Equality, freedom and wage labor

Points 2 and 4 would appear to be legislative constraints on employment contracts. As proposed, they’re universal constraints, but nonetheless they legally require employers not to pay below minimum wage and not to include sexual favours in the job description. As I understand full on libertarians, these would constitute unacceptable state interference in the contractual process.

I’m a liberal/progressive, but in what world can we assure everyone a comfortable living even if they don’t work?

To put it another way, it seems a recurring part of the (BH)L argument is that regulations are welfare decreasing regardless of the level of inequality. Any argument that goes, “inequality, therefore regulation; equality, therefore no regulation” doesn’t seem like it will fly with them. So, sweatshops and payday loans are fine (see: Zwolinski), and should not be regulated, regardless of the huge inequality proper to the relationships behind the arrangements.

So from the BHL position, inequality seems to be, for the most part, a total non-sequitur. Decreasing inequality increases welfare; increasing regulation decreases welfare. Two separate propositions. What would be needed is something about a relationship between inequality and regulation. But if anything it seems like the position there would be that regulation increases inequality.

I really like this as a definition, not just a description: “Full employment, so that the cost to a worker of finding a new job is no greater than the cost to an employer of hiring a replacement.” Much harder to measure, but so much more on-point than the “maximum level of employment consistent with noninflationary growth” kind of definition.

It seems to me that in normal capitalism, the employer-employee relationship is necessarily one of domination and subjugation, because capitalism must produce a surplus, which must be extracted from the employees regardless of their wills and interests. (Presumably autonomous, informed individuals and groups will stop working when they have produced enough for their consumption and savings, leaving nothing for a capitalist to exploit.) Attempts to mask or mitigate this relationship, as by subsidies or regulations, would have to be foiled or subverted for capitalism to work.

Oh hell, nevermind. I just noticed that CB ended his (I think) initial post that began this series with just this quote. While it bears repeating, I apologize for wasting everyone’s time.

= = = hat is the view that, if only we had the substantial measure of economic equality described in the conditions above, we could indeed dispense with a lot of government intervention, and thereby enjoy more freedom in matters such as contracting over working conditions = = =

Information asymmetry alone raises serious questions about whether this state is possible even in theory. And it doesn’t even have to be at the level of sexual harassment: I have on more than one occasion participated in interviews of outside candidates to fill what Peter Drucker called “man-killing jobs”. That is to say, assignments which only a superman could fill successfully and which had already destroyed more than one person (destroyed professionally, psychologically, and/or physically). Sometimes the interview candidates figured this out, sometimes they did not, but in all cases the hiring organization knew far more than the candidate what his situation would be if he signed on, employment contract or no.

Cranky

Just noting for the record that other than C-level jobs and a very few professionals, employment contracts simply don’t exist in the US non-union workforce. I don’t see that practice changing whether or not a mythical UBI is implemented.

JQ shares “the intuition that bosses will always be bossy and (at least some) will always try to abuse their position”. Many would agree. But I don’t see how this works against – as he seems to think it does – his other conclusion that “a more equal society would also be one in which there was less need for detailed and prescriptive government interventions”. Surely it is common experience that government interventions are run by government-employed bosses, who are just as likely to be bossy, and to try to abuse their positions in one way or another?

The BHL side of the debate wants to believe that a modest tweak to current conditions would provide sufficient independence to make free contracting on equal terms a meaningful concept.

In modest defense of the BHL crowd, or at least some of them: I think they’d concede that a UBI sufficiently generous to accomplish the goals they need it to would be a a change to the status quo considerably more significant than a ‘modest tweak.’

“A default employment contract, incorporating prohibitions on sexual harassment, rights to regular breaks and so on, unless these are explicitly contracted out”

Legislative “restrictions on [implicit] employment contracts” essentially take the form of a default contract, combined with institutionalization of the means of arbitrating the terms, implicit or explicit. So, it seems you are asking, if we would still need legislated restrictions, if we had legislated restrictions.

I don’t think this is just an oversight. Libertarian arguments are often structured rhetorically to defend a null case, of no rules. But, there are always rules; there is never a null case of empty “laissez faire”. The question is, what will be the rule.

It is hard to say, because the libertarian typically avoids committing herself — that’s the beauty part, rhetorically, of defending a null; it leaves one very flexible. But, in this case, I think we can safely say that the libertarian affirmative of no legislative restrictions removes almost entirely the appartus of public institutions and standards for arbitrating contracts. (Not what Q assumes, here.) The subordinate employee can negotiate individually with the employer/boss, with the implicit threat of quitting, while facing the implicit threat of being fired, over whether to submit to particular imperatives. Whether it even makes sense for the subordinate and the boss to discuss general parameters of an implicit agreement, or the norms of a culturally mandated standard, when there is no public means of arbitration seems doubtful to me. The employee will have to choose whether to submit to each imperative, and the boss will choose whether to fire the subordinate, in the cases of non-compliance; end of story.

And, yes, libertarians will usually affirm that the criminal law and the law of torts still apply. A subordinate could seek relief from the courts, presumably, in the case of an actual sexual assault or rape, for example, regardless of whether a regulatory agency exists, to handle complaints in a more administrative manner. This changes the ground, again, to the question of whether a regulatory agency with quasi-judicial/administrative procedures is more or less efficient than the traditional judicial system. (Ah, the beauty of arguing from a null.)

I agree with most of the points made here, but I’m not sure why BHL are supposed to object to point 4. At least as I read John’s post, there’s no restriction of freedom of contract here whatsoever. Anything could be put into a contract, even sexual favours or diaperisation of the workforce.

What we have instead is a perfectly reasonable suggestion for how to interpret contracts, namely that some things are so bad that we shouldn’t assume an employee contracted to them unless there is a very explicit statement saying they did. That seems at least consistent with common law principles of contract interpretation, and the common law as applied to contracts is very libertarian friendly.

Given existing rates of unemployment, and of unemployment support, rules like 4 won’t help a lot. (As John says.) In fact, they may make things worse, since it will become standard procedure that you need to sign a contract including horrific clauses or you’ll starve. But given full employment and welfare support, I think there’s a lot to be said for principles like 4 being part of the solution. Not all of it – I’m no libertarian, especially on safety and harassment issues – but I think a combination of making sure people know what they’re getting in for, plus a real alternative to taking bad options, could solve some of the power imbalances that we’ve been discussing here.

Everything’s not about money, and money doesn’t solve every problem.

It seems to me that a big problem with such a system is the social norm it sets up. If you’re protected by a generous safety net, and the only constraining force on me is the threat of lawsuit, then I’m going to feel generally okay about pushing that system as far as I can. After all, we’re supposedly “equals,” each able to do the same. In the real world, though, the employee still has more to lose, and a higher burden to overcome to recover damages.

In the presence of government regulation, then I know it’s against the law to push it as far as I can, or might be. There’s a community expectation that I won’t break the law, as opposed to a community expectation that I’ll push hard to get everything I can.

I’d think the current financial crisis would provide an excellent example of this. Government regulation was removed in some cases, weakened dramatically others, not able to keep up with new inventions in finance. People pushed harder and harder against government regulation, and when nothing happened, the community belief in what was wrong shifted to “everybody’s doing it, I’d better do it too.” We can convince ourselves that something isn’t wrong pretty easily when other people are doing it and it’s to our benefit to do it as well.

These discussions always seem to assume that the object of the game is to come up with a set of institutions that will protect human dignity without harming economic efficiency. But we don’t know in advance the effects of a particular rules or arrangements, especially since the cultural setting is always in flux. It makes a huge difference, for example, if bosses have a generally democratic attitude or workers are willing or able to take risks to limit the prerogatives of employers. Meanwhile, the balance of power between labor and capital changes continually. It’s unrealistic to assume that there is a definitive, timeless solution to so dynamic a set of problems. It appears that decent outcomes are only possible granted an ongoing process of redefinition and struggle. As a Maoist might put it, what we have here is a need to properly handle contradictions among the people.

One to characterize the list of ‘requirements’ for a world in which there would be no need to regulate employment contracts is to say that you’ve left off point #5: “and a pony.”

More seriously, the preconditions seem to me (as someone who looks at history) as turning the entire question into an abstract exercise. Now, the abstract exercise of imagining the social organization of Utopia — ‘no-place’, lest we forget! — has been important to the history of social theory, over and over, so this is not a critique of the exercise, or of the list of requirements as a contribution to the exercise. Still, the contibution’s value would depend, to me, in part on acknowledging its utopian methodology.

As a side-note: excessive abstraction, detachment from a broadly included historical record and experience, and a tendency to imagine wildly unrealistic scenarios as a means of argumentation are frequent, and often debilitating characteristic of libertarian thought in particular (or perhaps, libertarian thought has its own distinctive mode of embodying these flaws, which can certainly be found in other schools, mutatis mutandis, as well).

= = = A flatter society with fewer regulations would produce by far the best possible outcomes. = = =

Assumes facts not in evidence.

I don’t see how the libertarian perspective, even with the modifications JQ outlines in the post, can work, unless it’s assumed that in a situation of economic equality everyone will pretty much agree. It seems to be able to handle a certain number of minor disagreements: Coke vs. Pepsi, Mac vs. Windows, emacs vs. vi, bigendianism vs. littleendianism. These are known familiarly as “religious” disagreements–because they are fought over so bitterly and for such apparently trivial reasons. They don’t mean anything much and they allow for a certain amount of necessary competition, so they can stay. But are we assuming either that everybody will agree on the more important stuff, or that it will be trivial enough that it can be handled through more or else informal means (even temporary hierarchy)? This seems to assume not only perfect, but perfectly shared, knowledge–or at least shared enough that people can act on it (I suppose)–that is for all practical purposes infallible.

Or is there a way to get around this?

To extend zamfir@1’s comment: doesn’t specialization come into play, so the (large) employer must always be more efficient at finding new employees than the average employee is at finding new jobs? Certainly the structure of modern organizations argues that employers think there are such advantages to specialization. And if there’s no full employment, then the imbalance of market power exists.

No mere social welfare program (UBI etc) can give the worker “equality” with the owners of capital. It can cushion the blows, and level things out socially among different strata of the working class, so that managers perhaps no longer imagine themselves to be king of the world because the owners give them a few thousand a year more than those they supervise. But that’s all.

Happily though, it’s very easy to permanently square human dignity with economic efficiency. All you have to do is reassign ownership of each firm to its employees, and let them decide among themselves how much hardship they are willing to trade for efficiency. Competition among firms for customers and labor then proceeds as usual, no central planning required, and will as an added bonus reveal which dignity/efficiency balance really does work best. Simple. (And a fair bit more likely than a world in which a representative government simultaneously ratifies both a laissez-faire labor code and a UBI.)

…but there seems to be some attenuating influence at work…

The availability of capital, perhaps? Immigrant sole proprietorships are often set up with family backing, or are supported by informal lending in the larger immigrant community. This brings its own problems, to be sure, including, in some cases, forms of indentured servitude, but even if it didn’t, it doesn’t seem like a model that could be expanded to include a significantly greater percentage of those who are now employees, at least not under current conditions. Similar caveats apply about increasing the number of self-employed craft workers. Prior long-term community contacts are often essential in getting started.

One reason why I keep tediously harping on the necessity of bringing some concept of the economic reasons for hierarchy into the model is that it will help to reveal the boundary between employment in hierarchically organized production, and employment without.

I think there’s likely to be quite a few “attenuating influences”, which work against people organizing production in various non-hierarchical schemes, but some people will be self-employed, providing some product or service, and some economic activities are more productively and efficiently organized in that way. Which ones? Why?

It may very well be that some of the “attenuating influences” are nefarious, and ought to be the subject of regulation or policy reform. In general, though, I would expect that people are more productive in hierarchies — at least in the actually existing hierarchies organizing activities that can be effectively organized in that way — and the hierarchical firm can pay a risk-adjusted premium vis a vis self-employment, so that those employed in hierarchies earn an economic rent over market self-employment.

So, yes, I am hypothesizing a market-premium paid to work in a bureaucracy, and I suppose some part of this premium could be attributed to some of the burdens and disadvantages (net of advantages) of having someone other than your own lovely self, as a supervisor and boss.

One thing that bothers me about the libertarian economist imagining, though, is that I would expect this economic rent premium for working in a hierarchy to be in the form of an inframarginal hostage, not a marginal bonus. The “Do as the Boss Says, or You’re Fired” contract sort of implies that the whole economic rent premium paid out for working in the bureaucracy on their schedule and according to their rules, is at stake at all times, subject to forfeit, in the event that you are fired or laid off. In the event that you leave your comfy position, you have to fall back on alternatives at a market rate of compensation, not the rate padded out by an economic rent.

This is very different from the marginal incentives faced by the essentially self-employed person, who may be earning an economic rent, from a professional license or a sunk-cost investment in expertise, but is paid in proportion to product or service produced and delivered — something close to piece-work in its operation. The whole economic rent is not at stake, with each sale or invoice. Someone might not be satisfied with a handyman or a lawyer, but cannot deprive him of his whole income, but only one piece of business, even with a bad Yelp review. The boss, in a hierarchy, can say, “Come in this weekend for some unpaid overtime”, with the implied threat of throwing your entire life into turmoil, putting your lifestyle, savings, house, car, marriage in jeopardy; the self-employed person can just reschedule an appointment or two, to clear a Saturday, and no client or customer, in most cases, can veto that choice with a cataclysmic threat. The other side, of course, is that a steady paycheck from a bureaucratic firm or public entity can, and has historically, in the right circumstances, formed the bedrock of a family life.

Kukai, the days when a worker who quit could be sued for the lost work are long since dead and buried. That’s a good thing.

The Republican candidate for President made a vast fortune from that form of vulture capitalism known as “private equity”, which consists of nothing other than breaking the implied contracts that hold a bureaucratic firm together, taking the money and running.

There’s quite a wonderful rant, today, on Naked Capitalism (and on Alternet), on the horror of the modern American bureaucratic corporation.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/fifty-shades-of-capitalism-pain-and-bondage-in-the-american-workplace.html

Maggie also thinks the highest tax bracket “kicks in too low”, while I think the key problems are that the highest income tax bracket isn’t 70+% and the corporate tax rate isn’t 50% and collectable.

We’re letting an elite of short-time sociopaths, in finance and the executive suite and the lobbies of Congress, destroy the society and the global economy, because they can take home millions, and tens of millions and hundreds of millions, from positions of power. You can be as smug as you want, but they’re coming for you, too.

Kukai, the thing at issue here for me, is whether or not we can — as it seems to some extent we must — separate the right to live from the necessity to work for a wage. What we’re facing, with a surplus of labor, indeed what looks like an inevitable long-term equilibrium well short of full employment, is something very like Marx’s reserve army of the unemployed, with precisely the effect on wages and working conditions which you and others have implied. This, to put it mildly, sucks.

Your proposed amelioration may not be as much of one as you suppose, not only for the reasons I’ve mentioned, but also because of something dsquared said many threads ago, in the seminar on David Graeber’s Debt. To paraphrase what I believe he was getting at, the rationalization of debt, and by extension of all economic relationships, and their separation from cultural origins, qua Graeber, in family, tribe, or custom-generated networks of incompletely specified obligations, is precisely that it freed the slaves, i.e. it freed those who felt themselves to been enslaved to that family, tribe or immemorial set of customs.

You might say that this emancipation is, or was, the essence of modernity as understood by the optimists of the Twentieth Century, and that immigrant sole proprietors of the kind you find in urban areas in the US and Europe are somewhat atavistic in the light of that understanding. In any event, they don’t look like a solution to the problem of a lousy outlook for labor, although they may certainly provide insights into what may be a solution, as Graeber has suggested, although certainly I think that dsquared’s caveat must also be taken into account as well.

To sum up, we thought we were about to become as free and universally prosperous as Francis Fukuyama, among others, was so fond of trumpeting to the world a decade ago, but now we find to our shock and dismay that capitalism may be running out of gas, and that we may instead find ourselves back in the swamp with Marx, if not Malthus. It’s a chilling thought, one which most Americans, if I read the polls correctly, are running away from as fast as the stunted legs of their economic fantasies will carry them.

My speciality is SOA architecture, machine intelligence and applications. Working forward over twenty years, there were two commodities trading concerns, a Japanese robotics firm, a retailer, a global bank, a logistics firm, a pharmaceutical firm, four franchises of a health insurance company and the central association, three government agencies and a process chemistry laboratory.

But SOA isn’t really about an internal process: how these corporations are organised is almost meaningless to me. I build external interfaces and the supporting infrastructure for them. I work at both ends of the wire, often spending time with my clients’ clients, forging up interchange mechanisms. I interact mostly with the database analysts and a handful of the client’s coders.

We must earn money, this much is true. You’re quite right, insofar as we cannot expect the existing employers to find a need for more worker bees in the cubicle hives. While their services were needed, they drove to work in their little cars and got mortgages on houses they couldn’t afford within driving range of those little cars and paid too much for them because all the other worker bees had created a demand for them and those mortgages were packaged and sold and options were created on those packages and well… we know how this run-on sentence ended.

And yes, it sucked. It sucked that those people got screwed by an incestuous cabal of investment banks secretly issuing insurance policies.

Amelioration? Far from it, I have no good solutions. I observe the old model of employer and employee is dead. I foresaw this decades ago, well, not so much foresaw it but had it pushed in my face, all my earnest money on the table, my first kid on the way — all these earnest little people, workin’ away in their cubicles, running up their credit cards, borrowing themselves into oblivion. They were living in a dream world.

Sole proprietorship is a horrid way to live in the USA. The risks are obvious and the payoff uncertain. My tax burden is awful. My insurance payments are killing me. I wish I could employ a few people and sometimes I do for a gig here and there, people I know and trust. But they’re all consultants, too. None of us trust our clients and all of us live like cats in a room full of rocking chairs.

Not only has capitalism run out of gas, it’s quickly running out of further targets to exploit. How much more timber is left, petroleum, bauxite, fish in the sea. The Tower of Babel we’ve erected will eventually be abandoned and we shall all walk away, tools in hand, leaving a set of splendid ruins behind us.

Kukai, namaste. It seems we share a perspective despite our different personal histories.

“Not only has capitalism run out of gas, it’s quickly running out of further targets to exploit. How much more timber is left, petroleum, bauxite, fish in the sea.”

Speaking specifically to bauxite, in reserves (ie, what we know is there, where it is and can extract at current technologies and prices) about 300 years at current extraction rates.

Not one of the great immediate resource problems really.

Hm, for some reason I arbitrarily restated the first point on my earlier list (stolen from CB et al’s OP), rather than sharing the ones I found most compelling.

Let me fix that by designating the item described above as ‘social asymmetry’ and then listing a couple other problems.

* Information asymmetry. When you take a job, it’s often completely unclear to you what will be expected of you, but quite clear to the employer or supervisor what will be expected of you. Any contract with that steep an information disparity is an alarming default. Except in cases where there’s a literal contract of employment, the job applicant will be signing a blank contract, going by some vision in their head about what job responsibilities are. (This vision is usually quite accurate for non-shitty jobs, but often inaccurate for shitty ones; it’s the latter we care about most.) On the other hand, most employers know exactly what pay and benefits they will be providing. So basically the employer has free reign to revise the contract terms on the fly, but the employee does not. Quite a lot of CB et alia’s original complaint rests on this: all the awful working conditions described were not clarified before the hire.

* Forfeiture asymmetry [weak]. This one’s hard to pin down. Even setting aside the information disparity, in an employment contract between boss and employee, we see empirically that an employee is automatically explicitly forfeiting many of their basic rights (the right to not be required to do stuff), and the employer is forfeiting none of their basic rights (having and/or spending money to hire people is not a basic right). Employers are buying off workers’ rights with their money; in this relationship, the boss/company tells the worker what to do. This seems to me to be a priori alarming as a default state of affairs, provided one values human rights much much more than business-entity rights.

* Exit/punishment asymmetry. Your boss can gain leverage in a dispute by threatening to send you packing. You can gain leverage in a dispute by threatening to… send yourself packing.

Quitting usually won’t cause the boss to lose their job or even suffer professional consequences. You don’t have any authority or ability to send the boss packing, so quitting won’t induce in the boss any desire to perform their administrative and managerial tasks differently. So your action won’t protect the next person to take the job.

* Consequence asymmetry. I would prefer to resolve mistreatment of myself in a way that helps prevent any similar subsequent mistreatment of anyone else. Exit/quitting is memoryless, so no environmental changes are made, and future employees won’t know what has happened previously (unless they happen to look for complaints about that company, and find your blog). On the other hand, a boss can share the story of a fired employees’ misdeeds with all future coworkers (and can embellish them).

* Ratchet asymmetry. Quitting your job in response to less severe forms of abuse or ill treatment would feel stupid, so if all you’ve got is threat of exit then you’re probably gonna “consent” to all kinds of little shit that you shouldn’t have to put up with. This connects to information asymmetry: If you knew up front that you’d have to endure A + B + C + D + E + F + G, you might be horrified and withdraw your job application, but if the A, + B, + C… are introduced over time, you might endure each additional restriction and get used to it, and might eventually end up putting up with A + B + C + D + E + F + G + H + I + J + K.

If you *do* quit, people judging you will only look at the most recent imposition. “Wait, you seriously quit because of K? Doesn’t that seem a little drastic? Sure, K is bothersome, but it’s not THAT bothersome” And if you *do* try to explain about A + B + C + …, they might think you’re a sour and bitchy person who just complains about all kinds of things for no good reason.

Exiting the contract is just too crude a mechanism (literally binary) for protecting your rights. Combined with the information asymmetry, you find yourself stuck putting up with a lot of unexpected mild mistreatment (or worse). Combined with the transition asymmetry, you realize that if you do quit, your decision could reduce your chances of finding a better job.

* Fear asymmetry. Treating quitting like it’s casual would misrepresent the experience of quitting. Quitting a job is inherently a scary life decision, even with the amelioration of basic needs that a strong UBI provides. It’s scary because you don’t know what you’ll do. Most people get some feelings of comfort and stability from having a steady job. Giving that up is scary.

On the other hand, firing someone is not inherently a scary life decision. It can be painful to do, especially if you really like the fired employee, but it doesn’t cause fear or life anxiety. Most of the time you’ll be rid of a disliked/bad underling, and your life will go on the same, with little to no ripple effect.

…There’s more, surely, but I’ve run out of steam.

Out of five jobs now, I’ve left two where I was definitely integrated into a community work environment that I missed after I was gone. Those networks give you access not just to friendships but practical advice like “where can I get my car serviced? Does anyone have a spare kettle lead?” — stepping into ready-made communities can really make your life easier, and better.

@Salient: you might be surprised how often an employer will hire on someone to fill a position, only to find the employee is far better utilised in other capacities. An employer has a perceived need, true, but it’s curious how often employees write their own stories within the context of the larger picture of the company, especially when the employee demonstrates initiative in that context.

As for employee abuse, I can’t speak to every sort of abuse but I can speak to the problems of outsourcing and temp-ing. The usual abuser in these situations is the middleman. The middleman doesn’t work for the employers. Overseas, he’s often the beneficiary of some government nepotism: this is especially true in China, where the grown children of government officials both leech and serve as proxies for their corrupt parents.

Thus an otherwise well-meaning employer such as Apple, who wouldn’t dream of abusing their talent in the USA, is simplistically lumped in with the actual abuser, a third party such as Foxconn, itself a subsidiary of Hon Hai. Happens everywhere, really: bullies and abusers use power granted to them by others to do their dirty work.

I am afraid my feeble attempt at arch humour failed. It’s a pity a sarcasm hasn’t been implemented in HTML.

First of all, let me say that aepxc makes an important point regarding the substitution of private power for state power. There appears to be little difference between conditions of employment imposed by contract or custom and regulations imposed by government, with the exception that government regulation would necessarily lead to some level of national uniformity in the labor relationship. Such uniformity might arguably improve overall welfare by reducing both information and compliance costs.
Also, just a note to further roil the waters. How does the BHL position differ from the Marxist maxim “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. It seems to me that ensuring a minimum wage (or its alternative, a universal basic income) that meets all basic needs would necessarily satisfy the second clause. And doesn’t the unconstrained right of an employer to exploit (not in any perjorative sense) the ability of his workforce and claim rent thereon, comport with the first clause?

On the loss of community: its not even necessary that you deeply like this community, just that it helps to make you productive. A good working organization is more than the sum of its parts.

You, your coworkers and also your bosses helped to create that environment and usually share in the results. But once you quit, the bosses get to keep the organization and you can’t take your share with you.

kukai @ 64
You mean outsourcing but not “temping,” right? Temporary employees and temporary contractors are managed onsite by the same managers who manage “fulltime” employees. The agency only handles tax stuff, generally for contractors who aren’t self-incorporated.

Zamfir @ 69

You mean productivity is NOT entirely attributable to the “skills” an individual brings with her to the job?

Could it be libertarian and neoliberal economists are deliberately framing the public discourse in a way that prevents reference to anything that actually matters?

Fear asymmetry. Treating quitting like it’s casual would misrepresent the experience of quitting. Quitting a job is inherently a scary life decision, even with the amelioration of basic needs that a strong UBI provides. It’s scary because you don’t know what you’ll do.

This point I disagree with. None of us have ever lived in a society with a strong enough UBI to make quitting non-terrifying, but if you look at the closest equivalent, people who have enough independent personal wealth to make quitting non-terrifying, they really aren’t terrified of it (and may even have trouble understanding why the commoners *are* — Yglesias, for example).

So theoretically in a society where the UBI made everyone’s potential nonworking fallback option as good as Matt Yglesias’s nonworking fallback option, we should probably expect that most people wouldn’t be terrified of being fired, even though it might annoy them.

P.S. If the default terms of employment were reasonably worker-friendly and could only be overridden by explicit written contracts, I would expect a lot more people to have explicit written contracts. And great strides would be made in the field of contract obfuscation, to ensure that as few as possible understood their employment contracts. Hayek wasn’t wrong about the value of localized knowledge, but he made insufficient allowances for the opportunity to weaponize it. Even having decisions made by a remote and ill-informed bureaucrat may be preferable than having them made by your superbly well informed counterparty, if your interests are adverse to theirs.

@Chris, I don’t think a UBI can be high enough to be comparable to being independently wealthy, not even in a vastly different economy. Because independent wealth is a highly relative thing. The comfort doesnt come from knowing that you could live without work, but also from knowing that you would still have a respectable social position if you gave up paid work. But money can only buy you that if you have more than others, which a UBI can of course never reach.

The only way the conditions in the hypothetical could exist for very long is if someone invents the technology of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Otherwise everyone simply retires and goes on the dole, and you’re living in Spain after Columbus, all over again.

I think it is possible to enforce better-than-market-clearing work conditions on employers, by implementing a system like Germany’s unemployment system. But that system’s long-term viability is in doubt, too, and would be so even without the present Greek crisis as a millstone around Germany’s neck.

The real difficulty in sustaining a system like Germany’s is that its workers have to compete with those in poor countries. If we’re lucky, in another century or two the leaders of all or most of the poor countries will get out of the way and let their people get rich, and then maybe it’ll be sustainable for us to offer workers the German level of protection. Until then, any country that tries it only dooms its economy and screws its people.

Since I live in Massachusetts, which has Romneycare, I could take an even greater pay cut and have a chance at employer-provided health insurance, which luckily I didn’t need. But no life insurance, no disability, no 401K, and your pay is calculated by a formula that presumes you are not a person with expertise but a “temp.” Not bitter at all, though.

@bianca steele

Entirely correct. “Consulting” has become a nasty bit of Newspeak. Once, consultants were professionals, who had to know something about the industry. Nowadays [ insert creaky old gent noises] they’re mostly terrified, pimply-faced young folks from Bangalore with company laptops, living six to an apartment, eating out of a common pot and paying a kickback to an agent overlord. Often, if I can, I get these kids, some of whom are bright and capable, out of their H1-Bs and into reputable consulting firms, where they can earn about four times more take home pay. I cannot overstate the seriousness of this situation. The rapacity and cruelty of these Indian contracting houses is beyond description.

One such rescued kid was going back to India to get married. He asked me if I wanted anything from India. I said I’d like a shivalingam, thinking of all those little fired clay shivalingams I’d seen in the marketplaces. He brings me back his mother’s silver shivalingam, still encrusted with incense. It now resides at the centre of an unburned CD-ROM. I had to take it to the Hindu temple in Lemont to learn how to do puja to it. I give it orange flowers every so often and pour distilled water over it.

As you say, there’s always an angle on how to screw the worker. It’s always done by proxy. The most-despised members of the antebellum communities in the South were the slave-sellers. They didn’t much seem to mind, salving their wounded pride with the money thus earned and the certain knowledge of the hypocrisy of those who despised them, buying their wares.

On the other hand, you don’t really take the idea of full employment seriously. You just seem to deny that, as I’ve defined it, it can never exist, at least for workers in general. That might be right, but you haven’t made the case

True, and also, the “as I’ve defined it” here alerted me to something. I was oblivious that I was disputing the proposed definition of full employment (which I thought meant, no unemployed people). I misread your ‘so that’ in that statement as a grammatical condensation of this statement: ‘If we have no unemployed people, then the cost to a worker of finding a new job will be no greater than the cost to an employer of hiring a replacement.’

Hence me going on about how relying on that particular ‘if P, then Q’ is dangerous, because it’s impossible to force Q using only P. But if the cost equalization of firing vs quitting is part of your hypotheses rather than part of the conclusion, that changes a lot; e.g. given that this is your definition of full employment, you’re allowing the state to take a whole suite of actions to achieve full employment; e.g. it could

* restrict bosses’ behavior and making certain forms of duress like “if you quit, I’ll…” punishable offences

* provide transitional housing and schooling assistance to anyone quitting a job and moving somewhere

* create and maintain a website where employees can publicly post their grievances that caused them to quit, with a quick and easy way for bosses to flag and protest defamation (sort of like ratemyprofessor.com?)

* enforcing the existence and bargaining power of some sort of union-like organization with the ability to publicly report working conditions

* require the first round of correspondence between a business and potential hires to be conducted online, with applicants kept anonymous

* require any business seeking an employee to post a fairly detailed standardized description of responsibilities and compensation to a readily accessible state-run website, with some minimum length of time to accept all applicants. Why states don’t do this one kinda mystifies me. Workers could see their options comprehensively, and could more easily get a new job and a new life plan lined up before they quit. “Oh hey look, this small place in Tulsa is hiring people just like me. Hmm, y’know, we could enjoy living in Tulsa. I’ll ask the kids what they think.” It’s much easier to quit a job if you have a wealth of knowledge about your other options.

* employers can’t fire or penalize their employees for conducting job searches on their own time

* employers cannot reject a hire due to their quitting prior jobs and limits their right to request information about why the person quit

etc, etc. So it’s not just UBI-money and ‘no unemployed people’ the state is offering, in such a world. UBI + a package of universal non-monetary help designed to ease a transition between jobs for anyone who quits their job is a much stronger hypothesis to take, and I can be amenable to it.

…

Admittedly though, it’s probably still fair to say on some level I don’t take full employment seriously. In order, from least fair to you and/or BHLs, to most fair to you and/or BHLs:

[1] Relying on threat of exit basically says, I think, that you’re willing to let a whole lot of people get pushed right up to their suffering threshold before any positive change happens. That’s not OK with me.

[Me going on about this might be redundant, sorry.] A system in which people’s only recourse is drastic, accepts non-drastic grievances as just part of the job. Even if quitting’s truly as easy as firing, this bothers me, because: the employer gets to change the employment environment as much as they want, and the employee does not necessarily get to change any aspect of the employment environment.

So, employers get to test just how much their employees are willing to put up with for their pay, and the only possible penalty the employer faces is losing too many workers and having to walk back the very last policy change they made.

Suffering-causing policies only get retracted if the company finds too many people quitting the job, and decides that eliminating the policy is cheaper than paying people a little more to put up with it. Workplace dangers are only addressed if enough workers threaten to exit unless that specific danger is fixed. An employer could keep hiring new people who don’t have a strong sense of how dangerous the job is, with everybody quitting after a short stint of work, letting threat of exit claim everybody and relying on a never-ending supply of workers. (In unskilled labor there’s no reason to prefer a current employee to a new one, and it’s pretty easy to advertise the job to new applicants in ways that obfuscate the danger, or make the quitters seem lame and weak and uncool. In a heavy tough masculine voice: “It gets to be 160 degrees in here–the hottest workplace there is. But if you can HANDLE the HEAT, then your PAYCHECK is SWEET. Are you man enough for this? Come prove it with us. Wayco Warehouse.”)

If pressuring their workforce to accept a slightly larger salary is cheaper, that’s what they do. I feel like people shouldn’t have to put up with these kinds of policies, period. People will endure a lot of intense demands if their loved ones will get a reward, sure, but why structure all commerce around maximally exploiting that fact?

And I’m testy and defensive about this. Isn’t it inherently inhumane? Why should I even consider a social framework in which employers are explicitly allowed and implicitly encouraged to squeeze their employees to their breaking point limit to extract every last bit of productivity? Why support a social framework in which, in the optimal scenario, people are getting paid e.x.a.c.t.l.y. the least amount of compensation they’re willing to take, to tolerate a job with gritted teeth?

I want people to be fairly comfortable while working productively. That’d be my goal. I just don’t see how this model ensures that will happen. Is the gain in productivity per person that we as a society get from this model, really worth sacrificing workers’ comfort? Not to me, certainly not if the employee does not stand to benefit from their own increase in productivity.

[2] I feel like if we’re going to allow arbitrarily massive state intervention for people who quit their job in order to empower threat of exit, like my list of bullets above, why exactly are we not allowing useful state intervention for restricting unacceptable work conditions? Beyond “let’s see if we can find a way to make threat of exit sufficient on the job protection,” …is there a point to this? Ok, I hate it when people ask that question in other contexts. So maybe I should ask, given that I couldn’t care less whether contracts are or aren’t the cornerstone of social infrastructure, are there reasons for me to prefer a UBI/TOE model?

[3] I feel like we shouldn’t structure society’s productivity around hierarchical employment, which strikes me as a weird organization we unfortunately inherited from the collapse of feudalism. That’s the world we live in, ok. But if we’re building a theoretical vision of a just society from scratch, and we are going to allow businesses to have substantial freedom to operate as profit-extracting entities in our envisioned world, I feel like at the very least we should ban all business-ownership structures except cooperatives, with apportionment of profits to be decided by vote, and with state regulation specifying acceptable voting procedures, etc. But eh, that’s very far away from our world, so I try to set those feelings aside.

Way back at 18,

In modest defense of the BHL crowd, or at least some of them: I think they’d concede that a UBI sufficiently generous to accomplish the goals they need it to would be a a change to the status quo considerably more significant than a ‘modest tweak.’

I strongly agree. I see a certain lack of generosity from CT towards BHL here. That and the all too common tendency on the left to argue for an impossibly remote ideal, a world without discrepancies in power.

First of all, it seems to me that BHL’s conceptual offering of UBI is both radical and generous. I don’t see how one could deny its essentially socialistic nature. And I don’t see how their basic reasoning fails to deserve respect. If the response here was closer to, “sounds interesting, why don’t we try it,” then–right there–we’ve got the making of a coalition, maybe even a movement. Sounds constructive to me.

And concerning power and hierarchy, this is a place where the left often goes reductio. As Bruce Wilder often seems to acknowledge, hierarchies serve us in various crucial ways. They aren’t something to be frowned upon per se. In most cases they dramatically increase the productivity of the group/community/nation. Ideally hierarchies form in a natural and voluntary manner. But even where they don’t, it is often possible to tolerate a less than perfect boss with the knowledge that having no one in charge would be even worse.

I said it on the last thread but I’d like to mention it again here: full employment is no panacaea. I live in a full-employment economy (Japan) and working conditions here are terrible, as is work culture generally. People work very hard, very long hours and even in industries with an excess of qualified people (such as hairdressing) they get worked to the bone and paid crap. Furthermore, there are huge barriers to entry to many industries, so that getting one of Japan’s famous “jobs for life” requires a year of continuous effort at the end of university.

It’s easy to quite a job and find a new one, but if you quit your company job you’re out for good and the system is carefully structured to ensure that you do all you can to stick it out within the company system. And just like everywhere else, people frown on you if you work at many different jobs in succession, and you’ll find yourself sliding down the work ladder.

Full employment doesn’t protect worker rights the way the libertarian dreamers think it will.

I think I agree with John Quiggan in the sense that in a situation where “the cost to a worker of finding a new job is no greater than the cost to an employer of hiring a replacement” and “even without working no-one need be poor”, then “we could indeed dispense with a lot of government intervention”. [OP]

And I agree with Salient believing that such a situation is not achievable (more than momentarily) — if over a period of decades the economic power of employers were so weak and that of workers so strong, I’d certainly hope we could get rid of capitalism itself, but failing that we’d at least have regulations barring things like onerous restrictions on bathroom breaks. “Once behavior of any kind becomes common enough, it ceases to be stigmatized” [80]; but once a cruel behavior becomes unusual enough, it will be stigmatized and eventually forbidden. (Possibly through union contract rather than direct state action, to be sure.)

Why should I even consider a social framework in which employers are explicitly allowed and implicitly encouraged to squeeze their employees to their breaking point limit to extract every last bit of productivity?

Circular reasoning? If you’re certain of finding another job quickly, your “breaking point limit” isn’t what it would be in an economy with high unemployment. This is surely the point of the exercise. If quitting isn’t a big deal, it becomes a credible threat much sooner. The political aspects of full employment are that the relationship between bosses and workers is equalised. (This is Michal Kalecki calling from 1942, by the way.)

In fact, on the rare occasion that any advanced capitalist economy has come close to unemployment < 5%, the central bank raises interest rates to avoid inflation.

Not all countries at all times have strongly independent central banks or low inflation targets. And, you know, if you don’t like the central bank’s charter or inflation target you can change it! It’s legislation, not gravity.

Katherine @ 97: I really don’t understand the enthusiasm for a UBI … I suppose in a scenario of full employment I’m not going to worry too much about being able to find a new job. But does that not mean that UBI as a panacea also requires full employment and lots of flexibility…?

Yes, I think full employment (not-a-scam, John-Quiggan approved, really-works full employment) is the team of Clydesdales in the OP and UBI is the pony.

Here’s an alternative scenario: there are regulations in place that make harassment not allowed and there is a workplace and social culture that disapproves of harassment, and doesn’t look askance at women who kick up a fuss about it.

I do think for-real full employment would do wonders to help create that culture.

99 — regardless, I didn’t say the power imbalance between capitalist and worker was the sole source of sexual harassment and exploitation. I said that the social structure of capitalism (as we know it) requires the production of a surplus.

In regard to later comments, this could be why hierarchical organizations may seem more productive than other collections of workers. When we say ‘productive’ we may want to ask (if we don’t know already) ‘of what?’ and ‘for whom?’

Oddly, both sexual exploitation through misuse of authority and social position, and the dubious efficiencies of hierarchy over horizontality, came up in a discussion among anarchistic activists I was present at last night, not as what capitalists do but as problems in our own community. It’s not just the capitalists.

However, capitalism does require the production of surpluses, whether it requires the production of sexual exploitation or hierarchies or not. The capitalists have to have something to exploit, therefore they must make workers work more than they would if they were just producing for themselves. Once they have the surplus, they must reinvest it in order to make yet more surplus, etc. etc. etc.

Ah, the Marxist Labor Theory of Value. How 19th century.

In orthodox economic theory, capitalism itself need not be exploitive. Consider three partners who pool their own savings, buy cattle, rent grazing rights, herd the cattle themselves, fatten the cattle, and sell them at a profit. Their inputs are the cattle, the rent, their labor, and the foregone interest on their savings. The owners of the capital are justly compensated for its use, and the workers are justly compensated for their labor.

Oddly, both sexual exploitation through misuse of authority and social position, and the dubious efficiencies of hierarchy over horizontality, came up in a discussion among anarchistic activists I was present at last night, not as what capitalists do but as problems in our own community. It’s not just the capitalists.

Oddly, human nature seems widely distributed among humans.

For those who feel there’s something intrinsically unjust about hierarchical structures I have a question. How much experience do you have with collective decision making? I have some such experience and I found it extremely underwhelming. If you think the problem of bringing debate to a close and executing an actual decision is a minor one then I think you’re probably lacking real world experience.

Any search for excellence involving groups of people, whether it’s a group of musicians, a team of athletes or a company in business, is going to select it’s own leaders through various means. Some selection processes will be more democratic than others but without leadership excellence is an elusive goal.

How much experience do you have with collective decision making? I have some such experience and I found it extremely underwhelming.

There are many kinds of collective decision making processes. Some of them don’t work, some of them only work with certain types of groups, some groups are fundamentally dysfunctional regardless of what type of decision making process they use, etc.

Saying that you’ve had some underwhelming experiences with collective decision making is not saying much; I’m sure you’ve had plenty of underwhelming experiences with hierarchical decision making, too.

without leadership excellence is an elusive goal.

Leadership is important, but outside of hierarchical organization the word has a very different meaning.

Mattski at 106: “…without leadership excellence is an elusive goal”.

Ah, the Fuhrerprinzip. From the Wikipedia article:

“The Führerprinzip was not invented by the National Socialists. Hermann Graf Keyserling, a German philosopher, was the first to use the term “Führerprinzip”. One of Keyserling’s central claims was that certain ‘gifted individuals’ were “born to rule” on the basis of Social Darwinism.

“The ideology of the Führerprinzip sees each organization as a hierarchy of leaders, where every leader (Führer, in German) has absolute responsibility in his own area, demands absolute obedience from those below him and answers only to his superiors.[2] This required obedience and loyalty even over concerns of right and wrong”.

It’s just anti-democratic, anti-ethical, anti-rights and anti-labour ideology dressed up in management jargon.

That’s exactly what the BHL people are doing when they urge us to ignore possible changes, in favor of the unicorn which is what a generous UBI would be.

Barry, you make a good point. I guess I would want to hear from you what are the realistic changes we should focus on?

Leadership is important, but outside of hierarchical organization the word has a very different meaning.

I think you’re quite right to point to the shades of meaning involved here. But I don’t think “hierarchical organization” is a black & white question either. I am saying that hierarchy is everywhere, it comes in infinite shades of gray, it generally serves an important purpose and it is leftism-gone-nutty which rails against it per se.

All wage work is wage slavery because it involves alienation from control of one’s own labor and from control of the destiny of one’s own products. It involves loss of autonomy in an enormous slice of one’s life. Wage work, with a handful of exceptions, is partial slavery.

Isn’t it rather wonderful to have a choice between a good product at a competitive price, and a very good product at a higher price?

Not really. First off, not all products are amenable to such an ordinal ranking: I don’t know how one might rank, say, toothpaste. As far as I can tell, all toothpaste is identical except for the flavor anyway, and I highly doubt anyone’s lot in life is materially improved in any noticeable fashion from having a choice of 15 different types of it. This train of thought is easily extensible to any number of ordinary consumables.

Second, even if it is conceivably possible that in some areas such a ranking can be imposed, I hesitate to describe this as necessarily “wonderful.” In the vast majority of situations, a nicer widget is not going to make a huge material difference; not the way that, say, food security or healthcare does. In a way, this is somewhat analogous to the standard right wing refrain about how the poor aren’t really poor because they got them fancy TVs. Well, and so they do, because if you want to buy any kind of TV new today (and even most of the old ones, I’d bet), you can’t even get an old-fashioned CRT. But I don’t think it’s credible to say that poor people are any less poor, or their lives materially better, for having TVs with better image quality. By the same token, I’m not convinced that the choice between many different fancy widgets is particularly wonderful. Or rather, that choice would be nice all things being equal, but aiming at it as any kind of social goal or holding it up as a remarkable societal achievement strikes me as misguided, especially if it comes at the expense of normal people trying to live normal lives of acceptable quality.

Me: “That’s exactly what the BHL people are doing when they urge us to ignore possible changes, in favor of the unicorn which is what a generous UBI would be.”

mattski : “Barry, you make a good point. I guess I would want to hear from you what are the realistic changes we should focus on?”

Every standard liberal change which has been discussed in these posts is a lot more likely than a generous UBI, so take your pick.

Which, of course, was exactly my point, as I said in rather clear language.

Katherine@117: So true! Stress is real. So are anger and shame. So is potentially productive/enjoyable time wasted in evaluating “Is this abusive behavior bad enough that I should leave now?”, and in searching for a new job because, yes, it is time to leave.

Mattski: I believe that in practice the pursuit of “excellence” in the sense of supremacy, being #1 at whatever, and the pursuit of reliably, sustainably goo quality are competing goals because of observation. They don’t have to be, it’s just that a lot of #1-ness seekers are quite willing to slash, burn, and otherwise impair all the support systems that make the sustained reliability feasible, and a lot of them don’t respect any goals that they can’t translate into the language of #1-ness seekers.

Bernard Finel had a good comment about just this over at Balloon Juice today:

““Troubled” companies have a particular meaning on Wall Street. Sure, sometimes they refer to companies that are just muddled, have over-expanded, and are badly managed. But more often, what they are talking about is companies that do not seem to providing a large enough return to shareholders—a stagnating stock price in particular. But that does not mean a company is “troubled.” It can be quite profitable, have productive and loyal employees, have satisfied customers, and cash on hand.

“What players like Bain do is enforce a Wall Street preference. There is a bias against companies that seek a “quiet life.” They are shunned by institutional investors, which depresses stock prices and makes these companies “troubled” in the first place. It isn’t that they are not profitable, but rather than institutional investors don’t like them, and as a result they trade at dramatically lower P/E ratios. Indeed, it isn’t even clear that takeover targets do have weaker stock performance if you look at total returns, including dividends.

“Once a company goes public, it is essentially subject to “disciplinary” takeovers if it fails to act in accordance with financial sector preferences. This is often phrased as “poorly performing managers,” but what does that really mean? That is really just about enforcing a certain conventional wisdom about what a company ought to do. But these preferences are socially problematic. Consider some of the things that seem to contribute to being a takeover target: slow growth, stable revenues, cash on hand rather than debt, generous employee compensation, conservatively-funded pension or insurance plans. (Again caveats abound. There is no simply model of predicting takeover targets.)

“So, in a sense, Bain, and other buyout specialists, serve to enforce a particular type of corporate behavior that focus on expansion at the expense of predictability, risk acceptance in terms of contractual obligations to employees, and a ruthless focus on cost controls at the expense of employee loyalty and stability.

“As a practical matter, it is not clear that this sort of approach is conducive to more rapid economic growth. Certainly the rise of this consensus and expansion of “disciplinary” takeovers since the 1980s has not resulted in any noticeable improvement in U.S. macroeconomic performance. And furthermore, the evidence on whether takeover targets overperform or underperform after being bought is mixed.

“But what has happened is that as firms accept these practices, they become more dependent on the financial sector. They borrow more, become more active in raising money through equity sales, they run leaner by hedging through derivatives, and so on. In each case, they pay a cut to financial firms. The result has been that the financial sector’s share of corporate profits has risen dramatically since the 1980s.”

There are times when significant shakeup serves the long-term goal of sustained reliability. We see one of those right now in food, where changes in packaging technology are making a big difference and setting off a whole bunch of changes. But it makes a real difference whether people in charge are thinking how to assimilate new things into a new long-term pattern that will continue to serve employees, employers, customers, and others well in the long haul.

Js, I’m not sure our politics are all that different. I’m relatively new here but as a rule I like your posts. Why do I think there is common ground to be found with a bunch of libertarians? True confessions: I’m not familiar with BHL. Also, the mere word libertarian sets my teeth on edge. But here is what I know, that bargaining involves tradeoffs and that the mere act of making a proposal sets a precedent, puts you on the record. If BHL is on the record making an overtly socialist proposal that would seem to me to “bend the curve” of their possible future positions.

Is there really common ground to be found? I don’t know. As a rule I think discussion and debate with people you disagree with is healthy and potentially productive. Certainly not to be discouraged. And something I carry with me all the time: we are all human beings. Labels like ‘libertarian’ or ‘capitalist’, in the long run, don’t mean shee-it. Any conceptual trick which makes it easy to disassociate from another human being is dangerous. Really, if you think about it, disassociation is a necessary precursor to violence.

I consider myself very liberal. But at the same time I get extremely exasperated when I see lefty-types taking what appear to me absurdly counterproductive positions. Like casually dismissing ‘capitalism’ as though there was any actual useful content in such a statement. Or another example, thinking and arguing from an assumption that injustice of any sort is intolerable. See Katherine @ 117.

Or, and this REALLY makes my ass chew gum, you get the “whose shit smells the sweetest” threads where a litany CT commenters proudly tell the world they’ll “never” stoop to pulling the lever for Obama because, imperialism! or drones! or take your pick.

Hidden Heart, I didn’t use the term excellence in the sense of supremacy. I used it in the sense of quality. “Being the best you can be” is a cliche, but it isn’t silly. If you can look past the cliche for a moment there is wisdom there.

<Or another example, thinking and arguing from an assumption that injustice of any sort is intolerable. See Katherine @ 117.

Well, without wishing to comment on the wider point which you claim I made, but which I did not make, I do indeed think that the injustice of requiring an employee to flee their job to escape a harasser, rather than dealing with the harasser themselves, is intolerable. It is part of a wider issue – that of the general oppression of women via apparently small acts of sexism.

The harassed woman may find herself reluctant to trust another male boss, and the women left behind sure as heck won’t feel safe either. If we wish to argue from utility, then the situation specifically is hardly conducive to work place productivity, and the situation more widely suppresses the abilities and talents of women everywhere.

I happen to find that injustice intolerable, and find it exasperating when men, unlikely to ever experience this general oppressive atmosphere, proclaim themselves exasperated that such a situation should be found intolerable.

Just an inconvenience.

And thus the UBI; we can’t just let them starve.

I do indeed think that the injustice of requiring an employee to flee their job to escape a harasser, rather than dealing with the harasser themselves, is intolerable.

Katherine, I don’t mean to pick a fight with you. But I’d like to talk about this. At 117 you say that if we were to somehow achieve both UBI (impossibly utopian according to several folks on this thread) and full-employment, that this unprecedented set of circumstances would still be “sucky.” Sorry, but I think your sights are set way too high. And I think it would be better to take a more agnostic approach: maybe the incentives would work–under those admittedly unlikely circumstances–to motivate employers to a higher standard of behavior? We wouldn’t know unless we tried it.

You wrote, There is more than just economic cost to consider. Having to leave a job because of a crappy boss comes with other costs – to your self-esteem, your professional progress maybe, and dammit to justice!

I don’t think this is right. Your self-esteem? A wise woman by the name of Roosevelt once said, “no one can make you feel bad about yourself without your permission.” It is easier for me to see the case for a social safety net (no one in a wealthy society like ours should starve for want of a job) than to concede any particular person has a “right” to any particular job. I don’t think anyone has such a right.

bianca, I have a question I’d like to ask those who question whether it’s possible for an injustice to not be intolerable: Have you not ever experienced different levels of injustice, coercion, harassment, etc., in your life?

I think this much is simple and indisputable, life is filled with pain and suffering and disappointment. The problem with “injustice” in the first place is that it is mostly in the eye of the beholder. That is why, imo, it is best to focus on the BIG injustices, the ones where there is overwhelming consensus that a specific problem should be addressed.

Tolerable injustice? These are everywhere. Someone cuts in front of me and “steals” my parking spot. Should I get out of my car and start a fist fight over it? Should I silently stew over it and engage in fantasies of retribution? I’ll be a happier person if I let it go. How do we respond when we’re on the receiving end of a sharp insult? Do we pour gasoline on the fire?

Our attitudes towards concentration of wealth are of interest here. One of the reasons I have a problem with broad brush attacks on capitalism is that I think there are plenty of examples of people becoming wealthy on the basis of legitimate, ethical behavior. Otoh, there are plenty of cases where wealth is accumulated either on the basis of unethical and antisocial practices, or where wealth is inherited or otherwise transferred without ever being “earned” in any decent sense of the word. AND, there are plenty of cases which are somewhere in the middle between these extremes. Some accumulated fortunes are instances of injustice, some are not, some it really is hard to say.

That is why, imo, it is best to focus on the BIG injustices,

You see ladies, we should just shush with all this going on about sexual harassment and potential assault and rape in the work place, it’s just not big enough to focus on.

And I’m not even going to both dealing with the inanity of that Eleanor Roosevelt quote. Yes yes yes – all oppressed people throughout time have just let themselves be oppressed.

And by the way, if a woman who is being harassed has no “right” to her job, then surely the boss who is harassing her doesn’t have a “right” to it either. By any and all standards of fairness, he is the one who should be shipping out, not her.

Yes, there are bigger and smaller injustices, and I suppose I’d be happy to say that some injustices are more intolerable than others, but count me among those having trouble with the concept of a “tolerable” injustice. More to the point, sexual harassment is pretty damn high on the intolerable scale — seriously upper reaches of the scale. (On the other hand, I don’t think someone cutting in in front of you should be considered an injustice at all — at worst, it shows a lack of consideration.)

All this by way of saying, Katherine is surely right. It seems insane to penalize the victim of sexual harassment while letting the harasser continue on his merry way. And it doesn’t matter at all if the penalty turns out to be relatively insignificant in the bizarro-world where libertarians guarantee everyone a living wage whether or not they work (and again, just think about this for a second). The underlying principle is itself remarkably unjust.

JQ @ 135 It seems to me pretty unlikely that employers are going to offer employment terms that explicitly require workers to put up with sexual harassment or that (under the conditions assumed in the OP), workers would accept jobs offered on those terms.

It does seem unlikely that employers would require women to put up with what they consider sexual harassment, but–this occurred to me after reading some of the comments on the latest BHL post–what if men refused to take a job that required them to change the way they interact with women, while on the job? For instance, I have heard men say that the requirement for them to treat women in an asexual way is not only a terrible personal imposition, but makes the world a terrible place by removing Beauty and Eros from its premises. Or what if men insisted they could only treat women as quasi mothers, wives, daughters, or else scarlet women, and defended this on some sort of moral grounds (the precise nature of which I can only imagine)? If these conditions had to be written into an employment contract, presumably it would limit other employees to those who agreed to compatible conditions.

Whether enough people think this is a serious enough possibility that it’s worth discussing whether we want to protect men who believe what’s described above, in the same way we want to protect women who don’t want to respond sexually to their bosses no matter what–or whether we think it’s improbable enough that we can assume the conditions in the OP will help to eliminate sexual harassment–I don’t know.

Maybe the case is different elsewhere, but in the US, as Brian Weatherspoon noted above, the fact that the employment contract ruled something out is not much help, because the employee is still responsible for taking action. Since the employee can choose not to take action, but simply to walk away from the contract, there is no real penalty for noncompliance on the part of the employer.

It seems to me pretty unlikely that employers are going to offer employment terms that explicitly require workers to put up with sexual harassment

Hooter does just that.

Anarcissie @119:

“However, in history we observe what we might call normal or traditional capitalism, in which a class of owners of the means of social production require another class, a laboring class, to operate the means of production and consume its products, with the owning class deriving a surplus from this process (exploitation) which provides a living and source of power for them, as well as further capital.”

That would be the classic Marxist take, yes. But most non-Marxists don’t buy it. Rather, they would say that capital investments allow greater productivity from labor, and so there is a just return on capital that need not depend on exploitation.

Consider the employee truck driver who uses his savings to buy his own truck. The difference between what he formerly got as an employee and his current profit is his return on equity.

If you say that that’s just his escape from exploitation, suppose that he then buys a better and more expensive truck, and his profit increases. Where did the improved earnings come from but return on capital, since his labor input is unchanged?

Katherine, you’re misrepresenting what I said. The OP was not focused on sexual harassment. I’m sorry for not appreciating sooner that this was your primary concern. I certainly didn’t say that sexual harassment is a minor issue. But it wasn’t the focus of my remarks.

Yes yes yes – all oppressed people throughout time have just let themselves be oppressed.

I didn’t imply this. Not even a little. I was trying to distinguish between the bad behavior of a boss and the feelings it induces in the employee. Why does your boss’s deficiency have any bearing on your character? I’m not denying that most victims of insult, certainly myself included, have a tendency initially to feel bad about themselves. I’m saying it’s important to come to see that our feelings of guilt are generated on the inside and aren’t the responsibility of the bad actor.

And by the way, if a woman who is being harassed has no “right” to her job, then surely the boss who is harassing her doesn’t have a “right” to it either.

Obviously, I agree.

By any and all standards of fairness, he is the one who should be shipping out, not her.

Yes, with the caveat that it isn’t always possible to get this result.

And no, poverty and humiliation in a world of plenty are not equivalent to someone stealing your parking spot.

I didn’t say it was. If by “system” you are pointing to matters of degree then I wouldn’t disagree. Maybe this will help- Clarence Thomas is on the supreme court. In my opinion this is a serious injustice. (Yes, sexual harassment factors into my equation here) But I’m going to tolerate it at least in so far as I’m not going to resort to extralegal means to try and change the fact. But as I said, what is just or unjust is a matter of opinion.

The last addressed to Brendan.

I’m saying it’s important to come to see that our feelings of guilt are generated on the inside and aren’t the responsibility of the bad actor.

wtf? Why do people insult and bully other people, then? Because they know that these feelings will be generated, no matter what people want their response to be. Telling people to read a bit of Spinoza doesn’t help them feel better when their boss tells them they’re a gonk-faced shitwit. It just makes you look callous.

And in any case, your response to this sort of thing shouldn’t be of this tenor: toughen up! Not everyone can do this, and no one should have to.

I have to say I’m really disappointed by the direction this series of posts has taken. It seems to be dominated by people who have no experience of real work, or whose experience is composed entirely of a few weeks of manual labour in high school, that daddy could always save them from. And this bullshit idea that no one needs to be protected in a world of full employment, which – even if it were possible in modern disaster zones like the US or the UK – is not even, and never was, true.

The debate here has come to be dominated by fantasists who don’t seem to want to understand either the nature of bullying, or the way that most real workplaces work. In between, their are fantasists who think that all of labour relations can be reduced to a simple Econ101 model, where “full employment” does all the work of abstracting away the real power relations that exist in real institutions. For light entertainment we’ve had the likes of asdf dropping in to talk about how useless “the proles” are.

It just goes to show how terribly limited academics are in providing any sense to a problem more complex than a perfect point object floating in a vacuum.

JQ @135:

the issue arises much more sharply with things like meal and toilet breaks – should these be legislated, or would it be better to even out bargaining power in such a way that workers could demand and get a better deal at the outset.

So, I’m simply not getting the contrast here. On the one hand, you could legally require that employees can take regular toilet breaks, get a lunch break, etc. Or…, they demand a better a deal how?

Here’s another way of putting it: Say I’m a worker in current in current US conditions. No bargaining parity at all! Now, we move to new and much better world where bargaining power has been evened out (presumably through legislation? I’m assuming you’re not imagining wildcat strikes, workers fucking up machinery etc.). Ok, now in this much better world, it seems to me the very first thing I do is agitate for legislation that requires employers to give me regular bathroom breaks! I mean seriously, if I have to wear diapers to work(!), what’s a better deal than not having to wear diapers to work?

Again though, I just really don’t get the contrast in the quoted sentence.

” I’m assuming you’re not imagining wildcat strikes”

I’m certainly imagining strikes (not sure whether the wildcat/regular distinction matters much here). I implied as much in the OP, when I talked about union contracts. And, in a strong labor market, walking out at zero notice is often as damaging to the employer as machine-breaking.

Overall, I’m surprised by the fact that so many CT commenters have so much faith in regulations and courts. I think the Australian and US perspectives here may be quite different – I see the courts and industrial laws as being at least as likely to favor bosses as workers .

John, the laws you cite were changed after a 10 year backlash against the power of organized labour and the regulatory system. It’s naive to pretend that the operation of the laws is independent of the cultural and political forces at work at the time. And it’s equally naive to assume that unions could achieve the same things in a full employment situation without regulation governing both unions and employers. No doubt you’ve read Keating’s comments about John Howard being like a stupid boy with a match in the powder room – that’s what happens when employers and employees are left to negotiate directly with only the unions as a go-between. Australia’s 15 years of growth were dependent on both regulations covering employers and an agreement with the unions. To claim that we’d be better off without those complex systems of consensus is to argue against most of modern Australian labour market history.

This kind of semi-anarchist approach to labour relations is a disaster waiting to happen. Reforming it was Hawke’s first order of business upon assuming power in 1983, and for good reason. Look at Australia’s economic performance up until then to see why!

To the various people I’ve irritated, I wish it weren’t this way. Maybe I’m mistaken, but I’m trying to bring a perspective that I think could be useful. I’m interested in the interplay between our rational faculties and our emotions, particularly the susceptibility of our reason to being at times overwhelmed by strong feelings. I see that quite a bit on this thread.

Why do people insult and bully other people, then?

There are times when the only really apparent reason is, they do it for their own amusement, for the satisfaction of a sadistic urge. Where do sadistic urges come from? Probably from being similarly abused in the past. We repeat what we know from our experience. In other cases, the force of habit is combined with having a particular object in mind, like getting my female co-worker to have sex with me. I want something, I deploy the means I’m familiar with to get it, and in the case of the workplace I might think that I have something extra working in my favor, the power of being my co-workers boss.

My instinct tells me this shouldn’t be permissible. But even if it is illegal that hardly guarantees it won’t happen. It hardly guarantees that the courts are the best recourse. Maybe they will be in many cases, and that’s good. In other cases maybe there is recourse within the company, going over the head of the offending boss. But there may be many cases where the best answer is, “I’m not going to work for a bunch of assholes. Goodbye.” Or perhaps, “You must not value my contribution to this company very much if you’re willing to treat me this way. And by the way, go fuck yourself.”

Hidden Heart, I wouldn’t for a second make light of PTSD. I don’t think though, that PTSD is generally the result of verbal insults or other forms of non-violent disrespect.

“the courts”

I doubt that most people in the UK think of going to an employment tribunal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Tribunal

to challenge a case of unfair dismissal in quite the same way as they think of going to law to sue somebody. (My sense is that some participants in this discussion have in mind people suing one another for tort, breach of contract etc.)

John:

I would (as a worker) go for the 60s without hesitation and (if I were an employer) much prefer the current situation.

I don’t think this is a fair way to characterize the false choice you’re offering. You “as a worker” don’t represent the full range of possible participants in the 60s employment market and you’re hand-waving away a huge amount of oppressive and discriminatory practices with this comparison. Specifically, women in the 1960s were guaranteed low wages and no career options no matter what job they applied for, and sexual harrassment was common. Moving jobs in a situation of full employment didn’t change this for them: it was a constant of their labour market participation and required regulation to change. Indeed, at the time that regulation was being considered, many labour activists argued that to extend them the same rights as men would destroy full employment.

You can’t just hand-wave this away by saying that it wouldn’t happen now, because it would, and although the burden of this kind of problem wouldn’t fall so disproportionately on women now it would still apply: to people from poor backgrounds, to some new migrants, etc. In Australia, with an unregulated labour market, identifiably Aboriginal people would suffer continuous and crippling discrimination that would force them into exactly the labour market position of women in the 60s. Unskilled female labourers in their late 20s and early 30s would be unable to change jobs, because they would be a “hiring risk” due to the possibility of getting pregnant; so, if hte situation in their current job became untenable (due to e.g. harrassment or bullying) they wouldn’t be able to change work.

Other things that don’t affect you “as a worker” now but that are very important to other workers and have only been achieved through regulation are: workers compensation (largely irrelevant to economists in academia); safe work environments (economists don’t need safety gear); asbestos amelioration (do you work in a prefab?); anti-bullying laws (bullying can destroy your mental health long before you can get out); and laws about drug use, shift length and alcohol in the workplace that are crucial for ensuring the safety not just of employees but of the people they serve.

I just can’t understand how people can blithely assume that “full employment” situations from a different era will somehow provide protection to a working population that spent the last 30 years agitating to improve work conditions from that time. It seems terribly naive.

What’s hard to explain is how equity owners’ exploitation of labor causes rising inequality when equity yields over the past decade have been relatively low.

On the other hand, an increasingly globalized and growing economy makes it easier for the top performers in sectors that sell worldwide to earn much bigger incomes.

Low marginal cost products like software, electronics and recorded video make it easier for the companies that are first in their field to become hugely profitable.

Lower tax rates let high income people keep more of their earnings.

When social norms are eroded, executives, financial managers and lawyers are more willing to demand higher compensation.

Will McLean: “What’s hard to explain is how equity owners’ exploitation of labor causes rising inequality when equity yields over the past decade have been relatively low.”

It is a kind of zen experience, to simply contemplate that sentence, pondering what possible causal constraint the author imagined low “equity yields over the past decade” might place on exploitation of labor or rising inequality of incomes.

Some of us might think there’s an arithmetic relationship between inflated asset values and low equity yields, which resolves the deep mystery of the rising share of total income claimed by Capital, and in related news, by Power.

Still, McLean does raise the collateral questions of financialization and globalization, and their relationships to income distribution.

A corollary to the idea that full-employment is the key to equalizing negotiating power, nationally, is the idea that wages have been depressed simply by the changed ratio of Labor and Capital in newly globalizing trade, in which a vast “supply” of (cheap) labor has been thrown onto the world market, in the form, I guess, of China and India, and this has shifted the natural balance of negotiation in favor of Capital, of which a shortage now exists. Plus, as McLean says, Hollywoodization, which delivers big bucks to IP and to Stars.

Of course, the problem may be that, for technological reasons, the required amount of “real” capital for high labor productivity is declining rapidly. Fiber optic internet plus a cellphone system is much cheaper than the previous mountain of copper behind a switched phone system, for example.

Vast amounts of purely financial capital, with no secure attachment to factors of production (equipment, business ownership, real estate), is seeking return the only way it can, by promoting ponzi schemes and usury. The exploitation driving inequality isn’t bathroom breaks, it is bankrupting Greece or overthrowing democracy in Italy, driving municipalities into bankruptcy with fraudulent bond deals, and payday lenders preying on the working class.

Apparently full-employment is completely at odds with delivering the big bucks to banksters, but for reasons only tangential to, if not altogether distant from, the labor-management relationship on the shopfloor.

John, a lot of Japanese workplace “rights” come down to negotiation of contracts, and it’s not really a very pretty way to resolve disputes. How are poor people mistreated at work meant to rustle up the cash and the spare time to fight a court case, just to get -what? An apology and a few weeks’ back pay? Also, if as you say workers have not been winning the regulation battle for the last 30 years, what do you think would be different about the resolution of disputes under contract law? Slowly and surely the big companies, with good lawyers and infinite resources to restructure the legal environment, would reset case history in favour of their own rights, and it would become (as, I think, is the case in Japan) increasingly difficult for workers to win cases.

What would happen then is class actions, and demands by employers and employees to liberate both sides of the contract from complex legal cases, followed by regulation, etc….

RE: your second paragraph. Just because workers have been losing battles in the last 30 years, doesn’t mean that the conditions they were fighting against are desirable for anyone. Unions fought to improve the lot of workers from the 1960s on. That should tell you that 1960s workplaces weren’t popular with working people. , Nostalgia for full employment without regulation should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Mattski@171:

See this link, included in Krugman’s article, for a more complete explanation of the wedge:

http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/

Note that the biggest part of the wedge is bigger gains for more highly compensated labor vs. the median.