Liberterian views on worker protections?

Great Debates
1

Another spin-off from the second-hand smoke thread, where one main concept espoused was that workers who are exposed to environmental smoke (and its probable increased risks of cancer, etc.) do so of their own free will (by taking the job) and that government must stay out of that relationship. Which caused me to ask the generalized question:

Is the employer-employee relationship coercive or at least potentially so, to the point that Liberteria should ever regulate it?

Let us propose that I set up a factory in abjectly poor Apalachia processing extremely harmful toxins harvested from giant squids. :wink: I inform workers of the risks and they choose to work for me. Does a liberterian government regulate worker safety in any way? Does it guarentee my having provide fully informed consent?

2

Hello, DSeid. Please note my views may not reflect all of “Libertaria” as you put it. This is my viewpoint.

I’m assuming you are harvesting these harmful toxins because doing so will result in a profit for you and your shareholders. It serves your purposes to provide the most efficient and safest way to harvest these toxins, because by doing so you will get the most profit for your company.

An employee hurt on the job due to your negligence means one less employee to harvest the toxins. This will slow down your productivity and ultimately hurt your bottom line. Therefore, I would think, as the owner of this company, that the well being of your employees is very important to you.

Let’s assume, however, that you couldn’t care less about the well being of your employees. Someone gets hurt by the toxins, and instead of rushing them to the hospital and paying for their care and investigating the accident to prevent it from happening again, you shove them out the door and say “You’re on your own.”

The other employees see this, and morale starts to drop. They begin to question the wisdom of working there, and begin to investigate their options. Employees begin to leave, productivity drops.

In the meantime, the fired employee begins to talk to the press. 60 Minutes does an expose, your customers cancel their orders in protest. The Appalachian Squid Ink Harvesting Company goes out of business.

Now, I am in no way an expert on poverty levels in Appalachia. I have no way of knowing what they would consider their options. However, in my experience, no matter how good the job, when you can’t tolerate it any more, no amount of salary raises would make a difference.

This is of course, an extreme example. Libertarians believe that you can do what you like, as long as what you do does not deprive someone else of life, liberty, or property. If the work environment is such that you deprive your employees of any of the three, then yes, you are breaking the law.

I still submit the employer-employee relationship is not coercive. No one forces me to go to work…I go because I enjoy it and because I have bills to pay and things I want to do. If I don’t want to work there anymore, I will quit. It is then solely my responsibility to take care of my bills and anything else that crops up.

Please note, I do not presume to speak for all Libertarians. This is my view. Others may have differing opinions.

3

Even if I champion the ‘personal responsibility’ angle, do I have to be a Libertarian? Just the word gets me in trouble around here. ::: sigh ::::

4

ivylass,
My question here is not whether or not the good of workers would be served. (IMHO, you can only conclude that it would be if you ignore the vast majority of the industrial age. In many situations the costs of avoiding injury would be more than the company’s cost of workers being harmed.) Nor is it which is “right” or “wrong”. It is really merely a point of clarification for me. I have been led to believe that government should have a minimal role in a liberterian system, and that among its few fair roles is guarenteeing that agreements are not made under coersion or by misrepresentation. My question really is just to find out if there are contexts in which the employer-employee relationship meets that critera.

5

DSeid, maybe I’m missing your point. What employees out there are working under coercion? Who is forcing people at the point of a gun to work for them? If that is the situation, then, yes, Libertarians would be opposed to that, because you’re robbing someone of liberty.

6

you overestimate public outrage. people still buy nike shoes, no matter how many time you say the words ‘sweat shop.’

7

True Blue Libeterianism would absolutely decline to regulate any aspect of the employee-employer relationship, as long as employees are not physically prevented from terminating their employment at will. The economic imbalance between employer and employee is not relevant to a libertarian. Libertarians believe in a pie-in-the-sky world where employees have sufficient power to bargain freely with employers regarding the terms of their employment, even though everyone else knows that this is not the case. The libertarian is in the dream world where all contracts are the result of bargaining: each party meeting and compromising to come to a mutually beneficial decision both can live with. In reality, such contracts represent less than 10% of all contracts, and a vanishingly small proportion of labor contracts. Virtually all contracts are formed when one party sets down an nonnegotiable offer which is then either accepted or declined by the other party. The concept that one party of the contract may be disabled by externalities from bargaining is irrelevant to the libertarian. This is a direct consequence of the libertarian belief that coercion cannot take economic form.

The knowledge that employees are disabled from bargaining with employers is also why employers cannot be relied upon not to abuse their employees. The pie-in-the-sky notion that employers will not engage in conduct detrimental to their employees (because doing so is “wasteful” of resources) fails because employers know that there is a ready pool of replacement employees. There is no economic incentive to employers not to work their employees to death, as long as there is a steady stream of desparate replacements available. The libertarian fantasy is that employees will choose not to avail themselves of such employment. But, given a choice of starving now, or working yourself to death over the course of a few years, most people will choose to work themselves to death over a few years, on the hopes that things will somehow get better. Libertarians blithely ignore this because it suits their real purpose, which is to gather wealth to themselves without regard as to who they run over in the process.

8

I can’t speak for the libertarians, but to

I would say yes. The essence of an employer-employee relationship is an agreement to take direction in circumstances incompletely specified by contract. Employers have power.

9

If someone agrees with work in X conditions, and then go to actually work in X conditions, where’s the coercion?

10

The coercion is in forcing people to choose between working in terrible conditions and starving to death. When employers conspire to make those the only choices available to employees, coercion is present.

11

My take on this is that if the conditions are fully specified (including probabilistically specified) the you’ve got arms-length contractors, not employees. Direction means that employers can change effective conditions without consent. Of course employees can leave, but so can taxpayers.

12

gex gex, maybe that’s because some of us don’t feel that Nike is bringing the world to an ethical halt. Those are sweatshaops, yes, just like America and Britain had sweatshops during the industrial revolution.

Though I long suspected there was no Marxist in me, I have to wonder where things like “They have to go through developing stages to fight for their rights.” We can’t just hand it to them. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.

Which is to say, if you think it is appalling now, ask them why they are working for Nike in the first place. Please note I am not saying that anyone should be thanking Nike for their huge generosity, rather that these people were previously presented with the choice to starve or starve. Now they can starve or live. Now that they live, let them work out how to live better.

IMO.

13

Yes, of course, working conditions before gov’t regulations were safe. I wonder why there was a Progressive/Labor movement at all.