I think this is a good topic to discuss, and the post has many good insights. But I kinda see the whole topic from a different angle. Worker well-being can’t depend on the goodness of employers, because employers gonna be bad if they can get away with it. The true cause of worker well-being is supply/demand changes that favor workers. Examples: 1) unionizing was a supply control which led to 9-5 and the weekend, 2) big tech jobs became nice because good engineers were rare, 3) UBI would lead to fewer people seeking jobs and therefore make employers behave better.
To me these examples show that, apart from market luck, the way to improve worker well-being is coordinated action. So I mostly agree with banning 80 hour workweeks, regulating gig work, and the like. We need more such restrictions, not less. The 32-hour work week seems like an especially good proposal: it would both make people spend less time at work, and make jobs easier to find. (And also make people much happier, as trials have shown.)
Seems to me that debates about (de)regulation often conflate two different things, which probably are not clearly separated but exist on a continuum. One is that people are different. Another is cooperation vs defection in Prisoner’s Dilemma (also known as sacrifice to Moloch).
From the “people are different” perspective, the theoretical ideal would be to let everyone do their own thing, unless the advantages of cooperation clearly outweigh the benefits of freedom.
From the “Moloch” perspective, it would be best for the players if defection was banned/punished.
As an example, should it be okay for an employee to have a sexual relation with their boss? From the “people are different” perspective, hey, if two people genuinely desire to have sex with each other, why should they be forbidden to do so, if they are both consenting adults? From the “Moloch” perspective, we have just added “provide sexual services to your boss and pretend that you like it” to the list of things that desperate poor people have to do in order to get a job.
And both these perspectives are legitimate, for different people in different situations, and it is easy to forget that the other situation exists (and to have this blind spot supported by your bubble).
Simply asking people about their genuine preferences is not enough, because of possible preference falsification. Imagine the person who desperately needs the job—if you asked them whether they are genuinely okay with having sex with their boss, they might conclude that saying “no” means not getting the job. People could lie even if a specific job is not on the line, simply because taking a certain position sends various social signals, such as “I feel economically (in)secure”.
But if we cannot reliably find out people’s preferences, it is not possible to have a policy “it is OK only if it is really OK for you”, and without an anonymous survey we can’t even figure out which solution would be preferable for most people. (In near future, an AI will probably compile a list of your publicly stated opinions for HR before the job interview.) So we are left guessing.
Interesting, your comment follows the frame of the OP, rather than the economic frame that I proposed. In the economic frame, it almost doesn’t matter whether you ban sexual relations at work or not. If the labor market is a seller’s market, workers will just leave bad employers and flock to better ones, and the problem will solve itself. And if the labor market is a buyer’s market, employers will find a way to extract X value from workers, either by extorting sex or by other ways—you’re never going to plug all the loopholes. The buyer’s market vs seller’s market distinction is all that matters, and all that’s worth changing. The great success of the union movement was because it actually shifted one side of the market, forcing the other side to shift as well.
I agree that in long term, seller’s market is the answer (and in the era of AGI, keeping it so will probably require some kind of UBI). But the market is not perfect, so the ban is useful to address those cases. Sometimes people are inflexible—I have seen people tolerate more than they should, considering their market position they apparently were not aware/sure of. Transaction costs, imperfect information, etc.
One missing piece of context from this response is that a central case under discussion is the case where the employer is hypothetically aligned with the goals of its employees (as is often the case for small non-profits hiring heavily mission aligned employees).
By “hypothetically”, I just mean that the employees (and likely the employeer) both think they are basically aligned in this way, but there are remaining concerns around mistakes, deception, bad general norms, etc.
Sure, but there’s an important economic subtlety here: to the extent that work is goal-aligned, it doesn’t need to be paid. You could do it independently, or as partners, or something. Whereas every hour worked doing the employer’s bidding, and every dollar paid for it, must be due to goals that aren’t aligned or are differently weighted (for example, because the worker cares comparatively more about feeding their family). So it makes more sense to me to view every employment relationship, to the extent it exists, as transactional: the employer wants one thing, the worker another, and they exchange labor for money. I think it’s a simpler and more grounded way to think about work, at least when you’re a worker.
So it makes more sense to me to view every employment relationship, to the extent it exists, as transactional: the employer wants one thing, the worker another, and they exchange labor for money.
I mean, this is certainly not the relationship I have with my employer.
Here is an alternative approach you could use which would get you closer to this:
(Non-profit and values ~aligned) employeers pay competitive wages or (ideally) pay in impact equity.
Employees adopt the norm of maximizing (expected) profit. They can donate this to a charity of interest. (Including donating it back to the charity they work at, but this isn’t an expectation.)
This seems like a good approach naively, but unfortunately, I think there are a number of inefficiencies with wages and impact assessment that imply the costs here aren’t worth the benefits in clarity.
I agree with you that UBI is the solution to 98% of labor condition issues, and that’s a major reason I support it. But some fields pay primarily in some other currency (impact, social status, connections), so you’d also need UBsocialsupport, UBfeelingImattertotheworld, etc.
I think this is a good topic to discuss, and the post has many good insights. But I kinda see the whole topic from a different angle. Worker well-being can’t depend on the goodness of employers, because employers gonna be bad if they can get away with it. The true cause of worker well-being is supply/demand changes that favor workers. Examples: 1) unionizing was a supply control which led to 9-5 and the weekend, 2) big tech jobs became nice because good engineers were rare, 3) UBI would lead to fewer people seeking jobs and therefore make employers behave better.
To me these examples show that, apart from market luck, the way to improve worker well-being is coordinated action. So I mostly agree with banning 80 hour workweeks, regulating gig work, and the like. We need more such restrictions, not less. The 32-hour work week seems like an especially good proposal: it would both make people spend less time at work, and make jobs easier to find. (And also make people much happier, as trials have shown.)
Seems to me that debates about (de)regulation often conflate two different things, which probably are not clearly separated but exist on a continuum. One is that people are different. Another is cooperation vs defection in Prisoner’s Dilemma (also known as sacrifice to Moloch).
From the “people are different” perspective, the theoretical ideal would be to let everyone do their own thing, unless the advantages of cooperation clearly outweigh the benefits of freedom.
From the “Moloch” perspective, it would be best for the players if defection was banned/punished.
As an example, should it be okay for an employee to have a sexual relation with their boss? From the “people are different” perspective, hey, if two people genuinely desire to have sex with each other, why should they be forbidden to do so, if they are both consenting adults? From the “Moloch” perspective, we have just added “provide sexual services to your boss and pretend that you like it” to the list of things that desperate poor people have to do in order to get a job.
And both these perspectives are legitimate, for different people in different situations, and it is easy to forget that the other situation exists (and to have this blind spot supported by your bubble).
Simply asking people about their genuine preferences is not enough, because of possible preference falsification. Imagine the person who desperately needs the job—if you asked them whether they are genuinely okay with having sex with their boss, they might conclude that saying “no” means not getting the job. People could lie even if a specific job is not on the line, simply because taking a certain position sends various social signals, such as “I feel economically (in)secure”.
But if we cannot reliably find out people’s preferences, it is not possible to have a policy “it is OK only if it is really OK for you”, and without an anonymous survey we can’t even figure out which solution would be preferable for most people. (In near future, an AI will probably compile a list of your publicly stated opinions for HR before the job interview.) So we are left guessing.
Interesting, your comment follows the frame of the OP, rather than the economic frame that I proposed. In the economic frame, it almost doesn’t matter whether you ban sexual relations at work or not. If the labor market is a seller’s market, workers will just leave bad employers and flock to better ones, and the problem will solve itself. And if the labor market is a buyer’s market, employers will find a way to extract X value from workers, either by extorting sex or by other ways—you’re never going to plug all the loopholes. The buyer’s market vs seller’s market distinction is all that matters, and all that’s worth changing. The great success of the union movement was because it actually shifted one side of the market, forcing the other side to shift as well.
I agree that in long term, seller’s market is the answer (and in the era of AGI, keeping it so will probably require some kind of UBI). But the market is not perfect, so the ban is useful to address those cases. Sometimes people are inflexible—I have seen people tolerate more than they should, considering their market position they apparently were not aware/sure of. Transaction costs, imperfect information, etc.
One missing piece of context from this response is that a central case under discussion is the case where the employer is hypothetically aligned with the goals of its employees (as is often the case for small non-profits hiring heavily mission aligned employees).
By “hypothetically”, I just mean that the employees (and likely the employeer) both think they are basically aligned in this way, but there are remaining concerns around mistakes, deception, bad general norms, etc.
Sure, but there’s an important economic subtlety here: to the extent that work is goal-aligned, it doesn’t need to be paid. You could do it independently, or as partners, or something. Whereas every hour worked doing the employer’s bidding, and every dollar paid for it, must be due to goals that aren’t aligned or are differently weighted (for example, because the worker cares comparatively more about feeding their family). So it makes more sense to me to view every employment relationship, to the extent it exists, as transactional: the employer wants one thing, the worker another, and they exchange labor for money. I think it’s a simpler and more grounded way to think about work, at least when you’re a worker.
I mean, this is certainly not the relationship I have with my employer.
Here is an alternative approach you could use which would get you closer to this:
(Non-profit and values ~aligned) employeers pay competitive wages or (ideally) pay in impact equity.
Employees adopt the norm of maximizing (expected) profit. They can donate this to a charity of interest. (Including donating it back to the charity they work at, but this isn’t an expectation.)
This seems like a good approach naively, but unfortunately, I think there are a number of inefficiencies with wages and impact assessment that imply the costs here aren’t worth the benefits in clarity.
I agree with you that UBI is the solution to 98% of labor condition issues, and that’s a major reason I support it. But some fields pay primarily in some other currency (impact, social status, connections), so you’d also need UBsocialsupport, UBfeelingImattertotheworld, etc.