The political psychologist George Lakoff has long said that the right wing trumps the left when it comes to framing issues. One of the right’s best coups is titling an anti-union movement “right to work.” Essentially, what they are advocating is to give employers the power to hire employees who do not join a union. When it comes to one or two people, it sounds innocent enough. However, the net effect of permitting employees to work as free agents, rather than as part of a consolidated work force, is that workers can then bid against one another to determine who is willing to work for the least. Unenlightened employers love this situation, because the ultimate effect for them is to reduce the cost of labor. The politicians who represent businesses (primarily Republicans) have branded this idea with the partial misnomer of “right to work.” What could sound more American?
Frustrated by the Republicans’ framing of the issue, labor supporters, including most Democrats, have given a more realistic spin to the phenomena. Many on the left call it “the right to work for less.” This response is clever, and it clearly describes the situations in which many blue-collar workers find themselves when trying to find a job that will pay them a livable wage.
Is there a situation that might be a middle-ground between the “right to work” and the “right to work for less?” I think that there is, and this situation, while not occurring generally, raises interesting questions.
Suppose that your name is Albert Pujols, and you are currently a slugging designated hitter for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (does any team have a more cumbersome name?). A little more than two years ago, you signed a ten-year contract with the team. It totals $255 million; averaging over $25 million each year of the contract. You rejected a contact for less from your former team, the St. Louis Cardinals, and now you’re having regrets about the whole deal. You know that $25 million a year is far more than you need to live. And the last two years have not worked out for you. You’re not nearly as comfortable on the West Coast as you were in the Midwest, and your hitting statistics bear that out. Truth be told, you want to tell the Angels that they can keep the approximately $200 million that they still owe you. What you really want to do is to ask the Cardinals if they will sign you to a reasonable deal; something like $15 million for three years with performance incentives that could boost your annual pay up to $20 million.
The way the rules of baseball are structured, Albert Pujols couldn’t do this. There are three reasons. First, there is no precedent for a team and a player mutually agreeing to void a contract. Second, if Pujols decided to tell the Angels that he’s retiring (which would free the Angels of their financial obligations to him) he could not play for the Cardinals without sitting out a year. Third, the Players Association would strongly object to him “walking away from the contract.” They fear that a precedent could be set and it would work to the owners’ advantage. When teams think they have paid far too much for a player, they would put all kinds of pressure on that player to retire or somehow breach the contract. This would not be an idle threat; almost every team is saddled with one or two contracts that they would love to void and if that became possible the sanctity of all contracts would then be at risk. It would be a very legitimate area of concern for the Players Association (which is essentially the bargaining union for the players).
However, if an occasional exception could be made, such as in the Pujols case, it would represent a hybrid between the right wing’s “right to work” and the left’s “right to work for less.” What it would represent would be “the right to be free to work for less.” It’s not unprecedented; when Lee Iacocca became CEO of Chrysler Motors, he worked for a dollar a year. That didn’t do any harm to the wages and salaries of other Chrysler employees; in fact it probably helped them. Iacocca brought the company out of bankruptcy and back to profitability. He didn’t need the money from a salary, so it was a “win-win.”
I’m just wondering if we couldn’t address this whole issue under the umbrella of “the right to work for less.” Framed that way, workers would know the real meaning of what the right wing calls “right to work.” That would go a long way in preventing workers from being the victims of the forces that historically been on their backs; pressure to work for less. While protecting those in greatest need of financial remuneration, it would allow others to walk away from various forms of the “golden parachute” and give them more personal freedom.