Years ago in the middle of a very tight labor market, I was in a convenience store and an employee became upset at the boss and quit on the spot. The boss was very alarmed. He went running after the kid and begged him to come back. He gave him an immediate raise and the kid got back to work. All was well again.
It was then that I fully realized the essence of the labor contract in a free society. You can quit anytime. The corollary is that you can be fired at any time. There is freedom to choose on both sides. They go together, and one guarantees the other. It is insecure for both the employee and the employer. That is true.
But what is the alternative? The option is that one party is forced. The employee is forced to work or the employer is forced to keep someone employed. That is involuntary servitude in whichever way it goes. You should not be forced to work and you should not be forced to hire or keep someone employed. The freedom and right of choice runs both ways.
The 13th Amendment is very clear: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Freedom in the labor market is thus guaranteed by law in the United States. Most states today affirm this commitment with “at will” employment policies.
In a tight labor market, employees have bargaining power. In a loose labor market, the employer has bargaining power. Which is true at any moment in time depends entirely on market conditions in the industry in question.
For this reason, strict regulations on the right to hire and fire amount to an imposition on the freedom of the employer, in the exact same way that a mandate to work is an imposition on the freedom of the employee.
Compromise one side of the bargaining and you throw away the core of human volition. You put people in cages. That is inconsistent with the very idea of freedom.
What about unions? These are organizations set up by workers to collectively bargain. They can work but certain conditions have to be in place. There can be no easy replacements. The skill level has to be quite high. They can operate a bit like medieval guilds but only in certain areas of industry. They cannot work without coercion in most fields.
In order to make unions viable across many industries, the United States had to install a series of government interventions, starting in the 1930s, as a way of cartelizing the workforce and keeping away replacement workers. This led to unemployment and created new conditions for other interventions. In general, the only place where they are truly viable is in the public sector where the market for labor has long been restricted.
Let’s talk about the job guarantees granted to federal employees. It’s been true for many decades that these employees presumed a level of job security enjoyed by no one else in the private sector. You would have to cross the line with aggressively malevolent behavior in order to get fired. Even then, the public sector unions would come to your defense.
Under these conditions, it is simply not possible to have vibrant, functioning institutions. You know this from your own job experience. If there is even one employee with institutional knowledge, a network, a sack of grievances, and an expectation that nothing can get him fired, he can ruin an entire institution. Just one! Imagine if you have tens of thousands of such people.
It is simply not possible to manage healthy, functioning, non-malicious institutions so long as the staff can presume lifetime employment with no interruption. This is why job satisfaction in employment tends toward the lowest end in public-sector work. In general, these people are not happy because their institutions are not mission-driven and flourishing.
You might cite the existence of tenure at universities as an exceptional case. But remember that tenure is highly coveted and requires tremendous work to earn. Young academics find themselves bouncing from institution to institution for years before getting a tenure-track job. If they fail, there is a presumption that their careers are over. Even then, not every institution favors tenure because it is well known that the evidence is mixed at best on the effect. Many small colleges have found it to be more institutionally advantageous to have annual contracts rather than lifetime guarantees.
A brilliant move by the Trump administration was to figure out a way to cull the bloated federal labor force without mass firings as a first resort. They offered buyouts with 8 months of severance, free for anyone in the federal workforce to accept. We are still waiting on the numbers but probably between 5 and 10 percent of workers will accept them. This is a good start.
So far, 60,000 employees have accepted this offer. It is on temporary hold, however, due to an injunction issued by a federal judge. It will likely end up at the Supreme Court.
Regardless of the final results of the litigation, more needs to be done. We need a federal workforce that operates much more like the private sector, where employees can quit and employers can fire. The employer in the case of the executive branch is very clear: it is the president of the United States. He is the final authority of the executive branch and its 450-plus agencies. That reality needs to be institutionalized.
For many generations, and really since 1883, there has been a presumption that we could have a more professional, less political, public sector when it is populated by people who cannot lose their jobs and instead keep them from one president to another. This system has resulted in bloat, laziness, profligate spending, and a loss of focus and direction.
Above all else, a permanent civil service is inconsistent with democratic ideals. We vote in order to have a peaceful transition of power from one head of state to another. If nothing changes about the workforce except perhaps cosmetic heads of departments, we do not have real democracy. The president should of course be allowed to fire and hire in and out of the workforce populating the executive agencies.
This constitutional system in the 19th century was smeared as the “spoils system” because people spotted corruption. The president would hire his friends and family and kick out political enemies. That still happens today and the creation of the unconstitutional civil service did nothing to change that. It only ended up creating an administrative overlay that disabled the core powers of the democratic mandate for change.
Does that mean we should bring back the “spoils system?” In a word, yes. It’s not perfect but it is surely better than the system we ended up creating in its absence. I see no reason why the labor contract in government should be any different from that of the private sector. The bracing winds of the competitive market are great for everyone.
