This thought was inspired by a Facebook friend’s link to a July/August 2011 Mother Jones site article, “Harrowing, Heartbreaking Tales of Overworked Americans”, by Kiera Butler, Dave Gilson, Josh Harkinson, Andy Kroll, and Laura McClure. It is a series of sad tales told by ordinary working people complaining about their working conditions - specifically about speedups (union jargon, originally used when management increased the speed of an assembly line) that had occurred over time. My friend's comment was that if these workers were in a union the speedups would not have happened and their working conditions would be better.
After thoughtful consideration, I decided that while the stories seemed heart wrenching on first read, there were some contrary ideas that kept tugging at my mind.
Thinking of the complaints in Mother Jones I had to ask myself, “If it's really that bad, why are you, the people of these stories, still at these jobs?” And a specific question for my friend soon took shape: “Why do you want to restrict the kinds of jobs that are offered to people? Why not let people be paid for their willingness to endure and take risks? These are abilities, just like lifting, talking to people, and working with office equipment. Why treat endurance and risk as something not useful for employment purposes?”
The social justice side, the Mother Jones side, in the above mentioned article, makes a claim that some working conditions are terrible. And not only are they terrible, they are so terrible that no one must be allowed to endure them because of the conditions or risks involved. This means, according to the article, that laws and third party inspectors must keep these conditions from happening. The basic presumption of this social justice side is that bosses inherently have too much power over workers, so third parties - laws, regulators and unions - must intervene.
A converse side is my own work experience in 1970. I was fresh out of the army, in my mid-twenties, and spending a year at Dixie College in St. George, Utah to earn a set of good grades that would get me into MIT.
It was an interesting year on many levels, and one of those was engaging in the most unusual job I've ever undertaken. For several weeks I was part of a team working on a turkey farm that artificially inseminated turkeys - hundreds of turkeys and their progeny owe their lives to my efforts that year. The team herded turkey hens into the corner of a pen, caught them, and gave them to a turkey artificial inseminator person who serviced them. Once that was complete we let the hens get back to their daily routine. It was difficult, dirty, and dangerous. The hens were not excited about this. Well, not in the pleasant way, anyway. As we approached and closed on them, they ran away and beat at us hard with their wings. We eventually caught the hens by herding them into a tight crowd, getting down on our hands and knees in the dust, snaking our hands under all the flailing wings to grab feet, then yanking them out and holding them upside down, at which point they got a bit docile. One time, one of the hens managed to forcefully poke a feather in my ear, which drew blood. I thought about seeing the doctor, and the farm would have paid for it, but after a few minutes the bleeding stopped and nothing else seemed wrong. I continued my work.
Q: Why did I take this 3D job? (difficult, dirty, dangerous)
A: Because it was the best paying temporary job I could land. It paid twice that of pumping gas or flipping burgers.
The moral: I was being paid for discomfort and risk, and I didn’t mind.
My example and point is: let workers decide what jobs and working conditions they are willing to risk and endure. Allow workers to negotiate directly with the boss concerning workplace conditions and wages.
Being paid to endure is an aspect of employment that Mother Jones readers and union enthusiasts have a blind-spot for. They don't see that some people are happy to take on uncomfortable and risky jobs if they are paid well for doing so. It is important to note that the definition of well-paid rests with the person being paid, not the third party observer.
For the Progressive thinking types, these kinds of jobs are unconditionally unacceptable. The fact that they are even being offered is an indication of how much power over workers the “evil bosses” have. But for those closer to the situation it looks different. In my case, turkey wrangler was my preferred job while I was a student in St. George, and I accepted the offer of pay in exchange for my endurance and risk.
The cost of being Progressive in this situation is a lost employment opportunity. This hurts both the company and the potential employee directly. One acceptable alternative to social justice types is a union. But unions present other costs. If the turkey farm had been unionized, I would not have had the opportunity to hire on for this 3D job, and I would have been less happy as a worker. A union would have eliminated the difficult, dirty, and dangerous aspects of the work, replacing them with work rules for safety and cleaner conditions. The wage would have been lowered, and I probably would have taken a job pumping gas or flipping burgers. Not only would a union have made the turkey wrangler job safer and cleaner, but also I would have had to join a union and pay union dues, which would have put a hoop-jumping barrier between me and the job, and made the effective pay even less. Flipping burgers or pumping gas is looking better all the time!
Another cost would have been created once regulators and inspectors had told the turkey farmer exactly what to do to make the job safer and cleaner. The farmer may well have thrown up his hands in despair, “I can't make a living doing this anymore,” and moved the farm elsewhere, such as China, and I would... yeah, you get the message.
Related to the cost of regulators and inspectors is the problem of the rigidness caused by prescription. When inspectors and unions get involved it's easy to come up with “one right solution” and then stick with that way of doing things even if someone comes up with a better way. “That's not how we do that here, son” becomes the reflexive answer to every alternative suggestion. In most businesses, this dramatically slows down the constant process of making things better.
I suggest reducing the barriers to both entry and exit for company employees. If the barriers to both entry and exit are low, both are simple processes and open to many people. Then employers must compete for workers, just as they compete for customers. In my vision getting a job becomes more like getting groceries and less like getting married – it’s a whole lot simpler and happens with a lot less commitments.
The advantages of simplifying are numerous: employees get courted; job roles can change quickly to take advantage of new tools, circumstances, as well as neat ideas that employees and managers come up with; and employees and managers both become more sensitive to and responsible for working conditions and safety.
The disadvantage is that working conditions will be less certain and less prescriptive. Lifetime employment at a specific job or for a specific company will be further from reality than ever before. For many people that's a spooky thought.