Balancing Safety, Health, and Pay

Safety and Health vs. Pay

• How risky work should be involves balancing risk and pay, as well as other compensation forms.
• LMPD (Let Market Participants Decide) is a rights and responsibilities approach.
• LMPD promotes personal welfare and respects autonomy/liberty.
• The implausibility of LMPD in its current unqualified form is under question.

Choice and Its Limits: Against LMPD

• Workers cannot make fully autonomous choices if they do not understand the risks or have decent options.
• Workers still may make imprudent choices that are bad for them even when fully informed and have decent options.
• Paternalism is sometimes justified, for example, seatbelt laws..
• Government regulations may be necessary to establish minimum health and safety standards.
• Cost–benefit analysis to determine how much regulations are necessary may be tricky in practice.

Meaningful Work

• Meaningful work requires thought, skill, and creativity.
• Meaningless work is monotonous and routine and does not require thought, skill, or creativity, despite potentially being important/valuable for the business' operations.
• Meaningless work is derived the organization of labor processes into meaningless tasks, making them more efficient and providing businesses an incentive to produce goods efficiently.

What is Wrong with Meaningless Work

• Meaningless work can harm workers via dulling their cognitive capacities and extinguishing their ambition and direction in life.
• Meaningless work can be degrading as workers cannot act as autonomous agents.
• LMPD suggests that trading meaningfulness for more money may be a cost worth paying.
• It is debatable if meaningfulness is an amenity that can be traded for more compensation.

Some Data

• In 2016 the amount of time office workers spend on their primary job duties decreased from from 46% to 39%.

Control and Participation

• There are two kinds of control: means and ends.
• Whether workers should have some control over the tasks they perform is up for debate.
• A simple answer to if workers should have some control: workers should do what they are instructed because ownership (property rights) + consent (contract) give the boss control over the tasks assigned.
• Ownership alone does not give a boss complete control as safety regulations exist.

Should Workers Have A Say in Managerial Decision Making?

• The case for workers having a a say includes freedom and welfare of said workers, as well as "workplace democracy."
• The case against worker having a say includes the freedom and welfare of the owner and its shareholders.

Discussion/Debate: Which Side Has The Stronger Argument

• Giving workers overall control would make work meaningful, fostering pride and concern which in turn would increase their passion/productivity.
• "Katherine" states that workers deserve a say because they do labor therefore they can help into day to day operation that a CEO may not have.
• The employees should not be necessary for the decision-making process because the business is ultimately owned by one person or group.
• "Luiz" states that employees should get opinions but the decision should be down to the owner, so they can act be liable.
• "Luiz" suggests that workers can also have control by forming unions and voicing their opinions, with the ability to listen and carry out the orders instructed by the owner/managers