The labour movement has existed as a social force in Canada since about a decade before the beginning of the twentieth century. In that time it has grown in size and momentum, and in visibility and influence. A hundred years of the presence of organised labour have given us a good sense of what it is. Therefore I think it is a good time to ask the philosophical question: are labour unions morally desirable? Should we as individuals, and as a society, encourage the formation of unions and promote the goals of organised labour?

I answer in the affirmative. But before I describe my argument I must articulate a general proposition about social life in industrialised nations which underlies my analysis. Freedom exists only for those who have the opportunity to exercise their freedom. Before we can truthfully say, "we are free", certain necessary conditions must obtain, such as the absence of a captor, or the absence of obstacles that prevent follow-through with choice, and so forth. You and I, while we are in the employ of another person, do not have quite the freedom that perhaps we think we do. The largest segment of our lives, that is, the time we spend "at work", is time spent under the direction of an employer who has purchased our labour with a wage. My proposition is that during this time we are not free, because our activities are commanded and supervised by another person, and not by our own will. One may say that we are free because we retain a certain kind of veto power, which is the option to quit our job and go on to work somewhere else. However that kind of choice is coerced and not truly free, because the alternative of unemployment does not supply us with the money we need to obtain our basic life needs. We can chose not to work at some particular job, but then we must go off to work somewhere else. Forswearing employment altogether is not really an option, because of the risk of social ostracism, homelessness, impoverishment, starvation and death. Our culture does not have much tolerance for dropouts.

Those of us who have to rent their labour to an employer in this way, which is probably everyone at this conference, must risk suffering abuse, victimisation, or exploitation at the hands of unscrupulous employers. I believe that 'exploitation' is not too heavy a word to characterise this risk, for while there are plenty of benevolent managers in the world there are also plenty of dictatorial ones, who demand long work days, breakneck production rates, and who pay wages not large enough to support the worker or her family. In the labour movement, the term "exploitation" is used rather loosely, referring to any unpaid labour not given freely. But of course there is more that can be said than that. Exploitation involves a relationship between two or more participants exchanging vital energy, information, and resources, but exploitation has two qualities that differentiate it from other kinds of relationships that also exchange these things. First, in exploitation, vital energy, information, and resources are extracted and appropriated from the victim, as opposed to exchanged freely and in a mutually beneficial manner. Second, at least one side of the exchange is subordinated by the other. This may come as a by-product of inequitable exchanges of vital energy, but can stand alone as well, as in the case when one side is commanding or exercising power over the other. Clearly each of these criteria can be a matter of degree, therefore it is fair to say that at least one of them must be present in the situation for it to count as exploitation. It is easy to see how this definition of exploitation accounts for how our society has traditionally treated a variety of disempowered groups like women, black people, Jews, and even animals and ecosystems. In the case of wage employment, it is the worker who is subordinated, and the resource that is extracted from the worker is her labour. Now, labour is certainly a vital resource, and I think no one would dispute this. In most employment situations, labour is exchanged for a wage, but this does not mean that the exchange is always free and mutually beneficial. The wage might not be enough for the worker to sustain a decent quality of life. Or, the wage might not be enough to compensate fairly for grueling work hours and inhumane treatment. The second criterion, subordination, is also a feature of most situations of wage employment. Heirarchy and subordination is the basic structure of corporate and industrial organisation. This is a variation on the thinking of Karl Marx, who, by the way, invented the now-familiar term, "wage slavery".

So, in these two critical ways, the loose notion of exploitation that one normally finds in the labour movement is extended to include labour that demands tedium and toil, where the working and living conditions are sacrificed in the name of higher productivity, reduced production costs and higher profit. Additionally, the degree to which workers are subordinated is the extent to which the workers abdicate their freedom. When we abdicate some of our freedom we must face the possibility of being unable to control our living and working conditions and prevent exploitation. Again, I must emphasize that a person who gives unrewarded labour freely is not exploited, as in the case of labour donated by helpful friends. But labour given to an employer is not really given freely, because as indicated the alternative to employment is the risk of starvation and death due to unemployment. We may think that this possibility is remote in countries such as our Canada where workers enjoy certain socialised protections such as employment insurance or welfare. But these protections mitigate only against the most serious among possible consequences of unemployment. They are minimally life sustaining, rather than fully life empowering. Additionally they do not protect against the ostracism and stigma that is often directed at the users of these services. Finally, these protections are not bottomless wells; they do dry up eventually, they are not permanant alternatives to wage employment, as the public guardians of these services regularly declare. The other alternative to unemployment, which is self-employment, seems to free the worker from exploitation. But this option nonetheless re-affirms the basic fact of social life in most countries of the world, which is that we must work to live. There is no substantial alternative to full or partial participation in economic activity.

This lack of substantial alternatives is what I call a coerced choice. A coerced choice is a choice where there really is only one option because the others are clearly detrimental to some aspect of one's life. The choice is not really unfree, because there is some decision-making going on. Yet the options are set up in such a way that the "bad" options entail serious negative consequences, such as exposing the person to further risk of exploitation, or the "good" options entail elements so attractive that they are beyond competition with the other options. Either way, the range of available choices by themselves indicate which one should be picked.

Exploitation in the workplace can come in many forms, for it includes any practice which subordinates workers into the position of the property of the employer, to use and dispose of with impunity, instead of as an equal human being. This can include denial of a life-sustaining wage but can also include denial of any other kind of humane treatment, such as sufficient rest time, or leaves of absence, or health and safety protections, or fairness in discipline, and the like. Now I must emphasise that subordination and labour appropriation are matters of degree. In a worst-case scenario, exploitation can reach the stage of near-total subordination and labour appropriation. We call these scenarios "sweat shops", and the wrongness of them is obvious enough as to incite public anger against their operators. More frequent in Canada is the "joe job", that pays the provincially fixed minimum wage and offers no benefits, and frequently entails a strong degree of worker subordination in the form of electronic surveilance of behavior and productivity. In professions such as medicine or education, the benefits and the pay is good, and though the worker does answer to a supervisor but there is little or no direct command over her activity. Frequently, the worker can set her own hours. Yet even in the best case scenario, the heirarchical corporate structure is not fully abolished, so the risk of exploitation in the form of unfair labour appropriation remains real.

So, what counts as exploitation in the workplace, in the sense of treating workers as subordinate property instead of as people? I count as an example of exploitation the denial of the right to a minimum standard of acceptable living and working conditions. That right comes in the form of the ability to pay for it. We live in a system where people cannot have what they cannot pay for, and therefore people who cannot pay for even the most essential life-nurturing needs cannot get them. Those needs might include: food, shelter, clothing, sewage disposal, health care and primary education, the protections of laws and courts of justice, the stimulation of cultural events such as theatre or religion, and so forth. These are the things without which life is not endurable, nor even enjoyable. And in a capitalist society, these things almost always cost money.

Now, enter the union. Unions are the means by which workers obtain this protection from exploitation, by exercising a certain degree of control over workplace conditions. Union negotiators bargain with the management to create a legally enforceable contract, called a collective agreement, that reduces or eliminates the risk of exploitation in the form of unacceptable working conditions and insufficient wages or any form of inequitable appropriation of the worker's labour. The collective agreement may also reduce the extent to which worker subordination entails the other kind of exploitation, by exactly defining the permissible limits of management function.

So, since we have to work to live, we have to accept the command of an employer over our actions during work time. A person who must give away her freedom has the right to stipulate the terms and conditions of that giveaway. It should be the worker, and not the employer, who decides exactly how much of the worker's autonomy will be given to the employer, and how much autonomy the worker is still entitled to keep. It counts as exploitation if the worker must surrender some of her autonomy, and cannot be included in decisions about her own activity. Perhaps my employer is trustworthy, and I need not fear that he will order me to do something that goes against my own judgement, such as handle a dangerous chemical that I am not trained to use. But perhaps he is not: so I am taking a risk. Unless I am the one who sets the limits of the employer's authority over me, I will always be risking exploitation. A flat refusal to comply with an order to do something dangerous or unsafe, for example, might result in discipline or discharge, and then the employer would just get someone else to do it. The problem has not dissapeared; it has been transformed from a problem about worker treatment to a problem about worker insubordination.

A collective agreement enables the workers to retain at least some of their autonomy, by setting the limits of the employer's authority. This may seem to saddle the employer with more responsibility and less power, but what actually happens is that the employer's authority over the workforce is moved towards a balance with worker's authority over the employer. Without a contract, this exchange of power is more akin to exploitation than symbiosis, because the workers have minimal or nonexistant opportunity to control their own working conditions. At the event of bargaining a collective agreement the representatives of the workers meet the management not as subordinates but as equals, and get a chance to contribute to decisions about how the work at that location will be done. They could, for example, require that whenever Lefty is asked to handle dangerous substances, that he be trained first, and that another worker is with him to run for help if anything goes wrong.

If we are agreed that exploitation is wrong then we should support and promote whatever measures are available to prevent it. It is my argument that unions are the instrumental means by which workers exercise power over their own working lives and protect themselves from unacceptable working and living conditions. As an instrumental measure to prevent the exploitation of workers, they are very ethically desireable, and even necessary. We as individuals and as a society should therefore be encouraging their work by recognising them as legally constituted organisations, recognising their collective agreements as legally enforceable contracts, and at the very least, when the unions announce that "something is rotten here", we should pay attention.

I have characterised the value of unions as instrumental and not intrinsic. So, clearly it is the goals that unions seek that are important. It might follow, then, that we need not support labour unions in preference to any other organisation that seeks the same protections for workers that unions seek. It is concievable that a decent human resources department can communicate to management the needs of the workers. Additionally, a municipal government agency like a labour board, or a court of justice, could handle the grievance cases that are handled by the union stewards. I have two answers to this objection.

First of all, the union is composed of the very people who stand to gain or lose on any employment issue. It is not unrelated third parties who represent worker interests, but the workers themselves representing their own interests. Certainly an outside agent could take the worker's case to heart and fight it dilligently, but they would not have the same sense of urgency that obtains when the workers represent themselves with unions. Moreover no worker regards herself as a mere factor in production, as an human resource department is liable to do, since technically an human resource department is made up of managers and not workers. Indeed it is that very attitude that leads to the sort of exploitation about which unions are deeply concerned. This leads me to my next answer.

The second response is that the union is able to engage employment-related problems on a much deeper level than is possible within the existing structures of social organisation. The applicability of an unfair grievance procedure to itself cannot be addressed by the same procedure. However, it is vitally necessary to do this, in situations where the existing structures themselves are the root of the problem. To engage a deep structural problem within the bounds of the structure itself at best legitimises the problematic structure, and at worst perpetuates it. If the structure of some organisation perpetuates some kind of exploitation, one cannot use the procedures and processes of that same structure to address and rectify the problem. Indeed the structure would not be equipped to recognise the problem, and questions or criticisms of the structure would go unheared.

The necessary abdication of some of the worker's freedom is a problem that seems to be an integral aspect of the structure of wage employment in capitalist nations. Economic organisation in capitalist nations is structured to maximise profit; the exploitation of workers helps maximise profits by keeping production costs down. Unions enable the workers to expose problems of this kind at the root level of social organisation, and engage it there. Unions are able to do this because they operate outside the corporate structure, therefore they are not bound by its goals and methods, and additionally they are better equipped to recognise and address problems within the corporate structure.

I can forsee another potential objection to this position. Might it be the case that, as unions exercise power over the workplace, they merely exchange one kind of management for another? With a strong collective agreement in place, and strong shop stewards handling the grievances, one might suppose that the union bosses make command decisions with the same callous disregard for the interests of the workers that miserly managers have. It would be a mistake to suppose that all union bosses are knights in shining armour, coming to rescue us from evil managers. In addition, it may be the case in some shops that workers find themselves coerced to support the union because to do otherwise would risk some kind of reprisal. Certainly there was a time when workers who didn't support the union were violently attacked by their fellows. While those days are quite thankfully gone, there are other kinds of reprisal, such as harassment and ostracism.

My reply is to point out that the kind of power that unions have is not at all similar in character to the kind of power that the employer has. The primary difference is that unions are fundamentally democratic in structure and union power rests on a mandate of democracy. The bosses of unions are chosen by election, and some of the important decisions that a union leader might wish to make are still subject to referendums. One could suppose that the drinking buddies of the union executive get their views heard more often. Nonetheless when it comes to decisions affecting the vital activities of the union, every member has a chance to speak on the issue at general membership meetings, and to vote on it. If a member doesn't like the direction that her union is taking, she is empowered to stand as a candidate for election as a union leader and influence the union policy herself. The corporate structure, on the other hand, does not even pretend to be democratic. A worker who does not like some company policy cannot attempt to rectify the problem by becoming a manager. Management rights are justified on the claim that they own the place.

There is a more familiar name for this justification: "imperialism". This is the supposed inalienable right of the ruling class to rule over a subordinate class. Historically, this inalienable right has been granted by God, or by membership in a culture, gender, or race group that claims superiority over other groups. In the corporate structure, imperialism takes the form of right of property-owners to rule over their property. It has been entrenched in Western Civilisation since John Locke, who proposed it as a more rational alternative to the "divine right of kings". Locke says "He that in obedience to this command of God subdued, tilled, and sowed any part of the earth, thereby annexed to something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him."¹ It is used as a platform of moral superiority from which to condemn more life-affirming social movements such as environmentalism. It is used to justify worker insubordination: the employers claim ownership of the worker's labour on the grounds that they have purchased it with a wage. The labour movement is animated by a moral value of higher priority than the value of property, which is the value of freedom from exploitation.

At the risk of sounding absurd, may I say that I wish it were not the case that labour unions were necessary. But there are enough employers out there who treat their people poorly, who regard the workers in their employ as mere factors of production, and who disregard their human needs in order to keep costs down and profit up. If this attitude were not prevalent, perhaps unions would not be necessary. But it is an attitude that infuses our society at virtually all levels. What unions teach to all of society is that we must re-evaluate our attitudes about workers, and admit that it is not acceptable to think of workers as anything else but human beings. This is no vapid plea for liberalism or socialism: the exploitation of workers is the exploitation of people and as such it is a moral issue for everyone.

1footnote^* John Locke, Second Treatise on Government (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1956) pg. 32.