Published on December 27, 2024 11:21 AM GMT
Capitalism is a force that has lifted billions out of poverty, where even poor remote villagers enjoy luxuries that would have been unimaginable to medieval kings. When someone takes a job, even the worst job, it’s because both parties expect mutual gain. And yet companies routinely get accused of exploiting their workers for offering low pay and bad conditions, even if the pay and conditions are far better than the other available jobs. This sometimes results in protectionist laws that prevent those businesses from existing in the first place, making everyone worse off.
Given this, is there any meaningful concept that could be called “exploitation?”
I think there is.
In fact, I claim, it routinely happens that someone will voluntarily and rationally submit to a circumstance that should very rightfully be called “exploitation.”
An Actually-Exploitative Corporation
Consider this dialogue, taken from here:
Steve: Acme exploits its workers by paying them too little!
Liron: Can you help me paint a specific mental picture of a worker being exploited by Acme?
Steve: Ok… A single dad who works at Acme and never gets to spend time with his kids because he works so much. He's living paycheck to paycheck and he doesn't get any paid vacation days. The next time his car breaks down, he won’t even be able to fix it because he barely makes minimum wage. You should try living on minimum wage so you can see how hard it is!
Liron: You’re saying Acme should be blamed for this specific person’s unpleasant life circumstances, right?
Steve: Yes, because they have thousands of workers in these kinds of circumstances, and meanwhile their stock is worth $80 billion.
In this case, Steve has provided no reason to believe that this worker — let’s call him “Bob” — is being exploited, for any reasonable sense of the word.
But sometimes there are extra details that reveal that, actually, yeah, Acme really is responsible for Bob’s life circumstances.
Let’s make up some more details. Why doesn’t Bob have time to see his kids? He would on Monday evenings, except that the company requires him to drive an hour for a weekly city-wide meeting, where he raises his hand to prove that he worked the past week, and listens to some information that would be better communicated in an E-mail.
Other people in his circumstance manage to save money – why is Bob living paycheck to paycheck? Because the company required him to wear a tuxedo once a month — everyone must wear the same brand, and it costs at least $5000 – and he’s on a payment plan for it.
The company has many more ways to make him miserable. He’s not allowed to use his phone on the job, even when there are no customers around and he’s just sitting doing nothing. He wants to bring his own chair to help his back pain, but he’s not allowed. If he’s late by a minute, he loses half a day’s wages. His boss yells at him, and the higher-ups praise the boss for being tough and motivating. There’s a ritual where, every morning, any worker who made a mistake the previous day gets their mistake read out in front of everyone, and gets shamed for it.
In each of these cases, the company is inflicting massive cost on Bob, with at most a very small benefit to themselves.
And in each case, Bob takes it, because his alternative is to be fired and have no job whatsoever.
Bob is being exploited.
This motivates my working definition of exploitation:
Exploitation is using a superior negotiating position to inflict great costs on someone else, at small cost to yourself.
More forms of Exploitation
Here are some more examples:
- A parent sits down for tea, but their kid is running around. “Absolutely no noise while I’m having tea, or no Nintendo for the next month.” Every time the parent pulls this card, the kid accepts.A factory pays $5/hour for dangerous but air-conditioned indoor work, in a region where most other jobs are $2/hour farm labor in the hot sun. There is a piece of equipment they could install that would cost $1000 but would reduce the risk of injury by 10%. They don’t install it.A shy, nerdy programmer is dating a very attractive, nerdy woman, in an area dominated by many nerdy men seeking few nerdy women. She knows that she’ll have a far easier time finding a new partner than he would were they to break up. She begins using this position to change the relationship — telling him he doesn’t love her if he doesn’t pick her up from the airport, asking to open the relationship and hinting that him not wanting to is being controlling. Every time, he accepts, until he’s a shell of his former self.
In each of these cases, one person has the power to casually inflict severe losses on the other — punishment of a child, loss of a job, loss of a relationship. And so whenever they can gain $1 by making the other person pay $10, they do so. That’s exploitation.
This view of exploitation impacts what policies you should demand of companies. And it affects what kind of behavior you can morally request from others – and from yourself.
The Fair Trade movement seeks to pressure companies into providing their foreign laborers working conditions and pay closer to American standards. This lens suggests that neither the naive employer-provider view (“Make them treat their workers fairly!”) or the Econ 101 view (“They are providing jobs that the workers happily accept, and we should respect that”) are a complete way to evaluate what would produce the globally optimum policy. We should instead ask: are there small things the companies should be doing that would make a big difference in the workers’ lives?
This lens also suggests a personal code of conduct. Whenever you make a request from someone you have power over, ask yourself just how hard it would be for them compared to the benefit you get. And when you want to evaluate someone for ethics, ask them about when they took a small sacrifice in order to make a big difference for someone else.
Related: Eliezer’s Parable of Anoxistan
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