Tyler Cowen returns to the issues of employer/employee domination today, but since I never blogged his first response, I want to start working through this debate from the beginning.
The Crooked Timber bloggers offered a lengthy list of workplace depredations, and then suggested that these depradations require government intervention in the form of workplace regulation. It’s a long and interesting post, and it takes a couple of stances that I strongly disagree with (against the Basic Income Guarantee, for one) but the attacks have mostly been focusing on the idea that worker mobility (quitting) is a better solution than workplace regulations that give workers recourse. This is generally described as the difference between “exit” and “voice.”
In his first response, which was off-the-cuff “due to travel commitments,” Cowen seemed to treat the issue as if all complaints about domination in the workplace could be treated in terms of worker’s “willingness to pay” for various protections, and that regulations might better be replaced with cash. This attempt to treat economic efficiency and liberty as interchangeable irritated many bloggers, who went on to call for the “Diaperization of the GMU Economics Department.”
Of course, this is silly, but worse, like most ad absurdum attempts at refutation, it’s non-responsive, as Matt Yglesias shows here. If anyone actually thought that abusing faculty would increase revenue, they probably would do it, and academics with less bargaining power do experience some of the depredations that Henry Farrell jokingly described. I’ve personally had to work in open cubicles, under nosy supervisors, and with no air conditioning, and anyone who’s ever been to a faculty meeting or an APA keynote knows what it’s like to have workplace commitments require a strong bladder. (Maybe diapers aren’t such a bad idea… but no: never bite the bullet on an ad absurdum.)
We accept these dominations when they seem justified or when we don’t have a better recourse. The academic job market makes exit a very difficult proposition; mostly, we’re glad to be employed. The overall increase in administrators who find ways to tighten the screws on academic workers looks both bad and inefficient, but given that we’ve got one of the best jobs in the world, we often don’t complain very loudly.
What we need is a distinction between productivity-enhancing workplace rules and circumstances that merely enhance a manager’s ability to dominate his subordinates. In reality, many instances of manager-domination are actually productivity-reducing, and lots of businesses limp along at less-than-optimal productivity this way.
A firm that has *no* recourse mechanism will not realize that they are losing good employees to bad managers, but because recourse is sometimes expensive it may seem that firms are better off simply ignoring these problems. Yet I would argue that there are many pro-employee workplace innovations that reduce domination and increase productivity, yet are often not implemented. These are proverbial hundred-dollar bills on the ground, and the “pro-exit” stance taken by many of the Bleeding Heart libertarians and GMU economists looks, to me, like a simple mistake akin to the response “That $100 bill can’t be there; somebody would have picked it up!”
Cowen has already complained that this is merely a theoretical $100 bill, however, and that if I and the CT bloggers have real innovations of this sort in mind, we ought to either propose these innovations so that others may use them or keep them a secret and go start a business with them and make lots of money making the workplace more free. I intend to say more about specific proposals, but this post is already too long, so….
Second Opinions