Must a good job be freely chosen?
How is contributism related to what makes a good job? And how can we assert the right to give through our work?
There are some widely agreed-upon standards on what makes a good job: fair pay, good coworkers, flexibility to life circumstances, lack of risk of bodily harm/death, and benefits like sick leave or healthcare. But most people don’t have the freedom to choose a job that is “good” by every standard; and it’s also possible to use the freedom to choose a job to choose one detrimental to oneself and others.
Like other rights, the right to give is something all humans have, but we may be limited in circumstance by our ability to exercise these rights. Freedom is one of the four measures of giving noted in the introduction, and arguably the most important starting place when considering how contributism and work may affect each other.
What contributism – assertion of one’s right to give – looks like in job choice depends on how much freedom you have to choose your job. A good job is one that you can both choose, and that contributes to you being able to exercise your right to give. This piece will look at three states that people might find themselves in: no choice of job, some choice of job, and too (?) many choices of job; and how in each case, people may or may not be able to assert their right to give.
No choice of job
For most of history, and still in much of the world, people have had almost no freedom to choose their jobs.
Malawi is a low-income country in which about 80% of people are employed in agriculture. If you are born into a farming family in Malawi, you will probably also grow up to work on a farm, and you do not have much choice in the matter.
The economist Amartya Sen, in his work Development as Freedom, argues that freedom is both the object and the means of attaining development: without things like political freedoms and freedom from poverty, a country cannot be considered “developed”; in turn, development (e.g. political freedom, freedom from poverty), allows people to have even more expansive freedoms. The freedom to assert one’s right to give tracks with this along many, but not all, measures.
Someone with little freedom can still assert the right to give through one of the other of the four measures of giving from the introduction. The four measures work individually, so a loss of freedom can be compensated for by an increase in activeness, valuedness, or effectiveness.
For the farmer, this means that even without freedom to choose a job, you can still assert your right to give in your work by making it more active, valued, or effective – providing for your family, being a good neighbor, and treating others kindly. There might be some freedom to choose which crops to plant in a given season, or which type of seeds or fertilizers to buy, or which clothes to get for your children, but other freedoms are as yet unavailable. You don’t have the freedom to provide as many things for your family as you would like; you don’t have the freedom to get higher education to open up more job options; you don’t have the freedom to move out of farming into another job.
Though you can exercise the right to give no matter what your work, a bad job limits your ability to do so as much as you would like.
Some choice of job
You, reader, are probably not a farmer in Malawi. You likely have at least a few different options of jobs you could take. This freedom to choose a job in itself is a core measure of a good job, as freedom is an important aspect of giving. It’s a distinct good to do work that you want to do, instead of what you're obligated to do to survive.
If you are in a place where you have some options about what job to take, the following question, from a contributist perspective, is that of which job might best allow you to assert your right to give.
What this might look like differs depending on life circumstance. If you need to have time to support a family, the most important part of a job might be money to best support your loved ones, or flexibility to align with your family’s needs. If you’re younger or your children are grown, you might be thinking about applying for degrees or certificates to further your future options, or considering the broader societal impact of a job, even if it takes more time or pays less than other options you might have.
In other words, there are a few ways that you can “spend” your freedom: on supporting your family, on furthering your freedom to choose future jobs, or on helping others.
On the other hand, a bad job from a contributist perspective is the same as, well, a bad job from most other perspectives: one that either makes your quality of life worse (e.g. risks to your health, safety, mental well-being) — not contributing to your life – and/or one that takes away from rather than gives to humanity – not contributing to other lives.
We live in a largely capitalist society, so your only options may be jobs that are mediocre or bad by a number of measures. This is why freedom of choice alone is not sufficient, but a broadly contributist society is necessary – and this would require buy-in from society at large, including from people with power and wealth.
(Too?) many choices of job
Another great philosopher, Spiderman, says “with great power comes great responsibility.” The contributist framing might be: “with great power comes more freedom to assert the right to give.” But in practice, many wealthy and powerful people do not use their freedom in this way.
Freedom may be a good thing, but it can be used to different ends. Just because someone has more freedom to exercise the right to give (even see the example of tipping – the person has some level of freedom from poverty, since they have money to buy a pre-packaged snack and tip) doesn’t mean they will; and as in the biblical story of the woman in the temple, someone doesn’t need to have much money at all to assert the right to give.
One of the failures of a capitalist society is that we are socialized to choose jobs for reasons other than our right to give. The wealthier you are – in both money and education – the more choices of job you have, and thus the more opportunities to assert the right to give. But wealthy people often fail to do this.
If you have much family wealth and many degrees, you have the freedom to take many jobs that have a contributist angle; and the financial freedom to turn down jobs that are bad for either yourself or the world. And yet, perhaps because of the pressure to provide the same lives as they had growing up to their children, even if it is more than any human truly needs, people with too much choice will often act like the rational capitalist, choosing jobs that best consolidate their own wealth, which often (somewhere down the line) exploit others.
This is both bad for the wealthy person themselves, by limiting their capacity to love, and bad for the world, by creating a less humane society. This is exemplified in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a story that has resonated for almost 200 years. One might say (in an exceptionally dry summary) that Scrooge, a miserly, miserable rational capitalist, learns from the spirits to become more contributist, which benefits both him and everyone around him:
“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!”
Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”
Not everyone has the fortune of being haunted by spirits, so there seems to be a certain point of development and riches where the additional freedom does not, in practice, translate into greater assertion of your right to give.
If you are going to be a farmer, like your mother and your grandmother before you, then although you lack the freedom to choose your job, you still have the freedom to assert your right to give in how you approach your work every day. If you do have more choice of job, you in theory have more freedom to assert your right to give, but there’s the possibility you choose the rational capitalist option, and for that worse option to affect the freedoms of others and society as a whole.
We want to build societies where everyone has some freedom to choose their job, because freedom, as both Parabola and Sen argue, is good. However, unlimited freedom isn’t always the goal, because people can choose for good or ill, and freedom of choice itself isn't the only contributist value, and won’t lead in itself to a more contributist society.