The radical idea that people have value
The meaning of International Labor Day
Today is a day to recommit ourselves to the idea that human beings have value beyond their industrial productivity, and that people’s labor has value beyond what they receive in wages.
To the idea that people are more than “human resources” — an expense to be managed so that the “true owners” of a joint enterprise, its stockholders, can receive their just dividends.
To the idea that free trade is a profoundly enriching force in our society — but only when the trade is actually free. When someone controls the very means of survival for others, “trade” with them becomes extortion, only further enriching them.
To the understanding that the great differences in wealth in our society were not created by fundamental differences in people, but by earlier differences in wealth and power: the wealthy using unfree trade to make others more dependent upon them.
To the understanding that divisions like race and nationality were created by people who did not have our best interests in mind: as a way to divide people and make them see each other only as competitors, never as potential allies.
To the understanding that not all of the labor we perform is seen by others, but that even when it is not, it still has value.
When we weaken people’s ability to say “no,” we take power from them and put it in the hands of people who can demand things from them; we take wealth from them, we take time from them, we take the very energy of life from them.
Central to the idea of the value of free trade is the idea that after a trade, both parties end up better off, or they wouldn’t have traded. This idea that each party is better off by their own standards is why trade literally creates value: the total satisfaction of people in the world has increased. But we often ignore (and bad economists and corrupt politicians often deliberately conceal) how important that second clause is.
If you cannot afford a few extra days or weeks of unemployment while you look for a better job, it doesn’t matter what exists on the market; you will take the conditions you are offered. If you cannot get transportation from where you can live to where a job is, it doesn’t matter what kind of job is there; it is not available to you. If you have obligations of child care or elder care, if you have people depending on you and nobody else to do this task, then it doesn’t matter how much value you create by doing it; jobs which don’t allow you to do that are not open to you. If you do not have the opportunity to negotiate or to get any better deals, you are living in an effective monopoly, no matter how notionally “free” the market is to others. The benefits of free trade are not for you; instead, you trade for what you can get, or die. The difference in value between what you could have gotten in exchange for your labor in a free market, and what you will actually get in this unfree one, is captured entirely by those who have made the market unfree.
Yet when we hear the language of free markets, it’s almost invariably to talk about their virtues, and the very real fact that most of the most important trades the average person makes are not even remotely free gets papered over. The fact that some people can walk away from a deal, while other people can’t, is covered up with words about “job markets” which hide the fact that buyers and sellers of labor aren’t having even vaguely similar conversations.
What a great deal of this comes down to is what economists call “the declining marginal value of wealth,” or what the rest of us call “money can’t buy happiness, but poverty can buy you one hell of a lot of misery.” Someone with a million dollars in the bank can lose half of it and still come out OK; someone with a hundred dollars in the bank can’t lose $20 without feeling it. More generally, because we use money in our society to allocate not just “personal property,” but the basic requirements of survival like food, shelter, and medicine, for someone without money the threat of even a small financial shock is enough to “force them into line,” while for someone with it, that’s not true. This is the root of the idea of financial shock wealth.
This creates a self-reinforcing loop: those with power can use it to acquire more power over those who lack it. All the concepts of liberty and freedom that we say that we cherish get crunched up and turned into nothing when people can’t actually say “no” in their daily lives.
When we work, either at a job or among our friends and family, we create real value for those around us. We each have a desire that our work be seen and recognized, that those around us value us for it — and in turn, validate that value by supporting us, both emotionally and physically.
But too much of our labor remains invisible. The concept of “emotional labor” was a profound revelation to me when I first learned about it, because it put a word to tasks I had done, and seen others do, and by putting a name on it made it suddenly so much easier to see how some people had been doing tremendous work — work that was profoundly valuable and necessary to everyone around them — and not only not being acknowledged for it by others, but not being acknowledged for it by themselves.
Putting a name on labor makes the invisible visible. It lets us plan for the need for it, and seek out those who will do it; it lets us recognize our own labors and those of others, and (if we are at all wise) to reward it when it is done.
How much more labor is there in this world which remains invisible to us, because we don’t yet have the language for it? How much of it goes unrewarded, because we only measure the things which are easiest to measure, and ignore the things which are harder to tie numbers to?
Today is doubly meaningful for me in this way: it is also the one-year birthday of Humu, the company I joined nine months ago when I decided to make working on these problems my full-time job. (Slightly more detailed post here)
We have focused on what I would describe as “dignity at scale:” the idea that, if people are spending so much of their lives working, that time and energy should be repaid not just monetarily, but with a sense that both their efforts and their needs are recognized, acknowledged, and acted upon by their communities. It is intimately tied with the idea of “psychological safety,” and the real output of it is happiness: not superficial happiness, but a deeper sense of trust and value among one’s peers that materially affects people’s lives.
While for sound practical reasons, I can’t yet speak about the details of what we do, I can say that we have validated two key ideas: first, that it is possible to do this in a way whose value companies recognize, from individual contributors who see their needs verbalized, recognized, and acknowledged all the way to investors who see that a company that works on behalf of its workers is also a more successful company. And second, that it is possible to do this while maintaining a razor-sharp focus on the personal needs of each individual worker: not creating piles of bullshit reports, or manufacturing creative excuses for inaction, but actually engaging with the hard problems that people encounter.
I don’t think we will solve all of the problems of the world this way, but I have increasing confidence that we will be able to make meaningful progress on some of them.
My hope is simple: that with each successive May 1st, there will be more people who see the value of the work they put into the world meaningfully reflected back into their own lives. Let’s see if we can make that happen.
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