Abstract
The past half century has seen a successful employer attack on worker rights and advantages everywhere in the world, threatening to re-establish the pre-modern “servant” in place of the modern “employee” and, out in the world of “globalization”, imposing new forms of labor bondage. This trend has been founded in the now baseless idea of a distinct, self-funding “private enterprise economy”. Thus the proposal, explored here, of extending full citizen rights—of assembly, speech, and so on—into the workplace itself.
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Notes
- 1.
As in Milton and Rose Friedman’s well-known collection of essay, Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman and Friedman 1962).
- 2.
We see this in arguments over raising the minimum wage. In fact, we know or could know that today’s legal minimum itself, as well as the actual low wages being paid, fall at least $150 billion per year under the actual cost of producing the low-wage labor force. That $150 billion, earlier referenced, is the annual government expenditure on Medicaid, food stamps, housing allowances, the reverse income tax, and some other programs that subsidize under-living-wages, hence make up the investment gap in producing the low-wage labor force.
- 3.
- 4.
Yet, for household servants and would-be household servants, indentured labor was still common, although technically illegal here since our Civil War. All of the women in my family who emigrated to the USA (circa 1870) came as indentured servants. The Master paid their fare here and agreed to hire them for a stated period of years; they were not free to quit over the term of the indenture. That system continues sub rosa with many of today’s immigrants. It takes little imagination to see what sort of abuses might arise naturally in the course of the indenture.
- 5.
For her even wider historic importance, see Downey (2010).
- 6.
As Lichtenstein (1982) shows, the extra-wartime powers of the federal government were material to beating down residual opposition to the new system.
- 7.
Buder (1967: 215–6).
- 8.
For more on this distinction, consult the encyclical Rerum Novarum. As above, several other “non-Catholic” countries also find this tacit US/papal influence in their basic labor systems.
- 9.
There are some twists here. For example, the workers have to be engaged in inter-state commerce; purely local employments were not governed. Then too the exact boundaries of the workplace “bargaining unit” are not a given; the NLRB has some leeway here to expand or contract it as it sees fit. And so on and so on.
- 10.
Our anti-discrimination law also creates “corporate” bodies of minorities, of women, of the handicapped, of the elderly, of the gay, and so on, and extends special “corporate” protections to them which are also largely procedural. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has come into conflict with both Constitutional and the Common Law where the states have rights but all the rest are individual rights, not corporate ones. US courts continue to grapple with this difference.
- 11.
These unions, traditionally located in the corporate part of the US economy, are often referred to as industrial unions. Most stem only from the late 1930s. On the other hand, unions of skilled or craft workers go well back in history: They were a force in Pericles’ Athens. For stone masons, carpenters, and so on, so long as their skill monopoly holds they can impose conditions on their employers. But only so long as that monopoly holds. The typographers of the International Typographical Union were at one time thought the epitome of powerful, successful craft unionists by our then leading trade union theorist, Selig Perlman (1949(1928)), but the advent of computerized type-setting virtually ended a trade that reached almost back to Gutenberg.
- 12.
A limited menu of worker rights vis-à-vis the union itself was not established and codified until the passage of the Landrum-Griffith Act in 1959.
- 13.
- 14.
In Chap. 1 above.
- 15.
- 16.
As a grievance officer for my union local, I actually handled two cases like this.
- 17.
See Arthurs’ “Cross-National Legal Learning: The Uses of Comparative Labor Knowledge, Law and Policy” in Stone and Arthurs (2013: 353–65, especially: 354).
- 18.
See Liptak (2015) for a discussion of Bill of Rights protections for corporate “persons”.
- 19.
See also Greider (1997) for an earlier discussion of international forms and incidents of bound forms of labor.
- 20.
I found Rogers and Streeck (1995) exceptionally useful on this subject.
- 21.
Possibly because in every kind of US union, there is a power imbalance between the skilled workers and the rest. The UAW and the other great CIO unions of the tumultuous 1930s were essentially organized by the skilled workers in the industry, and each has two levels of rights and protections its practices, often to its formal written rules: one for the skilled component of the union, the other for the rest, the so-called semiskilled. And as a labor sub-contractor created and monitored by government, and not strictly speaking a membership organization, the rights of individuals seem automatically to fall into a secondary place.
- 22.
This proposal in no wise deals with the rise—cited above—in “non-free” or bondaged labor in the less-developed world. But a vibrant labor rights movement in the developed world offers both a model of work organization and a means to support worker rights elsewhere, thus one would hope to render the now bondaged significant and timely practical assistance.
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McDermott, J.F.M. (2017). From “Employees” to “Servants”. In: Employers’ Economics versus Employees’ Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50149-9_5
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