ALL CHIEFS, ALL WORKERS

Authority is something with which we all have to deal: authority at home, at school, at work, and in the political/government world. Authority is a status or quality a person or group of people has to hold legitimate power. A parent has authority over sons and daughters, teachers have it over students, bosses have it over workers, and government officials have it over residents within a jurisdiction. There are laws, customs, and norms that determine who holds legitimate authority. These elements also define acceptable ways by which authority is administered. Basically, authority is justified by the need for leadership in the functioning of collective action. For example, how a family functions – where it will live, where the parents will work, how children will be nurtured and educated, and the like – needs someone to be empowered to make the necessary decisions that will determine the answers to these concerns. So if there is a parallel institutional element in two or more aspects of life – family, school, work, government – then the attitudes we develop as we relate to one element will affect our attitudes in relation to the other ones. A civics teacher who is concerned with the attitudes his or her students are developing in relation to government should be aware of these crossovers. If the teacher wants to develop positive dispositions toward democratic governance and a genuine interest in having those students become active, participating citizens, then reference to these other domains would probably be helpful if not necessary.

In light of this, the work of a group of cognitive psychologists is relevant. They look at subconscious or unconscious biases that people hold that affect how they judge their world or choose to act in related situations. How one looks at authority in the home will likely affect how one sees it at school, at work, or in the political world. A cognitive psychologist who looks into this is George Lakoff.¹

First, Lakoff points out that most people's views about these concerns are based on metaphors that simplify the complexity of each of these domains. What I want to focus on here is how Americans metaphorically view work according to Lakoff. He writes that there are two prominent views among Americans: work reward and work exchange. Chances are that at times a person might view work one way and the other way at other times – given the context of a situation or conversation – but overall, a person will have one of these ways be dominant and when the views conflict will support that one over the other. The view one favors seems as obvious and natural, and therefore the holder of the view will tend to project that particular view onto others. As a default bias, people decide how much they will act in accordance with the favored view and this decision takes on a moral tone. Compliance is considered moral; non-compliance is considered immoral or at least suspect in terms of being the right thing to do.

Here is how Lakoff summarizes the work reward view:

• The employer is a legitimate authority.
• The employee is subject to that authority.
• Work is obedience to the employer's commands.
• Pay is the reward the employee receives for obedience to the employer.²

If seen as principles, the above has implications in terms of the relationship between those in authority and those who are subject to that authority. Lakoff provides the following in terms of these implications:

• The employer has a right to give orders to the employee, and to punish the employee for not obeying those orders.
• Obedience is the condition of employment.
• The social relationship of employer to employee is one of superior to inferior.
• The employer knows best.
• The employee is moral if he obeys the employer.
• The employer is moral if he appropriately rewards the employee for obeying his orders.³

As for the other metaphor, work exchange, these are the principles that Lakoff uses to define its view of authority:

• Work is an object of value.
• The worker is the possessor of his work.
• The employer is the possessor of his money.
• Employment is the voluntary exchange of the worker's work for the employer's money.⁴

As with the work reward metaphor, these principles have implications. Lakoff doesn't give a list of implications, but his description harps on the freely arrived at agreement between the employer and employee. He emphasizes that the agreement signals an exchange of equally valued assets: labor for money. Such a view, as opposed to the work reward view, places the parties of the agreement on a much more equal basis. Obedience is not relevant to this relationship. If one is socialized to view work in this mode, one can safely speculate that such a view is supportive of a more democratic disposition toward other institutionalized relations such as in the family, at school, and in terms of the political/governmental domain, whereas the work reward view lends itself to more vertical or hierarchical orientation.

In this blog, I have argued that a problem we are facing is the increasing disparity in the income levels between employers of large corporations and their employees – check my last posting, for example. But there has been a recent development that might promise, albeit limited, an antidote to this increasingly deleterious state of affairs. And one can easily see that if we encourage, through civics and other socializing agents, a work exchange view, we might bolster the necessary attitudes that can convert our employment expectations. In turn, that might very well lead to alternative approaches that might address labor and income problems that current practices produce. An alternative in line with the work exchange view can address the income problem we are facing. Such an alternative is a new business model that is becoming, to a degree, recognized as a viable option; that is, a business owned by the workers, a cooperative.

Most people are familiar with consumer cooperatives – buyers of a product who come together and set up a business to provide that product, as in apartment buildings in New York City or credit unions. Those have been around for quite a while. But more recently, workers of a particular industry have set up businesses such as restaurants or building supply outlets. When I say “new” that isn't exactly true. Worker co-ops have been around, but recently, they have enjoyed renewed interest. Shaila Dewan of The New York Times reports that co-ops range in size and in the number of workers involved. She points to Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx as one of the largest with a work force of 2,000 and judges that number as being the upper limit of such operations. Generally, it seems that this business model will work best with workers of lower tech skills which just so happens to be those workers who are most disadvantaged by current wage trends.

While this alternative might help some segments of the labor force, it does have its problems. What does the research have to say about worker co-ops? “Research findings about [worker co-ops] are rarely negative – they are either just as good as regular businesses, or they are more productive, less susceptible to failure, more attentive to quality and less likely to lay off workers in a downturn … .”⁵ But it's not all positive. These businesses lag in hiring new workers when business activity increases, have a general inability to hire people with high talent – that's why these businesses are not of the high tech variety – workers lack business expertise – fixable by buying such expertise – and have difficulty acquiring sufficient investment – banks are not used to dealing with co-ops. But many of these problems will prove temporary if the model becomes more prevalent. For this to happen, we need more in our work force to see the opportunities and be willing to take the plunge. They also need the disposition to be able to work and trust other workers in their industry to take such a risk. How kids are encouraged to see authority might be relevant to how many laborers of the future will be willing to join – to federate – with others and start and maintain worker co-op businesses. I, for one, would see such a development as a welcome change.

1See Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. The Lakoff analysis that is reported in this posting is derived from this book.

2Ibid., p. 54.

3Ibid.

4Ibid., p. 55.

5Dewan, S. (2014). Lose the boss. The New York Times Magazine, March 30, p. 21.