Are Employers Morally Blameworthy for Offering Bad Jobs?

Many people would find Bess the boss morally blameworthy if she offered Emily a job with low pay and poor working conditions even if Emily decided to accept the offer. But consider that Emily accepted Bess’s bad job offer precisely because no other employer made her a better one. After all, if another employer had made her an offer that was better than Bess’s, then presumably Emily would have accepted that one. So shouldn’t we be less critical of Bess than we are of every employer who offered Emily an even worse job or offered nothing at all? To put the point another way, we might think that Bess is the worst employer—except for all the others. She made the best offer, so it seems like she should receive the least blame. When, then, does Bess receive the most blame?

Here’s my hunch—we’re in the grip of what’s sometimes called the identifiable perpetrator effect: “People are more punitive toward identified wrongdoers than toward equivalent, but unidentified, wrongdoers, even when identifying the wrongdoer conveys no meaningful information about him or her.” We can easily identify Bess as a perpetrator of an apparent wrong—say, offering her employees less than what we think they deserve—but we can’t do the same for those employers who made even worse offers or no offers at all. Bess, in turn, more readily elicits a punitive reaction than the unidentifiable perpetrators—“identification amplifies feelings and behavior because it makes a situation more concrete and thus reduces the social distance between judges and targets.” Knowing that we’re susceptible to this bias should make us skeptical of our intuitive condemnation of Bess.

Of course, you might grant that other employers are doing something even worse than Bess but argue that Bess still acts wrongly by offering Emily a bad job—say, one that’s insufficient to enable her to meet her basic needs. However, as I’ve argued previously, I’m not convinced that it’s morally wrong to make an offer of a low-paying job:

Consider that employers are buyers of labor. So to determine whether employers in particular ought to be required to meet their employees’ basic needs, we have to ask the following question: does buying from someone obligate you to pay a price that’s high enough to ensure the seller can meet their basic needs?

I’m skeptical. To see why, suppose you plan to buy a car from a dealer who is losing so much business that they’ve fallen below a decent standard of living. Do you have an enforceable duty to pay that dealer an extra, say, $2,000 for the car rather than give that $2,000 to someone who needs it as much or more? I don’t think so. The mere fact that you’re buying a car from them doesn’t generate an enforceable duty to help.

What does generate such a duty is the general duty to help those in need when you can do so at a reasonable cost to yourself. But this duty would permit you to help someone other than the car dealer, provided their need was the same or greater.

Now suppose an employer buys someone’s labor, but the employee remains below an acceptable standard of living. If you denied that you have an enforceable duty to pay the car dealer more simply in virtue of buying a car from them, you should deny that the employer has an enforceable duty to pay the employee more simply in virtue of buying her labor. The mere fact that you’re buying something from someone doesn’t generate an enforceable duty to help that person. As noted, what does generate such a duty is the general duty to help those in need.

In short, employers generally do have a duty to help those in poverty, but that help needn’t take the form of offering them higher-paying jobs. For instance, the help can take the form of donations to effective charities. Moreover, it’s not a duty that employers have because they’re employers. Rather, everyone with sufficient resources has this duty and many employers have sufficient resources to help those in poverty.