Abstract
The dominant focus of thinking about economic justice is overwhelmingly distributive, that is, concerned with what people get in terms of resources and opportunities. It views work mainly negatively, as a burden or cost, or else is neutral about it, rather than seeing it as a source of meaning and fulfilment—a good in its own right. However, what we do in life has at least as much, if not more, influence on whom we become, as does what we get. Thus we have good reason also to be concerned with what Paul Gomberg has termed contributive justice, that is, justice as regards what people are expected and able to contribute in terms of work. Complex, interesting work allows workers not only to develop and exercise their capacities, and gain the satisfaction from achieving the internal goods of a practice, but to gain the external goods of recognition and esteem. As Gomberg’s analysis of the concept of contributive justice in relation to equality of opportunity shows, as long as the more satisfying kinds of work are concentrated into a subset of jobs, rather than shared out among all jobs, then many workers will be denied the chance to have meaningful work and the recognition that goes with it. In this paper I examine the contributive justice argument, suggest how it can be further strengthened, arguing, inter alia, that ignoring contributive injustice tends to support legitimations of distributive inequality.
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Notes
Race is Gomberg’s main concern, but in my view, class is more directly related to the mechanisms that he analyses. The relation between race and class is asymmetric: wherever there are racialised distinctions between people which are used to assign them different value, this inevitably also results in divisions of economic class. But class can exist in the absence of racialised divisions, and sometimes still does. The unequal distribution of complex and routine work does not require divisions of race, though if the latter exist, it tends to reinforce them.
I am grateful to a referee for pointing this out.
Of course, in many situations gender norms allocate cleaning work to women, but the feminist critique of the gender inequality can appeal to this argument that those who create mess should clear it up.
This partitioning and inconsistency in our moral economic judgements is a feature of modern society; see Sayer (2008).
Strangely, they don’t mention the domestic division of labour, even though concerns about contributive justice are so common and clear there.
Sociologists often object to these kinds of generalisations on the grounds that there are exceptions. But that objection misunderstands the nature of generalisation. Alternatively, they may object to claims about universals as ‘essentialist’. But characteristics like curiosity and enjoyment of complexity and skill are tendencies whose activation can be blocked or overridden, and hence there is no determinism. Nor is there any need to deny human variety; but when we encounter exceptions, we naturally ask what it is about the uncurious person or the person who prefers routine unskilled work that makes them different. Perhaps they have been socialised into believing that their lowly lot in life is all they should want.
While Rawls provides a rich account of these characteristics, he only mentions meaningful work in passing (1971, p. 425) Rawls believed that the worst aspects of the division of labour can be surmounted: ‘no one need be servilely dependent on others and made to choose between monotonous and routine occupations which are deadening to human thought and sensibility. Each can be offered a variety of tasks so that the different elements of his nature find suitable expression.’ (1971, p. 529). However, he does not take up the implied issue of contributive justice.
Although Marx was clearly influenced by all three of Aristotle’s arguments in his views on work, he tended to see divisions of labour of all kinds as damaging; hence his comment that ‘in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.’ [Marx, German Ideology—(Collected Works, vol. 5: 47).]. Translated into a modern context, this would imply superhuman individuals, able to master a large range of skills, many of them unrelated. For an excellent critique of this, see Murphy (1993).
Brown and Hesketh’s research on the UK graduate labour market estimates that 40% of recent graduates are in jobs which do not require degree-level skills three years after finishing their studies (Brown and Hesketh 2004).
Very roughly, for Marx, the social division is that between workers working for different employers and the technical or detail division is that between workers working for the same company. Gomberg and Murphy’s target—which they call the social division of labour—is Marx’s detail or manufacturing or technical division, not his social division of labour. The matter is made more complex by the fact that Marx’s own distinction itself compounds others (Sayer 1995, Chap. 3).
However, the post-Fordist literature tended to oversimplify the issues and idealise alternatives (Sayer and Walker 1992).
In many work situations the boundaries are often surmounted on a temporary, ad hoc basis so as to deal with problems of absenteeism or shifting workloads; thus workers may sometimes briefly take on tasks officially assigned to those above or below them.
‘The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up in maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.’ (Smith 1776, Bk I, ch.ii, pp. 19–20).
There has been much discussion of whether this is too deterministic. I have argued elsewhere that a more moderate version of the concept which acknowledges individuals’ reflexivity and agency is more plausible (Sayer 2005).
‘… the theory of the habitus allows us to explain the apparent truth of the theory that it shows to be false’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 215).
Such judgements imply that we should distinguish not only between earned and unearned income, but between warranted and unwarranted unearned income or other benefits.
David Miller provides a defence of a version of desert as a basis for distributive justice.
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Sayer, A. Contributive Justice and Meaningful Work. Res Publica 15, 1–16 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9077-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-008-9077-8