I’ve been thinking about the nature of work a lot lately. (What else is new, I know.)
But I’ve been thinking about it differently since I came across this idea, rooted in neo-republican political theory, about the nature of liberty.
The basic idea? Liberty is freedom from domination.
Huh. That simple (old) idea pulled me up short. Especially when I started reading Alex Gourevitch’s work on 19th century labor republicans (republican like the French Revolution, not Reagan), who argued that the very structure of employment is a form of domination. Two forms of domination, actually.
The first is individual domination–what happens when we enter into an employment relationship and are subject to the authority and domination of our employer. The second is structural domination–the condition of domination we live under because we have to have a job to make money to meet our basic needs. Both forms of domination undermine our basic liberty–our basic freedom.
When I started to think about work in terms of liberty and domination, so many things clicked into place for me.
First, many efforts within the labor movement are, at their core, about winning liberty for workers, about combating the individual domination that defines an employment relationship. You can understand collective bargaining that way, recent fights around scheduling, even the formative campaigns for a weekend and an eight hour work day.
But it’s not just the tactics of the traditional labor movement. Worker cooperatives, for example, are strategies to shift structures of individual domination. According to Gourevitch, cooperative structures were a big demand of labor republicans in the Knights of Labor, and that makes sense to me. What other demands might we make under a framework of worker freedom from domination?
Second, I realized that when independent workers talk about what they love about their work, they are really talking about liberty.
My friends at the Workers Lab recently published the preliminary findings from their Gig Worker Learning Project, and I was not at all surprised to see that when gig workers talk about what they love about their jobs, they talk about agency–the flexibility and autonomy of their work–their control over their own time.
That really resonates with me. I’m an independent worker, and I love being my own boss. I love working with people, not for people. And I’m pretty confident valuing personal autonomy isn’t unique to me.
Don’t we all want that liberty? And doesn’t the Declaration of Independence assert it as our inalienable right? (I know, I know, we’ve failed to live up to that document in so many ways, but still!)
That got me wondering whether figuring out how to make independent work actually work for people might be a path to greater liberty for all of us. Not just for the so-called professionals who can sell their labor at a relatively high premium, but for all informal and gig workers operating at the margins of the economy. And for all the folks whose labor is not adequately valued by our current system (looking at you care work!).
Gig workers are operating outside structures of individual employment domination, sure, but they’re still subject to the larger forces of structural domination. You see that come through loud and clear in the findings from the Gig Worker Learning Project. The biggest problems they face? Insufficient pay, income volatility, and lack of risk protection like health insurance.
So how might we mitigate some of the forms of structural domination that undermine our collective liberty?
That’s where Natalie Foster’s new book, The Guarantee, comes in.
I LOVE this book. Natalie traces the movements for several different kinds of guarantees: a Homes Guarantee, College Guarantee, Health Care Guarantee, Family Care Guarantee, Good Work Guarantee, Inheritance Guarantee, and an Income Guarantee.
Together, they form the basis of a set of economic rights (hat tip to Darrity, Paul and Hamilton’s “An Economic Bill of Rights for the 21st Century”), that could provide a solid foundation of economic stability for all of us.
The wonk in me wants to dig into the specifics of each of the ideas Natalie traces, but what I love about her book is that it doesn’t focus on the nerdy specifics. It’s about getting the work done.
By sharing the stories of several activists across multiple efforts to build economic rights into the fabric of our public policies, she shows what’s possible. Not only what’s possible, she shows that we’re already well on our way and how we got so far.
I’ve been cheering for a bunch of the folks she highlights for a long time, but seeing all their work lined up side-by-side and put into a larger framework changed how I understood it. I felt so hopeful!
In an election year where the stakes feel so high, when the polarization of our politics feels so intractable, when the day-to-day functioning of our government feels so dysfunctional, Natalie reminds me that we are making real progress. In some cases, we are moving at lightning speed.
Natalie’s book makes me think we can start to mitigate some of the broader structures of domination that constrain us. Because economic stability is about more than security and safety. Guarantees enable greater human flourishing.
And I’m starting to understand that these guarantees are a necessary condition of our collective liberty.
Odd and Ends
Working less as a way to become better humans? Yes please.
In the face of so much progress on guaranteed income, several states are passing (or trying to pass) laws to prevent local governments from establishing their own guaranteed income programs. Oy.
Can companies use ballot measures to classify app-based gig workers as independent contractors? The California Supreme Court heard arguments over the legality of Prop 22 yesterday, while the Massachusetts Supreme Court is considering the legality of a similar ballot measure there.
New York just became the first state to include prenatal care in paid leave, but failed to pass a more comprehensive set of reforms, including fixes for the self-employed. Chicago just released the final rules for their new paid leave law, while Maine is accepting comments on theirs.
I havent read any of these books but I always think of the republican ideal of liberty in opposition to the democratic ideal of equality - the two are in conflict in all kinds of political debates (about education and healthcare especially). Maybe another way to think about the labor movement you are writing about is an indeterminant combination of the two.