A World Without Work? No Thank You
Technology isn’t eliminating work, economic elites are destroying it
Buried in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a right that many find archaic. This is the right to work. To be sure, the Declaration also includes rights to social welfare benefits in times of need, but absent from it is a right to an income. Present instead is a right to work with dignity for fair pay.
Some social visionaries believe that they can do better than the Declaration. Instead of a right to work, they propose a right to a basic income, with or without work. These visionaries have all kinds of rationales for their proposal (including the sensible one that administering a basic income is more cost-effective than administering existing social welfare programs) but most of their rationales boil down to the belief that technological advances are making work disappear — and good riddance.
They are wrong on all counts, beginning with their belief that work is disappearing.
The False Narrative of Disappearing Work
The belief that technology is eliminating work is a familiar one. We’ve all heard about robots replacing manufacturing workers, drones soon delivering our pizzas, and so on. Lending credibility to this belief are the countless instances in which technological changes have in fact displaced workers. Anyone who remembers the large secretarial pools that ran offices a generation ago recognizes this, now that those secretarial pools are reduced to a handful of administrative assistant working at computers.
However, this techno-unemployment, as it is called, only occurs in specific industries at specific times and places. It isn’t a general trend. Between 1950 and 2010, decades of tremendous technological advances, for example, global employment rates increased faster than global population growth. The same trend is apparent between 1970 and 2013 in the G7 countries, among the most technologically advanced in the world. There too employment rates increased faster than population growth.
This is how it has been since the 19th century. Although the English Luddites are famous for destroying the weaving machines that they feared would cost them their jobs, at least since 1870, more jobs have been created in England than have been lost to technology.
But the belief that technology destroys work won’t die. Neither will the vision of a relatively work-free future sustained by the affluence technology creates.
To some extent, Karl Marx promoted this vision. He didn’t want to replace the machine-based industrial order, just wanted the wealth it generated distributed to workers, who with greater affluence could enjoy more leisure. In the United States, Edward Bellamy agreed. His 1888 bestseller, Looking Backward, describes a future technological utopia in which so little work would be required that everyone could retire in their 40's. By 1930, even the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes was on board. He forecast a future for his grandchildren in which the workweek would be cut in half.
Of course, none of these futures has come to pass. Working hours have been reduced for the bulk of industrial workers since the 19th and early 20th centuries, but these reductions were achieved by union pressures and government legislation, not by technological advances. Meanwhile, long hours remain the norm in some occupations and those who enjoy shorter workweeks sometimes work second and third jobs.
The Dubious Disparagement of Work
Beneath the various scenarios of a reduced-work future is the animating belief that work is an unpleasant activity that people prefer to avoid. To eradicate work, or at least to minimize it, is therefore tantamount to combating a dreaded disease. Just as nobody wants to get sick, nobody wants to work.
There is ample support for this disparaging view of work among workers themselves. To use the current jargon of “employee engagement,” which has largely replaced both “job satisfaction” and “alienation” among experts, the Gallup Poll reported in 2017 that 85 percent of employees in 155 countries were not actively engaged in their jobs. Although the bulk of the rest of the workers weren’t actively disengaged — prone to sabotaging the workplace and seeking revenge on their bosses or coworkers — most were the workers who have turned TGIF into a popular acronym and embraced phrases like “working stiff” and “bullshit jobs.”
More support for the disparaging view of work comes from the discipline of economics. There the underlying assumption is of rational economic actors seeking to maximize their “utilities” and minimize their “disutilities.” Go figure, work is regarded as a “disutility,” or an unpleasant activity that people only do in exchange for “utilities.” At the same time, striving to become a science in the era of Newtonian physics, economics embraced something of a Newtonian view of human beings. We are seen as bodies naturally at rest, prone to sloth, who can only be motivated to work by the carrot of desire or the stick of want.
And if the testimonies of workers and economists aren’t enough, there’s always the testimony of the Bible. Genesis after all tell us that work is a curse God levied on humanity.
There are, however, problems with this disparaging view of work. For example, if work is so onerous, why are almost half a billion people around the world (15 percent of the global workforce) engaged in their jobs? This is a set of workers almost three times larger than the entire US workforce that gets up in the mornings looking forward to their jobs. Although the work-haters sometimes dismiss these job-lovers as “workaholics,” the psychological basis for the accusation is thin.
Moreover, many of the workers who don’t like their jobs find fulfillment in work they perform outside their jobs. The majority of small businesses in the United States, for example, are hobby businesses that people operate alongside their regular jobs. Other disengaged workers find satisfaction in hobbies such as woodworking, gardening, playing music, and writing novels — activities that would be work if they were pursued full-time for a livelihood. For some, even shopping is a form of work. People who research products, comparison shop, and post product reviews — sometimes earning an elevated status among fellow shoppers for their consumer savvy — are voluntarily engaged in work-like activities, just spending rather than earning money in the process.
Then later, an increasing number of retirees who are healthy enough embark on encore careers, or work they want to do for its intrinsic satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, many of these encore careers are in teaching and social service, but some are small business startups and the like. Similar motivations are apparent before people embark upon their careers. Teenagers and twenty-somethings devote enormous energy to choosing and preparing for careers they hope will be fulfilling. They are assisted by legions of guidance counselors, aptitude tests, self-help books, and so on. When their jobs later disappoint, it’s not because they didn’t hope for a more agreeable occupational outcome.
Moreover, the anti-work crusaders are hypocrites. Name a leading advocate for a basic income today and it’s almost certain that you’ve named an affluent person working a fulfilling career.
This has long been a trait of the anti-work elites. Marx was enormously productive scholar, writer, and activist who over the course of his life generally managed to lead a middle-class lifestyle. Bellamy, who could have retired to live off the royalties from Looking Backward, continued to work for the cause he championed. Keynes, a wealthy man prior to forecasting a decline in work for his grandchildren, continued to work so hard that exhaustion from overwork is said to have contributed to his death.
Some of today’s economists behave similarly. Many continue to work well into their retirements, even though their economic models tell them that they won’t. But nobody outside the fraternity of economists believes these models anymore anyway. Even inside the fraternity, their assumptions have been devastated by behavioral economists, who show that real people behave differently than the textbooks say they behave.
Outside of economics, Newtonian physics is now supplemented by other paradigms, all of which reveal a universe alive with constant activity, not of resting bodies waiting for external forces to move them. Psychologists have discovered something similar about people. We aren’t just loafing around waiting for someone to dangle a carrot in front of us or prod us with a stick, but are constantly initiating activities that promise to give us a sense of mastery.
Even the Genesis curse of work should be considered in context. It is after all paired with the curse of pain in childbirth. Not many reason that because childbirth is painful they won’t have children. Instead, most decide that the rewards of well-raised children are worth it. So it is with work. No one believes that work worth doing is easy. Rather, they expect it to be hard. However, they do it because the results are worth it.
In fact, as Hannah Arendt observed in her book, The Human Condition, many languages have two words for work, one signifying unpleasant toil and the other the resultant product that instills pride in the worker. (In English these are the verb “labor” vs. the noun “work,” as in a work of art.) Generally, people endure the toil for the satisfactions of the finished product. Similarly, in The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval,and Modern, Herbert Applebaum recounts many historical instances in which workers whose occupations were disparaged signed their work. It can be inferred that despite the hardships they endured, they were proud of their work.
A Fuller Understanding of Work
The Awá are hunters-gatherers living in the rain forest of present-day Brazil. As hunters in a small, self-sufficient economy, the males make their own bows and arrows. But the anthropologist who studied them found something puzzling about their arrow-making. The males make (and proceed to carry) more arrows than they could possibly use. Each also decorates his arrows with individual designs. Since any game that is killed is shared among the members of the group regardless of which man’s arrow fells it, there’s no practical reason for individually decorated arrows. Indeed, there’s no practical reason for the men to decorate their arrows at all — or to make so many of them.
Unfortunately, the Awá have been contaminated by outsiders to the point where they wear shorts and the like (probably discount store overstock) rather than their traditional hand-woven garments. The investigating anthropologist therefore could only speculate about how the females in the culture may have once gone about making clothes. If the broader historical record of weaving is any guide, it’s likely that the females approached weaving in much the same way that men approach arrow-making, namely by adding aesthetic touches to their garments and making more of them than necessary.
It’s always risky to assume that any small foraging society in existence today represents some earlier stage of human cultural evolution. No one really knows what evolved from what. Even so, it’s not much of a risk to infer that these peoples sometimes disclose aspects of human nature that have been camouflaged in our own societies.
One economist who pondered the evolution of economies from the foraging societies of seeming prehistory to the then modern industrial capitalist order was Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). Armed with doctorates in both economics and social studies with an emphasis on anthropology, Veblen speculated that human beings possess an instinct of workmanship, a thesis he developed in his 1914 book, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts.
Veblen’s reasoning was straightforward. Given that work is necessary for human survival and every other species is driven by instincts to do what they must to survive, it would be odd if humans lacked an instinct of workmanship. More than this, Veblen observed the people around him. Although in his day work was disparaged as irksome too, Veblen noticed that many still seemed to tackle their work with relish, take pride in it, and even at turns include gratuitous aesthetic elements in otherwise merely useful products. Surely, Veblen reasoned, workmanship is hardwired into humans, despite the widespread belief that people loathe it.
Although Veblen was unacquainted with the excessive arrow-making among Awá males, he wouldn’t have been surprised by it. He therefore wouldn’t have blundered into the thesis that a later leading anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, promulgated about hunter-gatherers being the “original affluent society.”
The crux of this thesis is that hunter-gatherers enjoy more leisure than moderns. However, Sahlins failed to grasp that the distinction between work and leisure is a uniquely modern one — and not one most hunters-gatherers would understand. When Awá males sit around joking and telling stories while hardening their arrows on the fire and painting those ready for decorating, are they working or enjoying leisure? The question can only be asked by a modern who has been taught to distinguish two activities. When the instinct of workmanship is allowed free cultural expression, the distinction between work and leisure collapses.
Veblen also suspected that the useful and the aesthetic are joined in fulfilling work. He therefore would have understood why the Awá males decorate their arrows. He also would have understood what an aborigine quoted in Richard Donkin’s book, Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Evolution of Work (p. 8), meant when she said, “Aborigines are born artists. You would be too, but your culture has driven it out of you.”
Others have emphasized the fusion of the useful and the aesthetic in fulfilling work. One who did was the British artist, writer, and socialist, William Morris (1834–1896). In his critical 1889 review of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morris derided Bellamy’s utopia as a “machine-life” of “state communism” while challenging that “art, using that word in its widest and due signification, is not a mere adjunct of life which free and happy men can do without, but the necessary expression and indispensable instrument of human happiness.” Morris’s vision was of small workshops in which workers could develop and display their skills by producing simultaneously useful and beautiful goods, not of a massive industrial order in which workers were so redundant that they could retire young while living off the proceeds of the “machine-life.”
Another who suspected that the useful and the aesthetic are united in fulfilling work was Peter Maurin, co-founder in 1933 with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Workers Movement. With a working class background and inspired by his faith’s social teachings, Maurin’s ideas fit no conventional mold. Adamantly pro-worker, he was also anti-union and opposed to socialism. He saw nothing loftier in union greed than capitalist greed and doubted that collective ownership of the means of production promised improvement. Instead, Maurin just believed deeply in the dignity of work for fair pay. Among his eclectic musings about work (published in his book Easy Essays) is one that questions the hiving off of art from craft. Isn’t the useful and the beautiful fused in fulfilling work, and therefore the separation of the artist from the productive worker a mistake?
How Work Goes Bad (and Sometimes Does Disappear)
“There’s no unemployment on farms,” Peter Maurin would say during the Great Depression, a time when mismanagement of the industrial order and its underlying financial system reduced a quarter of US workers and up to a third of workers in other countries to idle beggars. Of course, Maurin was wrong. Environmental catastrophes, such as the Dust Bowl of the 1930's and perhaps climate change today, can force farmers to abandon once fertile fields. Population pressures on limited land can also leave the children and grandchildren of farmers without viable work opportunities. Competition from large agribusinesses can further squeeze small farmers out of their livelihoods, undercutting their ability to compete (usually by engaging in less sustainable but more profitable agricultural practices).
However, we know what Maurin meant, and intuitively understand its truth. When workers control their own property and proceed to meet suppliers, customers, and competitors on level playing fields, work simply doesn’t disappear. If the nostalgia for the family farm is any guide, work under these circumstances is even fulfilling.
The same is true for other kinds of workers who own other kinds of property. Skills, for example, are a form of productive property. Thus, when workers possess and control their own skills, their work is typically abundant and fulfilling.
This is why the now largely defunct craft guilds are often heralded as the heyday of skilled work. In his autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander, the legendary 20th century management consultant, Peter Drucker, describes these guild craftspeople from his native Vienna this way:
“There’s was a world of skilled craftsmen, of responsible guild members; a small world but one of concern and community. There were no riches in that world, but modest self-reliance. . . . [They] did not envy the great ones of this world and never dreamed of joining their ranks. . . [but] knew themselves to be as good as they, and better at their trade. It was a world that respected work and the worker.”
It follows that the destruction of work takes the form of a powerful group depriving workers of their property, amassing it for themselves, and proceeding to use that property advantage to tilt the playing field further in their favor.
Historically, plunder and conquest are probably the earliest means by which workers were deprived of property, although an even severer form of property deprivation appears early in human history too, namely slavery. The essence of slavery is to deprive workers of property in their own persons and transfer that ownership to someone else. A roughly similar transfer of ownership can be achieved by milder forms of bondage, such as serfdom. Some would even argue that with the rise of states, the role of subject relative to ruler was a kind of transfer of ownership. Subjects were compelled to pay tributes to their rulers.
The same principle operates today, although the most economically pertinent property is no longer land but capital, especially investment capital. This is highly concentrated. As measured by market capitalization, for instance, the largest 100 companies in the world are collectively valued at over $17 trillion. This is more than the total wealth in all of Germany or Britain, and about twice as much as Canada’s. Stock ownership is similarly concentrated. In the United States, for instance, 20 percent of the population owns 93 percent of the stock; 10 percent owns 81 percent of it.
This capital drives economies where it is deployed — and destroys economies where it isn’t. The threat of economic destruction is why the presidents of Costa Rica invariably include Silicon Valley on their itineraries when they visit the United States, rather than limit their calls to Washington, DC and United Nations in New York. The Silicon Valley calls are crucial because they are how the country secures investment capital. The presidents offer tax concessions and an eager low-wage workforce in return. This is also why Amazon and other big companies are able to conduct bidding wars among locations inside the United States for planned new business centers. When investment capital bypasses a location, that location is certain to suffer poverty and unemployment.
All might be cheery enough if investors scoured the globe looking for the best investment opportunities, but not many do. Instead, most follow the herd to the major stock exchanges, where they invest in the same giant companies everyone else is investing in. Even a look at the top five investments in the portfolio of legendary investor Warren Buffet reveals companies that are household names — two large banks (Bank of America and Wells Fargo), a food conglomerate (Kraft Heinz), Apple, and Coca-Coca. There’s not much sophisticated about this investment strategy.
It may though be savvy investing. Although investors’ lore holds that big companies can fail, not many do. Of the dozen companies that composed the original Dow in 1896, for example, 11 remain in existence, typically as units of larger companies that absorbed them.
Why big businesses fail to fail is an understudied question. Odds are that part of the explanation is simply that size confers enough clout to make failure difficult. For every fight in which a David prevails against a Goliath, after all, there are probably ten that Goliath wins.
However, direct and indirect government supports for big businesses are factors too. Directly governments support big businesses via the negotiated tax concessions and infrastructure products they promise at the outset, and then bailouts and bankruptcy restructurings when the businesses are at risk of failing. Indirectly, governments offer no-strings-attached corporate charters, business-friendly tax policies, and regulated financial markets that ensure the orderly flow of investment capital into the behemoths.
The upshot is that the global economy is dominated by well-financed big businesses. Increasingly, some are so flush with investment capital that even as startups they engage in the peremptory monopoly practice of absorbing losses while crushing competitors with lower prices. (Amazon and Uber come to mind.)
This influx of capital into big businesses, in turn, deprives locally-owned small businesses of access to the much smaller amounts of investment capital they need. Indeed, the profits generated by local businesses often don’t even stay in the areas they are earned, where they could be used as sources of investment capital for other small businesses. Instead, they flee to the world’s major financial centers where they end up financing big global businesses instead. Locally-owned small business owners therefore resort to financing their businesses with savings, personal loans, and credit cards. Unsurprisingly, not many aspiring small business entrepreneurs are willing or able to take these personal financial risks, so the businesses they hope to open remain pipe dreams.
This lopsided global distribution of investment capital can reach crazy extremes. In 2012, for instance, a report issued by Bain & Company warned that the world was “awash in money” and no promising investment opportunities were on the horizon until 2020. This was only six years after Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering the concept of micro credit — and demonstrating how little financing is required to enable poor country entrepreneurs to start their own successful businesses.
What’s really happening therefore is that the available investment capital isn’t finding its way to the aspiring entrepreneurs who need it. This problem was noted at least as long ago as 1909 when William H. Beveridge’s book, Unemployment: A Problem of Industry, showed that the under-utilization of human capital is the flip side of the under-utilization of finance capital.
Instead therefore of starting their own businesses (which over half the jobholders in the United States and similar percentages elsewhere say they would prefer to do) most people who can find them take jobs. Most of these jobs are in big businesses or their public sector equivalents. In the United States, for example, there are 18,500 companies with more than 500 employees, but less than a third as many employing companies with fewer than 500 workers. More Americans therefore work for big businesses than small businesses. (If public sector employment is included, the majority working for large employers is larger.) In the European Union, large employers (defined as employing 250 people or more) are somewhat less prevalent. There only a third of the workers on the average are employed by big businesses, although the proportion reaches almost half in Britain with Germany and France not far behind. (And again, if public sector employment is included, the numbers rise.) To get a taste of the situation in the world as a whole, the 500 largest global businesses employ 67 million workers (an average of 134,000 per company).
Moreover, the presence of large employers in local economies tends to establish employment standards that are copied by smaller employers. It may not make much of a difference to barristers whether they work for Starbucks or an independent coffee shop, since the jobs are about the same.
Already in possession of the most powerful economic property, investment capital, the large employers proceed to deprive workers of still more property, namely property in their skills.
This they do by designing jobs as deskilled pigeonholes in a bureaucracy. To some extent, this may follow simply from the sizes of their workforce. A company that employs thousands of workers can’t very well tailor most of the jobs it offers to the idiosyncratic inclinations of its employees. To a further extent, these deskilled, pigeonholed jobs may be a consequence of adopting technologies of production that ensure a more consistent product than relying on the varying skills of workers. However, these deskilled, pigeonholed jobs also increase the power of employers over employees. The less reliant employers are on the skills of their employees, the more power they have over them.
The educational advice big businesses constantly dispense to policymakers and job aspirants underscores this employer orientation. Nowadays employers rarely demand specific skills of job applicants. Instead, they prefer employees with a general educational backgrounds. To be sure, for specialized jobs in some industries, employers sometimes seek somewhat specialized educational backgrounds, such as a major in biology for jobs in the biotech industry. However, for the most part employers prioritize applicants with a general education background, ideally with basic verbal and mathematical competencies. The employers say that they prefer these employees because they can be easily trained to perform a number of jobs, and therefore offer employers more flexibility. What they don’t say is that this amounts to the employers hogging the property that exists in skills — and depriving workers of ownership in their own skills.
Then employers proceed to treat their employees as wage-slaves, depriving them of property in their persons. To be sure, the term “wage-slave” minimizes the far worse experiences of real slaves, but the analogy is otherwise accurate.
In the United States, for example, citizens are granted a healthy slate of rights by their Constitution. None of these rights, however, follow employees into the workplace. Workplaces are hierarchical, authoritarian regimes in which management commands and workers obey. The allowable commands include not only the work to be performed and the manner in which it is to be performed, but also the ability of employers to dictate dress, comportment, speech, and even facial expressions of the employees. Increasingly, employer control over employees’ persons goes beyond the workplace, as employers check the social media postings of both prospective and current employees, weeding out those who fail to conform to the brand image that the employer wants to display.
It’s therefore no wonder that some 85 percent of the world’s jobholders aren’t fully engaged. Neither is it any wonder that un- and underemployment are a constant in most economies and a crisis in some. Work, however, is not the problem, and technology is not to blame. The problem is the servility of the jobs heavily capitalized big businesses provide — when they provide any jobs at all. In a world where investment capital can move with the ease of a wire transfer but workers remain rooted in geographic places (and are often prevented from moving by immigration laws), workers lack the power to, well, work.
The Employers’ Excuse
The obvious solution to the ruination of work is to break up big businesses and remove the political supports that enable new ones to arise, chiefly easy incorporation laws and financial systems overly friendly to them. More reforms than these are needed, of course, but these are the gist.
Many, however, caution against this. They claim that the current business arrangement provides consumers with unparalleled material abundance. Since workers are consumers too, workers also benefit from this abundance. Some defenders of the current arrangement even refer to big businesses as “wealth creators” — rhetoric that as noted many leftists believe, which is why they prefer to tax, regulate, or socialize big businesses instead of dismantling them.
This defense of big businesses in turn rests largely on the historical correlation between the rise of big businesses and rising affluence. As Bill Gates likes to point out, the world today is wealthier than it was only a generation ago. It was also wealthier then than it was in still earlier generations. To be sure, the world is no more equal than it was in times past, and may be less equal today than it was at some earlier benchmark time. However, inequality and affluence are separate issues. It’s possible for the world to become more unequal and more affluent at the same time, and that’s in fact what has happened. The poor may be no closer to catching up to the rich than they were, but they’re less poor. Since big businesses arose alongside increasing affluence, it’s easy to assume that big businesses created the affluence.
However, serious investigations into wealth creation fail to find a significant role for big businesses. Everyone agrees that true wealth creation is a result of innovation. But as Mariana Mazzucato documents in her 2015 book, The Entrepreneurial State, most of the basic research that fuels innovation is funded by governments, not businesses. The innovations introduced by big businesses are usually limited to tweaks of the basic research that enable existing innovations to be brought to market. These tweaks, of course, are sometimes wealth-creating innovations, but other times they’re marketing gimmicks, hucksterism more than innovation.
Moreover, if patents can serve as a proxy for innovation, small businesses are sensationally more innovative than big businesses. They produce 15 times more patents per worker than big businesses.
But while innovations are the breakthrough sources of new wealth, most wealth is generated the old fashioned way, namely by workers making products and delivering services. The disengaged workers in big businesses don’t do this so well. In fact, the Gallup Poll calculates that US businesses lose $500 billion a year to disengaged workers. The losses to the economies of other countries are proportional. These losses don’t include the lost productivity of the unemployed, part-time workers, or the aspiring entrepreneurs unable to access investment capital for the businesses they dream of starting.
The behavior of workers, though, does sometimes suggest that they may approve of the trade-off between their disengaging jobs and the consumer goods big businesses supply. When an investigator went undercover in a plant in Hengyang, China manufacturing devices for the global business giants Apple and Amazon in order to document the exploitation of workers, for example, she noticed that at the end of their shifts many of the workers retrieved smartphones from their lockers and proceeded to fidget with them. Since the cellphone industry employs some 11 million people worldwide, most in jobs not much more worker-friendly than the jobs in the Hengyang plant, it’s difficult to understand how any of these jobs are going to be improved as long the workers themselves are buying the products other similarly situated workers make.
Though, there’s circular reasoning involved in concluding that because consumers buy and use a product they want it. It’s always possible that products are foisted on consumers by marketing campaigns only to become goods they must have in order to maintain their existing lifestyles.
Smartphone may fall into this category. Certainly if they had been evaluated with the rigor required of pharmaceuticals and food products, they wouldn’t have been introduced as rapidly. It’s now known that smartphones are associated with all kinds of social ills, including adolescent depression and suicide, traffic accidents, and so forth. The rushing of smartphones to market has also overlooked glitches. Experts discover roughly 400 manufacturing flaws annually that put smartphone users at risk of being hacked. By 2018, complaints about smartphones joined complaints against contractors and social media sites as the top three consumer complaints in the United States.
Yet, consumers today may have little choice about owning a smartphone, or at least a cellphone. Between 1999 and 2018, for instance, the number of payphones in the United States declined from two million to 100,000. Similarly, between 2009 and 2015, the average cost of landline telephone service increased 14 percent while the average cost for wireless telephone service decreased by 10 percent. Legislation in 20 US states has even paved the way for landline telephone service to cease to exist, should the provider not want to offer it. Not least, 87 percent of employers in the United States expect their employees to use smartphone in their jobs while 23 percent of employees report that their employers expect them to have and use their smartphones for job-related tasks outside of working hours. It’s become an act of consumer rebellion to revert to a now old fashioned flip phone, although not many dare to go without at least it.
There are other examples of technological innovations seemingly foisted on consumers more so than desired by them. Not many bicyclists were clamoring for the index shifters the Japanese company Shimano introduced during the 1980s to replace friction shifters. The change was rather made at the level of the industry as a whole. Now bicyclists who prefer the older friction shifters must usually special order them and pay extra. Among the reasons some bicyclists prefer friction shifters is that they can easily be repaired when broken. Conveniently for Shimano, index shifters can’t be repaired as easily, but new ones must be purchased. Even more convenient for Shimano, its index shifters require other compatible components that Shimano sells too.
But the questions that dog technological innovations purchased by consumers can be raised about other consumer justifications for big businesses. Many believe, for instance, that Coca-Cola has grown into a global company with over $40 billion in annual revenues because consumers like the 3500 (yes 3500) different products it sells. Consumers may well like Coca-Cola products, but there are multiple countries where locally-made beverages either outsell or fiercely compete with Coca-Cola. Few consumers outside of these countries have even heard of the locally-made competing drinks, much less tried them. Thus, to maintain that Coca-Cola’s dominant position in the global market is a reflection of consumer preference is simply wrong. It’s rather a reflection of Coca-Cola’s size, which enables it to dominate most markets to the point of suppressing consumer choice. Coca-Cola’s executives are well aware of this too. This is why they maintain their longstanding marketing partnership with McDonald’s and continue to spend $3 billion a year advertising a product everybody in the world is already familiar with.
Then there is the question of how big businesses must be even when size does benefit consumers. Everyone who shops at chain supermarkets knows that big businesses can provide consumers with a greater variety of goods at lower prices than small businesses. However, not many are aware that some successful supermarket chains have annual revenues almost a thousand times higher than other successful supermarket chains. Clearly, the economies of scale that benefit consumers are much smaller than many businesses have become. Meanwhile, it’s not as clear that the variety offered by the larger stores always represent real choice. The smallest supermarkets typically stock about ten varieties of Hamburger Helper (a product of the food conglomerate General Mills) while the largest supermarkets stock as many as 40. Isn’t Hamburger Helper roughly the same thing in most of its incarnations?
This is not even to raise the question of why businesses that are justifiably somewhat big can’t be worker-owned — even why worker ownership isn’t made a condition of corporate charters. Large, profitable, worker-owned businesses exist all over the world, and while they may not provide as satisfactory work experiences as small businesses or independent entrepreneurship, they are a decided improvement over investor-owned workplaces. Yet, incorporation laws assume that businesses are properly collaborative undertakings among investors and managers from which workers are excluded. This is not only wrong, it’s also bad business. Worker-owners are precisely the kinds of engaged workers worth $500 billion to US companies, and that’s if they don’t innovate on the shop floor, which worker-owners are apt to do.
But today’s business leaders don’t want to hear any of this. They pretend that they’re “wealth creators” when they’re mostly appropriating the innovations of others, thwarting the emergence of the small businesses that would really create wealth, and preventing their employees from generating the wealth they are capable of creating. Many of these so-called business leaders even have the audacity to refer to themselves as “job creators,” overlooking the fact that the system they head first destroys work opportunities only to unevenly offer disengaging, deskilled, and pigeonholed jobs as substitutes.
The Benevolent Employer
At some level, employers are aware that they’re ruining work. They aren’t even always deluded by the fiction that technology is the culprit. They know that their employees are unhappy, and in fact are the ones funding the research on disengaged employees in an attempt to address the problem. But they never address the problem by making work itself better. Instead, they open gourmet company cafeterias and onsite gyms, offer flextime and college scholarships, institute casual Fridays and so on. Some of the enlightened employers even reason that everyone in their headquarter countries ought to be given a guaranteed basic income as compensation for their lousy work opportunities.
Never mind that these employers don’t propose giving the same basic income to their workers abroad, whose wages for full-time work are typically less. Their compassion is restricted to their own countries. But it’s not compassion; it’s self-interest. With a guaranteed basic income, employers can continue to offer insecure low-wage part-time jobs in the gig economy, comforted by the knowledge that the workers will be taken care of by the taxpayers. Indeed, a few go so far as to promise that a guaranteed basic income will unleash the “inner entrepreneur” of the un- and underemployed. Given workers’ limited access to investment capital, its hard not to suspect that a lot of these “inner entrepreneurs” will end up driving for Uber — which may be the point of the basic income.
But today’s benevolent employers aren’t a new breed. An earlier one was the 19th century manufacturer of railroad sleeping cars, George Pullman (1831–1907). Although Pullman’s reputation is now marred by the bloody strike that erupted at his company in 1894, before then he was heralded as a forward-looking champion of workers. He provided good jobs to both whites and racial minorities, especially African-Americans and Filipinos, at a time when others would not. He proceeded hire an architect to design a company town where his employees could — but were not forced to — live. It was one of the healthiest places in the world to live, received numerous favorable write-ups in the press, and was even an attraction during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
An economic downturn persuaded Pullman to cut wages, a common strategy of business people in those days. Pullman’s employees, however, were furious. They persuaded the leading union leader at the time, Eugene V. Debs, to organize their strike.
At one juncture, Debs expressed a sentiment that was already antiquated in those bitter days of big unions battling for better pay against even bigger industrialists — but a sentiment that would have resonated with thoughtful defenders of work throughout history. As quoted in Philip Yale Nicholson’s book, Labor’s Story in the United States (p. 135), Debs said, “I am against the paternalism of Pullman” who “is everlastingly saying, ‘What can we do for our poor workingmen?’” The real issue, Debs insisted, is, “What can we do for ourselves?”
A similar sentiment was written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a half century later, where it remains binding international law. It mustn’t be forgotten.
