Michael Albert
The
issue of Dignified Work has two primary components:
(1)
what is a just division of tasks for each person; and
(2)
what division of tasks do we need to adopt in order to have our work foster
self-management?
Just
Work
A
just division of tasks requires that each person should have a fair share of
good and bad quality of life attributes in their workday or, if they don’t, that
they be remunerated accordingly. That is, why should one person have nice work
conditions and another person horrible ones, unless the latter person is given
extra pay to offset this burden?
But
conveniently this element of Just Work is already accomplished in our unfolding
vision because remunerating according to effort and sacrifice, as per our
earlier commentaries, automatically offsets any disparity in quality of life
attributes. That is, if we remunerate according to effort and sacrifice,
whenever Betty works at a less fulfilling and more demanding job than Salim,
Betty will also exert more effort and sacrifice at work and will therefore get
higher pay. So we already have Just Work due to our prior agreements about Just
Rewards. But is that all there is to Dignified Work?
Equally
Empowering Work
We
also want our economic actors to influence outcomes in proportion as they are
affected by them, in accord with self management. Suppose Betty spends all day
cleaning floors and Salim spends all day doing empowering financial and social
tasks that increase his decision-making related skills and knowledge. Even if
Betty and Salim have the same workplace voting rights and even if they are
remunerated justly, after months of working at these differently empowering
jobs, Betty will have neither the energy, knowledge, confidence, nor skills to
play a role comparable to Salim’s in influencing decisions.
Workplace
council meetings involve discussions, presentations, debates, and votes. If
Salim comes to meetings with extensive knowledge, social skills, confidence, and
energy due to his empowering job and Betty comes to the same meetings with
obliterated knowledge, social skills, confidence, and energy due to her dis-empowering
job–Salim is going to have way more impact at the meetings than Betty, In fact,
the relatively few workers with highly empowering jobs will by virtue of their
on-the-job situations dominate discussions. Even a fair vote will regularly
select among proposals that the empowered few offer and settle on proposals that
they favor. Betty will at best ratify the will of the empowered, informed,
energetic few. At worst she and everyone else who has a dis-empowering job will
be completely excluded.
It
follows that attaining Self-Management requires not only the formal right to
participate in decisions, but also that everyone enjoys conditions that prepare
and promote their effective participation. If an economy is class divided so
that those with empowering jobs make decisions others obey and those with
disempowering jobs merely obey decisions others make, there will no be self
management, clearly. This is why we highlight Dignified Work as a theme unto
itself. If workers are to participate equally in economic decision-making, their
diverse jobs must affect their decision-making inclinations and competence
comparably. The old slogan that you are what you eat may or may not be
economically meaningful. But the new slogan that you become what you do, is
surely economically pivotal.
Balanced
Job Complexes
Our
third thematic goal (after Just Rewards and Self-Management) is therefore about
what we call Dignified Work and Balanced Job Complexes.
In
any economy, each job combines many tasks which, taken in combination, have an
overall "empowerment index." This index is higher if the sum total of
tasks in the job are more empowering, and lower if they are less empowering.
Jobs in typical corporations combine quite similar tasks into such jobs as
secretary, mail boy, janitor, CEO, finance officer, assembly line operator,
manager, and so on. Most people in these corporations do jobs that have a low
empowerment index. A very few do jobs that have a very high index.
To
attain Balanced Job Complexes, we instead advocate apportioning tasks to jobs so
that each job in the economy has an average overall index. In other words, we
allot to each job not a homogenous batch of tasks at only one empowerment level,
but a combination of tasks with varied empowerment qualities whose total
empowerment effect is the average for society. Instead of Judy being a
secretary, John being a Comptroller, and Jerry cleaning bathrooms, Judy, John,
and Jerry all have a variety of tasks in their designated job with various
levels of rote and empowering implications. The overall empowerment effect on
Judy of her combination of tasks and on John of his and on Jerry of his, are, as
best we can manage it, the same.
In
other words, with balanced job complexes we of course each have a job in which
we enjoy our own particular and perhaps even unique conditions of work. However,
despite differences in specific content from what others do, our job and all
other jobs are comparably empowering.
As
a result of balancing job complexes there is no longer a fixed management with
uniquely informative and uplifting tasks. There is no longer a set of rote jobs
whose conditions are only deadening. Indeed, there is no hierarchy of jobs
vis-à-vis empowerment effects. We define all this away by combining tasks into
jobs in this new way, balancing tasks for empowerment effects. Thus, each person
working in the economy does a combination of tasks sensibly accommodated to the
needs of particular work situations, of course, but also designed to balance
empowerment impacts rather than to monopolize the most empowering circumstances
for a few folks at the top of a workplace hierarchy of power.
Okay,
it is clear that by its very definition balancing job complexes accomplishes
both being fair and also laying a proper foundation for self-management. It
avoids dividing the workforce into a highly-empowered "coordinator
class" and a subordinate, disenfranchised working class, instead giving all
workers comparable empowerment in their economic lives. But are there offsetting
problems with the approach? For example, can it get the work done, and can it
get it done well?
Individual
Options
Folks
at largely rote jobs will generally like the idea of balanced job complexes,
because their lives would improve as they get their share of empowering tasks of
one sort or another. They will see the switch from unbalanced to balanced jobs
as justly redressing a demeaning and unfair situation they have long suffered.
On
the other hand, folks who occupy or aspire to cushier and more empowered jobs
such as managers, doctors, lawyers, empowered intellectuals, etc., will often
see this proposal as threatening because after job complexes are balanced, their
old jobs would no longer exist in the same form. A person in an economy with
balanced job complexes may of course do some managing (of a sort), doctoring,
lawyering, conducting, researching, designing, composing, etc., but this person
would also have to do a fair share of less empowering tasks to attain an overall
balance like everyone else’s. Thus, people’s jobs who are now in relatively
commanding positions will lose some empowering tasks and incorporate their share
of less empowering, rote, or even deadening labor.
In
any event, whoever enunciates it, opposition to job balancing most often employs
one of two rationales:
1.
Balancing would impinge my freedom to do what I want which would be immoral.
2.
Balancing would consign even the most talented to rote tasks and thereby reduce
the social product to everyone’s disadvantage.
Let’s
consider each complaint in turn, to close out our case on behalf of Dignified
Work.
Freedom
It
is true that allowing only balanced job complexes would by definition preclude
anyone having an unbalanced job complex and would thus also preclude complainant
1 above from doing only empowering tasks as her job. However, this is true in
the same sense that reshaping an economy to have no slave-holding options
precludes anyone from owning slaves. That is, owning a slave means the
slave-owner freely expresses his slave-owning aspiration, but it also means that
someone else is owned. If we rule out that anyone should be owned, we
simultaneously rule out that slave-owning aspirations should be honored.
Similarly, having a job complex that is more empowering than average is only
possible at the expense of someone else having a job complex that is less
empowering than average. If we rule out that anyone should be saddled with a
less than an average complex, yes, we must also rule out that anyone can have a
more than average complex.
But
freedom to act on one’s aspirations is a valid and wonderful thing only so
long as it is contingent on everyone else having the same freedom. Some
aspirations — owning slaves, killing a neighbor, employing wage slaves, having
an unbalanced job complex – intrinsically impinge on others’ rights to
similar advantages. In other words, it is no more immoral to impose job
balancing on society to eliminate a class hierarchy of those who order and those
who obey, than it is to impose abolition of slavery on society in order to
eliminate a class hierarchy of those who own others and those who are owned by
others. All people’s rights to never be a slave trump Mr. Plantation’s right
to own slaves. Similarly, all people’s rights to enjoy conditions prerequisite
to self-management trump Ms. Manager’s right to monopolize empowering job
circumstances.
Productivity
But
how about output? Seeking to avoid a class division between order givers and
order takers, are we also reducing society’s overall productivity by
under-utilizing some folks capacities? If so, is the loss in output so great
that it makes balancing job complexes unwise?
I
should first clarify that even if job balancing would in fact sacrifice some
output, it wouldn’t cause me to renounce Dignified Work as a goal since I see
self-management and classlessness as far more worthy aspirations than attaining
maximum output. In fact, however, it turns out that we can make our cake with
dignity and still eat plenty of it too.
First,
normal human beings generally don’t work endless hours at empowering and also
more productive tasks. Rather, folks with a relative monopoly on empowering
tasks often do them some limited amount of time each week, spending a lot of
other time chatting, loafing, meeting, bossing other people around, or playing
golf. Realignment of their responsibilities so they are balanced can often be
done without much incursion on their most productive capabilities. We instead
replace their excessive time off or their bossing by more rote responsibilities.
But
second, suppose that I am wrong. Suppose that every hour that someone now doing
highly empowering tasks is asked to do more rote tasks is an hour subtracted
from time going to their most talented focuses. As complainant 2 fears, that
would certainly entail a loss in output from that person. For example, if a
surgeon who now works all day long on surgery (no desk work, no loafing, no
golf, etc.) suddenly has to do her share of less empowering work such as
cleaning bed pans, then to make room she must of course do less surgery, and she
will in total therefore generate less valuable output.
But
what about the other side of the coin? What about the nurse who in this new
context is better trained and able to more fully use her talents? Indeed, how
about all the people previously "dumbed-down" by schooling and then by
on-the-job boredom and who have been previously constrained to do only rote
tasks but now have Dignified Work to do? What about the creativity, talent, and
skills that would be newly-tapped for society due to about 70% to 80% of the
population now being prepared to fulfill their capabilities rather than
channeled as before into rote obedience and subservience? Does anyone really
believe that the sum total of creative talents and energies available for
production would be reduced by opting for an economic arrangement that enjoins
every actor to become as able and productive as they can and that provides the
means for them to do it, but that then also requires each to do a fair share of
non-empowering work as well as a fair share of what their talents are best
suited to?
If
current class-divided societies were perfect meritocracies in the sense of
welcoming every person to become as productive as possible, and then rewarding
with better work conditions and more empowering circumstances only those who
produce more so that any effort to balance circumstances among workers would
reduce output, we should still overwhelmingly favor balanced job complexes. Our
guiding value should not not be the size of output of an economy – but instead
equitably meeting needs and developing capacities while furthering values we
aspire to such as self-management, solidarity, equity, and diversity. But of
course, in reality societies with hierarchical distributions of tasks don’t even
remotely approach being perfect meritocracies. Instead, in such societies an
educated and credentialed elite monopolizes empowering and knowledge-enhancing
tasks partly due to their talents, but overwhelmingly due to their
circumstantial advantages and their willingness to trample those below. Without
job balancing, most members of an economy are propelled into relative
subservience not by a lack of potential, but by socialization, schooling, and
on-the-job circumstances. They could certainly partake in decision-making and
creative work given the opportunity to enjoy a balanced job complex, and the
gains would be enormous.
The
second complainant also fails to notice the amount of time, energy, and talent
that goes into maintaining the exploitative exclusion of most actors from
empowering work and into coercing their obedience to instructions that they are
alienated from. If we account for the difference between class-divided
workplaces and dignified workplaces regarding time given to oversight and
enforcement, time lost due to outright struggle and strife, and the new pools of
talent salvaged by utilizing previously squelched potentials, not only does the
switch to balanced job complexes emerge as preferable on moral grounds and on
grounds of laying a basis for real self-management, but also on grounds of
economic output.
Indeed,
the only debit for balancing job complexes, at least viewed from the angle of
those now enjoying a relative monopoly on empowering work, is that it removes
their relative advantages. But that is precisely the purpose of job balancing,
at least when viewed from below — and that’s where our eyes ought to be seeing
from.