| Jobs vary significantly in attractiveness, even accounting for differences in personal taste. Some workers toil in intuitively burdensome jobs while others enjoy the benefit of rewarding and meaningful work. Are these inequalities fair? How can we tell? What norms of justice (if any) apply to the organization of work and the distribution of tasks across producers? This dissertation answers these and related questions about justice in production. It challenges two popular theories of justice in production, offering a new account that appeals to widely shared liberal egalitarian premises yet calls for far-reaching (but feasible) changes to the way we work. In particular, the dissertation advances two main lines of argument. First, drawing on the instrumentalist case for democracy at the national level, the dissertation argues in favor of the democratization of the economy: workers must be granted genuine decision-making rights over all issues facing their firms. Second, drawing on a broadly Rawlsian account of distributive justice, the dissertation argues that justice is sensitive to the distribution of “occupational goods” like complex work and authority and responsibility. Such goods count as “primary goods” in Rawls's sense. These goods, like other aspects of “justice's currency,” are to be distributed in accordance with liberal egalitarian principles of distributive justice. The dissertation develops this suggestion using Rawls's “difference principle,” which requires that primary goods be distributed equally except insofar as inequalities benefit the worst off members of society. Commentators have largely failed to see the way in which the difference principle governs the distribution of occupational as well as economic goods (like income and wealth). By widening the scope of the difference principle to include both occupational and economic goods, we at once improve our understanding of Rawls's theory and arrive at a powerful and plausible standard for evaluating the division of labor. Drawing on sociological and economic research, the dissertation considers which occupational inequalities pass the difference principle's egalitarian test, reaching a fairly pessimistic result: contemporary economies are shot through with unjust inequalities in access to intrinsically rewarding work. The dissertation concludes by considering concrete proposals for reform, including restructuring work, sharing burdensome work, and compensating those who perform necessary but unappealing labor. |
