Work

This chapter has two aims. First, in light of the continued dominance of market capitalism, one aim of the chapter is to examine contemporary approaches to traditional concerns about the impact of market capitalism on the manner in which work is carried out. By the manner in which work is carried out, we have in mind the activities performed by workers and the organization of that activity as opposed to other dimensions of work, such as pay or the distribution of income. According to one prominent tradition of thought—namely, Marxism—the manner in which work is organized under market capitalism is a matter of concern. The manner of organization is the wage-labor relationship, in which an individual is hired to perform some agreed-upon set of tasks over a certain period of time under the direction and supervision of another individual in exchange for an hourly wage or salary. The second aim of this chapter is to highlight ways to respond to the criticism that contemporary philosophical scholarship has framed issues of justice largely as matters of distribution, thereby paying insufficient attention to questions about the nature and organization of economic production.