and therefore have an interest in improving its quality. Workers face numerous disadvantages in this conflict. To begin with, many people are in such desperate straits that they are forced to accept very bad work just to avoid the alternative of total destitution. Moreover, many people lack the skills and connections required to allow them to compete realistically for good jobs.
Policies that reduce inequality, and especially those that improve the condition and opportunities of the worst-off, are helpful, but they can only go so far. In general, it is a structural feature of the labor market that any given worker needs a job more urgently than any given employer needs workers. This puts workers at a general bargaining-power disadvantage vis-à-vis employers (a situation Vivek Chibber summarizes particularly clearly and succinctly). The asymmetry is exacerbated by the significant transition costs that workers face when changing jobs or careers (as Nien-hê Hsieh, Iñigo González-Ricoy, Anderson, and Gheaus and Herzog have argued).
Perhaps what is needed, then, is more direct government intervention, in the form of regulation mandating minimum standards for the quality of work. This top-down strategy seems most promising with respect to those features of good work that are measurable, context-insensitive, and temporally stable. But the strategy is probably insufficiently context-sensitive to deal with some aspects of good work and insufficiently dynamic in the face of technological and other developments. For example, what counts as (sufficiently) skillful work or as (sufficiently) autonomous decision-making is likely to differ significantly from one type of work to another; definitions both comprehensive and specific enough to make state regulation effective will be hard to come by. Moreover, even if it were possible to codify what counts as good work at a particular time, this codification could quickly become inadequate in light of unanticipated technological and other developments (such as a global pandemic, say).
There is also a deeper problem. The top-down strategy leaves entirely intact the fundamental conflict of interest between employers on the one hand and workers and regulators on the other. This causes difficulties at two levels. First, employers will often have an interest in flouting the relevant regulations when they can get away with it, necessitating costly and fallible mechanisms of monitoring and enforcement. Second and perhaps more worryingly, employers can always be expected to attempt to use their political power to abolish or defang the relevant legislation.
These limitations suggest the need for a more bottom-up approach that would directly empower workers themselves vis-à-vis employers. The most obvious strategy of this kind would be to rely on collective bargaining. Unions directly strengthen workers’ bargaining power by enabling them to exercise meaningful control over the labor supply. Unions also give workers a vehicle for articulating determinate grievances and demands, making it easier for workers to translate their preferences into targeted changes. Economists call these two mechanisms the “monopoly effect” and the “voice effect,” respectively. In addition, unions tend to improve the enforcement of existing labor regulation—through what economists call the “facilitation effect” —and they give workers some power to protect and expand such regulation in the political sphere.
Yet collective bargaining has its own limitations. Although it gives workers more influence over the content and conditions of their work, it does not give them ultimate decision-making power over these matters, which remains vested with employers. Such influence as workers wield through collective bargaining, moreover, can be quite costly, insofar as it depends ultimately on the power of the strike. Finally, although workers wield more political power together than as individuals, collective bargaining is not immune to political sabotage by employers.
Each of the strategies considered above—general egalitarian policies, government regulation, and collective bargaining—has its idiosyncratic strengths and weaknesses. In combination, they would surely help to make good work more widely available. A common weakness, however, is that these strategies address the class conflict between labor and capital only incompletely. And I suspect that it will be impossible to make good work genuinely available to all in a stable way as long as there exists a class of people with an economic interest in degrading work and with the power to do so, both directly in the workplace and indirectly through politics. In a follow-up post on this blog, I will therefore turn to a more radical strategy: economic democracy.
Pascal Brixel
Pascal Brixel is a moral and political philosopher at Northwestern University. He writes primarily about freedom and the social organization of work, approaching these topics partly through an engagement with the history of philosophy, especially the thought of Karl Marx.
