Jobs as Property

I am reading parts of Ethical Theory and Business (4th edition, 1993) by Beauchamp and Bowie. It includes a 1989 law journal article "Baseline Questions in Legal Reasoning: The Example of Property in Jobs.” (It’s probably used as a textbook. There are 9 editions now. Amazon.)

This was my first encounter with regarding a job as property. The idea is opposed to at-will employment, whereby an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is, without having to establish “just cause” for termination), and without warning (Wikipedia).

I present some key points of the article.

The authors say “the at-will rule ignores the employees’ property interests entirely.”

They argue that jobs themselves should be recognized as legally protected property interests. They assume that property rights are almost always shared, rather than unitary. In many ways common law supports this, treating non-owners as owners. Their main example is a house with a mortgage. When there is a mortgage, the lender is the legal owner, but the borrower has rights, too. For example, the lender cannot foreclose as long the borrower makes full and timely payments. When the mortgage is paid off, the borrower becomes the owner.

They present several possible levels of rights that employees might have about their jobs. A narrow definition would prohibit employers from firing employees for reasons of malice or in bad faith. A little broader definition would adopt the just cause principle. Broader yet would be that employees have a near absolute right to continued employment, and the employer could dismiss the employee only with a large enough severance package. Broader yet would be that employees have rights to manage the business. The authors do not advocate the last two, but I speculate that they would have pretty strong standards favoring the employee for what counts as a “just cause.”

A different article in the same book defends employment at will. “In dismissing or demoting employees, the employer is not denying rights to persons. Rather the employer is simply excluding that person’s labor from the organization.” Other articles discuss drug testing, whistle-blowing, and trade secrets in relation to employee dismissal.

Jobs as property? I agree that employees should not be dismissed without good reason. However, the idea of a job as property seems very questionable. Property is usually something one can buy or sell, but jobs aren’t bought and sold. (I don’t regard an employer or job seeker paying a headhunter to find somebody qualifies as “buying and selling a job.”) Labor better qualifies as property than a particular job. Labor is what a worker sells to an employer, and an employer buys from a worker, in exchange for wages or other compensation. Better than labor in my opinion are a worker’s time and skills. Why? Time and skills are less tied to a particular job than labor. Persons retain their time and skills even while not working.