Poetics of Work in the “Manifesto for ‘Products’ of Dire Need”
Preston Carter
As the nature of work continues to be reshaped by neoliberal forces perpetuating local and global environmental crises, the need for a philosophical interrogation of work becomes increasingly urgent. This paper argues that Édouard Glissant and the Creolité movement’s poetics of in the 2009 Manifeste pour les “produits” de haute nécessité (“Manifesto for ‘Products’ of Dire Need”), written in the wake of the 2009 General Strike in the French Caribbean, and the expanded 2009 Traité pour le grand dérangement (“Treaty for Widespread Disruption”) offers a departure from neoliberal conceptions of labor. These manifestos provide a poetics of work that aligns with the syndicalist movement of the Guadelouepean Lyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (Alliance against Colonial Profiteering) and the Martinican February 5th Collective, the two organizations that called the general strike. Glissant et al. criticize the reduction of work to mere economic production and consumption.
Their manifesto calls for a reclamation of a conception of labor that opens space for political freedom, cultural expression, and communal solidarity rather than labor reduced to mere a means to economic ends. Glissant et al.’s manifestos aim to reclaim the poetic dimension of work, and they are not only in lyannaj (alliance) and solidarity with the militant actions of the LKP and its unique syndicalist approach to labor organizing; Glissant et al. and the LKP each in turn draw upon the rhizomic roots of the Antillean and Caribbean tradition and society of koudmen--a practice of cooperatie labor and mutual aid--in their critique of neoliberal labor and visions of alternatives.
The LKP movement is born out of a resistance to novel forms of neoliberal exploitation, and moreover draws upon long traditions of struggle against racial capitalism in-part through alternative forms of labor, ranging from the plantation to its afterlives to the necropolitical chlordecone poisoning. As the word liyannaj elicits, the creative forging of alliances and emphasis on the interconnectedness of struggles disrupts logics of neoliberalism and racial capitalism. Glissant’s philosophy, along with that of the creolité writers, puts forward a transformative approach to work that emphasizes the poetic dimensions of work--including its potential to foster social invention, ecological stewardship, and new modes of organization beyond colonial profiteering.
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Must we all do essential work?
Rebecca Clark
Food, clean water, medical care – these goods are owed to people as a matter of justice. Who should do the work required to provide them? Building on the intuitive claim that there are certain goods and services that every human being is owed as a matter of justice, I mount three key theses. First, I argue that we are under a collective obligation to ensure that essential goods and services are produced (Collective Obligation Thesis). Second, I contend that the distribution of the burdens of discharging this collective obligation is fair only if there are no agents who are unjustifiably exempt from either (i) doing their fair share of essential work or (ii) fairly compensating those who do this work (Fair Discharging Thesis).
I argue that a fair level of compensation is equal to the degree to which the agent who does essential work suffers from a setback to their objective interests. Third, I show that we cannot fairly discharge this collective obligation via the labour market (Anti-Market Thesis).In contemporary Western societies, the question of who does essential work is largely settled by the market mechanism. I argue that using the market to organise essential work is in principle unfair and in practice often exploitative. It is unfair because the rest of society lets these workers discharge the collective duty to provide essential goods and services without offering a fitting return to these workers and thereby unfairly free rides on them; the reciprocal obligations incurred are directed duties, and hence cannot be satisfied by private employers. Moreover, in practice, relying on the market to determine who does essential work is not only unfair but exploitative since many people only do essential work in virtue of their position of vulnerability. Thus, I show that considerations of fairness offer a strong pro tanto reason not to rely on the market as the primary mechanism by which society allocates essential work.
The final section of the paper turns to the question of how society should organise essential work all-things-considered. While fairness is a weighty normative consideration, other relevant normative principles that bear on this question include efficiency and liberty. Indeed, one way to construe the existing debate between those who advocate for conscripting citizens to do essential work and leaving the matter of who does essential work up to the market is that the disagreement stems from different weightings being placed on these values. I aim to cut through the existing stalemate by proposing an alternative institutional arrangement: the state should directly employ workers who produce essential goods and fairly compensate them, funded by higher taxes paid by citizens who do not do essential work. I show that this public employment model would enable citizens to fairly discharge the collective duty to produce essential goods while being more attractive than conscription on the grounds of both efficiency and liberty.
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Unemployment Insurance, Inflation, and the Willingness to Work
Ryan Doody
In 1935, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, and with it a government commitment to provide unemployment insurance to most American workers. Unemployment insurance is a form of temporary wage replacement for workers who are unemployed, so long as they are available, and actively looking, for work. It is a familiar part of the fabric of life for American workers. But it is open to some interesting principled objections from the political left and the right. For example, opponents with libertarian sympathies may object to the compulsory withholding of wages to support such programs. While progressives, who generally support programs of financial support for the unemployed, may yet question the condition that beneficiaries of the program be available and looking for work.
They complain that conditioning benefits on a willingness to work is objectionably paternalistic. This paper entertains a novel justification for the conditional form of unemployment insurance—one that turns on the relationship between the unemployment rate and inflation.
The idea, roughly, is this. There's typically taken to be an inverse correlation between the rate of unemployment and inflation: as unemployment decreases, inflation increases. One reason for this is that the larger the pool of unemployed looking for work, the more competition for jobs there will be, ultimately driving down the price of wages, exerting a deflationary effect. Hyperinflation is disastrous for everyone. We have strong reasons—grounded in a concern for individual autonomy—to avoid significant, unpredictable rises in inflation.
In the service of avoiding runaway inflation, we should tolerate the existence of a certain amount of unemployment. In answer to the libertarian’s worry: those who are unemployed at this level are performing a service that benefits the rest of us, and for that reason we owe them reciprocal compensation. And so, coercively collecting contributions, via taxation, to fund Unemployment Insurance doesn’t objectionably compromise individual autonomy—instead, that is money one owes to others who are providing one with an autonomy-enhancing service.
Furthermore, because unemployment has a deflationary effect only when the unemployed are actively searching for work, attaching a work requirement to Unemployment Insurance programs can be defended against the objection that doing so is objectionably paternalistic. To maintain a competitive labor market and attenuate the prospect of runaway inflation, we need the unemployed to actively seek work and it is on this understanding that compensation is due. Properly understood, unemployment benefits are not benefits, welfare, or workfare but compensation for performing a critical social function.
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Re-Thinking the Post-Colonial Self in Caribbean Philosophy
Rudolph Ellis
The post-colonial self in Caribbean philosophy is an inherited concept bequeathed to us by our ancestors. This inherited tradition has influenced Caribbean people’s tendency to engage the self and its environment as a disfigured entity and landscape where tragedy was redefined, respectively.
These conclusions were hinged on and informed by the twin events of slavery and colonialism in the region. The problem with this view is that it lacks a proper synthesis of the anatomical narrative and the predicative discourse to help us understand more holistically the constitutive nature of who and what the post-colonial self is. This defect in our philosophy has caused an aberration of effect in writers’ narratives, where they engaged work as a separate process from the human agents who perform it, this is metaphysical dualism that will be interrogated in this paper.
The position that will be defended is the claim that dualism is an embedded state of consciousness that reflects the nature of the post-colonial self and the concept of work is an inextricable element in human autonomy. We will engage C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon’s works to expose their different approaches toward achieving revolution for black people, and the impact of dialectical materialism on their vision of the self as a revolutionary entity. The archival approach facilitated the retrieval of data that contained the conceptual and articulated understanding of the structure of the post-colonial self they embraced.
The result of this exercise seeks two primary outcomes, to re-orientate the perceptions we have nurtured about who and what we are as autonomous agents endowed with consciousness; and to redefine the notion of work to incorporate consciousness as the element responsible for functionality in the body. The conclusions in this paper will interrogate whether the vision Caribbean writers narrated for the people would define their destiny if they took control of the plantations, as espoused by C. L. R. James. Or, whether the black man must annihilate his oppressor to achieve total revolution, as in the case of Frantz Fanon. How these divergent visions establish compatibility with the nature of the self is consistent with work as a multi-purpose undertaking. More importantly, the conclusion will explore whether these undertakings qualify as genuine work.
Key Words: Self, post-colonial, consciousness, work, autonomy, C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, Caribbean.
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The Subject Project: Human Visibility, Vulnerability, and Diversity in the Data Age
James Garrison
Using a combination of approaches from critical theory, data science, and data ethics, my work The Subject Project: Human Visibility, Vulnerability, and Diversity in the Data Age investigates 1) how human subjects view themselves and are conscious of being viewed by data systems and 2) how to mitigate the impact that this has, particularly on vulnerable populations. The Subject Project maintains that specific conditions of visibility and invisibility make each of us (but some much more so than others) vulnerable to being compelled to see what we hold to be special about ourselves projected with unsettling accuracy into the future by impersonal algorithms which have major social and political consequences.
The Subject Project therefore builds on perspectives from critical theory like those of Michel Foucault
regarding the emergence in the industrial age of self-monitoring, self-policing, self-disciplining, self-conscious subjects being formed by the gaze of others in society’s “virtual panopticon.” Now, as the very nature of work is being called radically into question with the advent of the data age, the human subject has also become a project, i.e., a projection. This new epoch thus calls for an elaboration of labor. Hence, The Subject Project claims that, to the extent that a given type of work yields data that either facilitates or resists projection, workers will be hyper-visible and/or invisible, with both options presenting perils.
For example, the work of artists, philosophers, and writers more generally will remain invisible in financial terms to the extent that correlating such endeavors with monetary value continues to be difficult. Even now with mountains of data, identifying the “it” factor that separates mere competence from staggering genius is no easy task. Despite overwhelming interest, we still cannot do much to predict where a given creative endeavor will land in the marketplace, making workers in these fields curiously invisible when it comes to future projection in specifically monetary terms.
Meanwhile, that same work might also be extremely visible in other ways, especially as it is quantized in digital form, processed by large language models (often without content creators’ consent), and exploited to generate seemingly novel cultural expressions at the expense of temperamental, unpredictable, and the reforecostly human creative types. The invisibility of such work on financial terms will almost certainly make such workers vulnerable to being devalued by an increasingly algorithmic marketplace, while the visibility of such work for computational systems makes many of these same workers vulnerable to replacement in everyday settings where superlative human genius might be superfluous.
The twofold goal of The Subject Project is therefore 1) to offer an overview of this inflection point in history now occurring when, instead of just seeing ourselves as subjects here and now through each other’s eyes, we also increasingly see ourselves projected into the future, and 2) to recommend ways of responding to the dilemmas that this poses for human freedom in general and for diverse populations whose specific visibility and invisibility before data systems creates unique conditions of vulnerability that demand to be addressed.
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A Time for Everything: The Case for the Limited Working Week
Simone Gubler
Legal limits on the duration of the working day and week (e.g. the 8-hour day, 40-hour week) function to impose a control on labor supply: obstructing or disincentivizing employers from purchasing more than a specified amount of an individual worker's labor. Working week laws thus limit the freedom of employers to purchase labor, and, by extension, they limit the freedom of employees to market labor hours that they might otherwise be willing to sell.
In this paper, I focus on the latter species of worry, asking whether there are liberal reasons strong enough to justify limited working week laws, in light of worries about the autonomy of workers. I take it as given that the state should not violate the autonomy of its citizens absent very compelling reasons. As Mill says: “But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.” (Mill, 2006: 79).
I surveyed four potential ways of defusing the worry that limited working week laws objectionably violate the autonomy of employees by limiting their freedom to sell their labor. Each response has its limitations, but I argue that the fourth, the idea that free time is a common pool resource, which the state has a legitimate interest in conserving – is the most promising.
Each human being has a finite amount of time on Earth in which to serve their own interest and the social interest. And, while productive labor at work supplies some goods that comprise the social interest, it fails to supply some other necessary goods. The pool of individual free time is an important resource because, as our society is presently organized, it enables the provision of at least two key public goods.
Society and democracy will fail if a certain basic capacity isn’t maintained. Limited working week laws are one of the key legislative tools for maintaining that capacity. I argue that whatever their own individual interests, workers may justifiably be subjected to legal constraints in their election of working hours, in order to avoid the depletion of the pool of free time to an extent that threatens the provision of key social goods––one regarding social reproduction, and one regarding our duties as democratic citizens. We all have some stake in the free time of others, and the limited working week is an important means to protect that interest.
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Data as labor and as work
Julian Jonker
Data and algorithms increasingly intermediate the modern workplace: the
warehouse worker’s footsteps and restroom breaks are recorded, the delivery driver’s route is algorithmically monitored and prescribed, and the white-collar worker’s key- strokes are logged. Such tools of algorithmic management are continuous with the scien- tific management techniques of the early 20th century, but they are also a departure.
Both approaches use data as a means to increase productivity and discipline behavior. What differs in the 21st century approach is that surveillance is extractive: the data produced by algorithmic management tools is stored or sold as training data for the machines that will replace the very workers who are the source of the data. This mirrors a wider extractive phenomenon: our everyday interactions on the internet similarly generate vast troves of data whose economic value accrues to platforms rather than users. And much hyped AI models rely upon hidden pools of labor whose fine-tuning efforts become permanent parts of the models.
This paper examines these extractive tendencies by distinguishing between work as a source of normative interpersonal relations, and labor as a factor of production. (The distinction borrows some aspects of Arendt’s distinction, but borrows also from the insights of 20th century political economists like Polanyi.) We give work normative priority because we respect its claims on agents, and we acknowledge those agents as deserving acknowledgment and compensation. By contrast, labor is an economic resource to be allocated efficiently, though labor markets involve significant distortions of the competitive market mechanism. Some of these distortions are a necessary part of the commodification of work, while some help to protect the interpersonal dimension of work.
One solution that has been posed to some of these extractive tendencies is that we view the act of participating in generating data about oneself as a kind of labor. Seen in this light we can imagine ways of protecting data subjects that are not the traditional privacy protections; for example, data unions and data strikes. Viewing data as a kind of labor also recommends that we view gig economy workers as laboring in the service of platforms as much as other platform users. But it is harder to see data generation as a kind of work. Moreover, when we emphasize the economic value of data generation, and in particular the value of the disembodied and personalized commodity that it produces, we run the risk of overlooking the interpersonal activities that accompany it. Indeed, overlooking the interpersonal importance of work is one of the neglected threats of automation.
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Fragmentation and integrity Within the Workplace
Kevin Layne
When integrity and fragmentation is discussed, it is usually within the broad sphere of personal versus professional life. We hear turns of phrase such as “there are no friends in business” and “keep home life and work life separate”. Fragmentation generally is taken by most people as the way one ought to operate in life. However, some philosophers have argued that fragmentation is problematic because it may cause a kind of cognitive dissonance within the individual and may affect their ability to live a non-compartmentalized life – a life of integrity.
In this paper, I wish to explore fragmentation and integrity within a much more confined space – the workplace itself. If one has worked in any organization for any length of time, one notices how individuals navigate the workspace and how they interact with people of different strata – upper management, supervisory staff, peers, cliques, subordinates and those who may be seen as the “lowest” in the organizational chart. I will argue that this behaviour is a type of fragmentation as opposed to just the usual office interactions/politics. I will also argue that this type of fragmentation is problematic for the individual and organizational integrity and how it can also have a negative effect on the organization, including on the internal and external customers. I will also show how having an integrated approach could benefit the individual and the organization and make for a better and more stable work environment. I will conclude the paper with a potential practical approach as to how to achieve this.
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Being our life’s work: A kaleidoscope of meaning and mastery
Donna-Maria B. Maynard and Mia A. Jules
Muhammad Ali (1978) stated, “service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth”. Our humanity can be justified by embarking on a life in service to others as well as a need to satisfy self. ‘Work’ is a subjective abstraction, however ‘to work’ represents the expenditure of energy (mental and physical) to achieve a desired goal. For many in the Caribbean, ‘to work’ is synonymous with the achievement of external gains driven by the forces of capitalism and a desire to amass resources in a region still grappling with the vestiges of colonial disenfranchisement. However, after one has mastered the external to achieve outward goals, there is a need to turn the work inward so as to understand how personal meanings change across one’s lifespan.
Rex Nettleford’s (1999) concept of “inward stretch, outward reach”; beautifully encapsulates the balance between personal growth and societal contribution. As an abstract noun, what constitutes one’s work is highly subjective, and the unique meanings ascribed to the concept of work can have far-reaching implications for the many facets of one’s being. Thus, to solely define work in terms of economic productivity is limiting as the intra and inter personal process-based nature of the construct should also be explored within the context of its value to personal and community well-being.
Work is a process that represents a striving to be at one with what we deem as ‘being.’ From an existential perspective there is no inherent meaning to life–we give it meaning through our preoccupations and strivings (i.e., our work). Humanistic theorists would argue that we must continually engage in self-work to become our most authentic selves along five’s dimensions of the human condition. That is, the spiritual (our search for a deeper connection and sense of purpose beyond oneself), the emotional (our range of feelings that shape our experiences and interactions), the intellectual (our capacity for reason and critical thinking that informs our understanding of the world), the physical (our biological and physiological aspects of being human), and the social (the ways we interact with and are influenced by our social environments and relationships). ‘Being’ and ‘becoming’ is the work of the human condition as we (in the present) strive to achieve a state of stability, self-acceptance, completeness and an alignment with our authentic selves. These strivings (i.e., work) are not bound by time or any single life achievement, but rather through the reinvention and rediscovery of one’s self across one’s life, which creates a kaleidoscope of work-related possibilities. This conceptual paper therefore aims to redefine ‘work’ through a psychological lens. That is, we will explore the existential meanings of the work construct and how it influences personal fulfilment across the many dimensions of ‘being’ within the Caribbean context. Additionally, we will offer insights for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand and improve the quality of work and life in the Caribbean, emphasising the need for a holistic approach that honours the full spectrum of the human experience.
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“Work” as the Manifestation of Agency
Kiesha M. Martin
An intentional action requires an agentic mind with the powers to form the intentions and make the logical connection between the intentions and the course of action required for the desired outcome. Recently, advances in cognitive science and the upsurgence of Artificial Intelligence has required a reconsideration of agency, with a reconstitution of what actions can properly be labelled agentic. The following articulates a conception of work as the actualization of agency, where work fills in the content of those actions that reveal agency. Agency properly speaking is the capacity to act, and work is the realization of that capacity. Using two of the four pictures of agency.
Luca Ferrero spell-out in the introduction to The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Agency; agency as productive power and agency as self-constitution, I will argue for a notion of work that reveals agency. Agency as productive power is the capacity to make a difference in the world. “Agency as self-constitution offers a straightforward account of the attributability of the action to the agent. An exercise of self-motion, any piece of conduct is necessarily of the ‘self’, that is, of the entity that is, by its nature, in the business of constituting itself – of making itself” (Ferrero 2022, 10). I argue for the centrality of work, not only as a vocation but as a necessary praxis of identity formation, where identities are formed and fortified through the socially discursive activity of working as the manifestation of agency.
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Being Human, the Clinamen, and the Inevitability of Work
Deryck Murray
The advance of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and robotics makes it possible to imagine a world without work. We have already seen the movie. The Matrix. Those in the Matrix never actually work physically. In the old days, only royalty might have come close. Still, there is much mental work.
In the Matrix, even learning was effortless. Advance skills are downloaded. If we take work to mean activity that generally is arduous and not immediately pleasurable, can we imagine a world where human beings continue to flourish without working?
This paper explores the inevitability and metaphysics of change and disruption – Michel Serres’ clinamen – and the imperative of ongoing, evolving, and embodied learning both as work and fundamental to being human. The consequence is, we can never escape work, whether as royalty or in the matrix.
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A Caribbean Somaesthetic Analysis Of Professional Image
Charis Sieunarine
Somaesthetics is proposed as an interdisciplinary field that engages and meliorates aesthetic and affective life experiences of persons within different multicultural contexts. Richard Shusterman who coined somaesthetics in 1997, makes a point that when we put art and aesthetics into preoccupations associated with taking time off from our work, this notion in itself perpetuates and constructs institutions that can oppress persons (Pragmatic Aesthetics, 20). From an autoethnographic perspective, I will first work out how somatic image builds and layers over into notions of a professional image.
Then it would be important to describe how Caribbean regional work spaces tout, require, embody, sanction or design training of persons in order to cultivate, curate and choreograph image according to dress code manuals and aesthetic expectations embedded in its established work culture. By this limited experiential measure of living and working in the Caribbean region, a professional image seems, feels, appears to be somaesthetic. In order to gauge the viability of this assumption, global contributors to somaesthetics studies along with thinkers within the Caribbean region will be brought in to help answer three questions: (i) What are the sociological consequences associated with a professional work image? (ii) Is it pedagogically wise to curate and choreograph a professional image? (iii) Is the notion of a professional image ethical?
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Objectionable Status Hierarchies at Work
Sanat Sogani
Firms routinely create or reinforce status hierarchies at work – between bosses and subordinates, managers and workers, or even between employees at the same level of organization hierarchy. These hierarchies are often upheld by privileges for those in superior positions in the form of larger offices, exclusive rights to parking spaces, honorific titles, personal assistants etc. Such hierarchies have received strikingly little philosophical attention, at least much less compared to other distribution and relational issues at workplaces. To some extent, this is understandable – some people being seen as superior to others may not be the most urgent workplace issue at hand, especially in cases where such status hierarchies do not lead to demeaning treatment, significant constraints on liberties or material deprivation for some workers. Having said that, I argue that many workplace status hierarchies are in fact normatively significant because they harm some employees’ legitimate interest in not being seen as inferiors. I draw on Niko Kolodny’s recent proposal of ‘claims against inferiority’ as sui generis moral claims to capture the sense of insult, frustration and harm arising out of workplace status hierarchies (Kolodny, 2023).
Sometimes decision makers in a firm have a good justification for why they create or maintain status hierarchies, despite this harming those in the inferior positions. I accept that claims against inferiority, while morally significant, may be defeasible in the face of other valuable organizational goals. I consider what I take to be four plausible ways in which status hierarchies at workplace may be justified despite generating claims against inferiority. These are that status hierarchies may be used to:
(i) create incentive structures to maximise productivity such as by making certain positions within the organization more prestigious and aspiration-worthy
(ii) enforce legitimate authority of managers/bosses, assuming that subordinates are more likely to respect the legitimate authority of the boss if the boss is seen as having a higher status than them.
(iii) track moral desert such that those who contribute more to an organization rightly merit a superior status and,
(iv) equalise the welfare packages associated with jobs such that the good of superior status helps offset other burdens associated with a job.
I show that status hierarchies are not strictly necessary to achieve goals (i), (ii) and (iv). However, in some cases, status hierarchies may in fact be required to achieve these goals depending on prevailing attitudes, organisational ethos and external factors beyond the control of individual decision makers within the firm. Considering such hierarchies tend to raise claims against inferiority, decision makers have a duty to start from a low base and deploy status generating strategies only when other less objectionable ways of achieving the same goals have been exhausted. I further argue that (iii) can never justify status hierarchies as status tends to bias the evaluations that agents receive from others. Desert demands that agents receive the respect they merit because of their actions or dispositions and not because of their social status. With the use of several commonplace examples of workplace status hierarchies, I identify cases where such hierarchies are at least morally regrettable and some others where they are outright objectionable.
Bibliography
Kolodny, N. (2023). The Pecking Order. Harvard University Press.
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Freedom and Equality in the Gig Economy
Jacob Sparks
Millions of workers now participate in the gig economy, where almost every aspect of work, including compensation, is mediated by automated management systems. Some worry that these tools can be used to surveil and control workers, that the scale at which these systems operate can give some outsized power over the lives of others, and that automated decision making can perpetuate race, class and gender biases. Despite these concerns, automated management presents an important opportunity to create a freer and more equal workplace. When the conditions of your employment are determined by an automated process instead of human judgment, there is no one to whom you must ingratiate yourself, no authority you have to worry about offending, no one you need to fear, flatter, or cajole. If we could fully automate management’s role in the workplace, that would eliminate a deep and persistent source of hierarchy and domination at work: the boss.
To argue for this claim, we make use of an analogy between automated management and the rule of law. Both automation and law reduce the need for human discretion in decision making and can therefore be used to prevent dominating relationships. But just as some laws are despotic, some automated decision systems are mere tools of the powerful. Consider the difference between the rule of law, a republican and egalitarian ideal, and rule by law, something a despot might use to exert power at one remove. When one rules by law, some authority makes laws for any reason and is unaccountable to the people their laws govern.
When we have the rule of law, the laws have a special way of coming into being and have their own independent authority. The solution to domination by law is not to replace laws with discretionary choice; it is to make laws better. We take great care in making, enforcing and adjudicating our laws.
We should take similar care in building the automated systems that increasingly govern people at work. So how do we achieve the rule of law, thereby protecting freedom and equality? And how could we design automated management so that, rather than algorithmic domination, we have the rule of automation? According to a line of thought favored by many republicans and egalitarians, only when laws are created and enforced under certain conditions, do we achieve the rule of law. These conditions are that: (1) those subject to the law must enjoy equal and individualized influence over it, (2) those subject to the law must provide equal and individualized direction in its creation, (3) the law must avoid codifying objectionable social hierarchies and (4) the law must be the output of a democratic community. In the full paper, we explain these requirements and use them to evaluate the automated management systems powering the gig-economy.
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Basic Income Exit As A Social Good
Jurgen De Wispelaere and Tobias Jaeger
It is a staple of the basic income debate that a substantial unconditional basic income would provide workers with an exit option from their current employment or even the labour market altogether. This exit option is often framed as providing workers with the “power to say no” that boosts workers’ bargaining power against their employer. This exit power is conceptualized as an individual power and some (but not all) basic income advocates argue the individual power of exit provided by basic income is superior to the collective power of voice (collective bargaining backed by strikes) currently available to workers. This paper argues that the conventional view is mistaken and that while the basic income is an individual good, the exit option it provides is an irreducibly social good since its value is impacted by the behaviour of other workers. The paper develops two arguments prevalent in the basic income exit literature to show that each strand leads to a distinctive social dilemma. The argument that workers can use their exit option toseek out better job alternatives is subject to social contagion and therefore faces a common good dilemma. By contrast, the argument that sufficient threats to exit will lead employers to offer better pay or working conditions too depends on there being a critical mass of such exits: this argument takes on the form of a public goods dilemma. Modelling both “common good exit” and “public good exit” together demonstrates that while a robust exit option is a theoretical possibility, the specific conditions under which this possibility becomes reality are too strict to provide a reliable political strategy for improving workers’ bargaining position. In short: our paper shows that the basic income exit option is not a generalisable argument for promoting workers’ bargaining power.