Justice in the Labor Market: The Empowerment Model

"There's a great deal of anxiety about the current state of the labor market, and the direction in which we are heading. For many workers throughout the post-industrialized world, the post-war growth in wages has stagnated and, in some places, reversed. More workers than ever are employed on precarious contracts, working shifts on demand with no guarantee of future employment. Technology has enabled greater surveillance and monitoring of staff, in the office and at home, during work hours and outside of them."

"And though the amount of time that individuals spend at work has steadily declined in recent decades, progress on this front has been dishearteningly slow, and almost absent in the United States. In this constellation of factors, some commentators see the beginnings of a social crisis, one that risks being very seriously exacerbated by the march of technology, and artificial intelligence in particular. Others believe that we're already in the depths of one."

"Given this social and economic context, it's hardly surprising that legal, moral, and political philosophers are becoming increasingly concerned with the appropriate design and regulation of labor markets. After all, governments and other policymakers require theoretically-informed practical guidance to assess the appeal of competing arrangements, as well as to determine the justifiability and limits of particular policy proposals. In Empowering Workers in an Age of Automation, my aim is to contribute to these discussions. I seek to do this (a) by presenting and defending a distinctive way of theorizing about the demands of justice in the labor market, which I call the empowerment model, and then (b) by integrating these commitments with a host of empirical findings from across the humanities and social sciences to shed light on ongoing disputes about a range of issues, from the four day work week to the appropriate role of higher education."

Economic conditions include stagnating post-war wage growth, widespread precarious contracts, increased workplace surveillance, and only modest reductions in working hours, with especially slow progress in the United States. These trends combine with rapid technological change and artificial intelligence to create or deepen social and economic risks for workers. Philosophical inquiry into labor justice seeks principles that can guide policy design and regulation of labor markets. An empowerment model proposes prioritizing worker empowerment within limits and integrating normative claims with empirical findings to inform concrete policy disputes, such as four-day work weeks and the role of higher education.

Read at Apaonline