Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Zwolinski on Adjuncts vs. Actual Sweatshop Workers

Matt Zwolinski is interviewed at Libertarianism.org's Free Thoughts broadcast, on a retrospective about what the Bleeding Heart Libertarianism blog was about and why it ended. The end of BHL has led to some characteristically weird, semi-conspiratorial, semi-accusatory theorizing by Henry Farrell over at the Crooked Theorist blog.

Matt's said one thing in the interview I find puzzling:


[Jason's] generally a fairly moderated, restrained folk, but his view on adjuncts for instance, and what we should think of movements to increase the pay of adjunct lecturers or improve their working conditions, I have some disagreements with him about that. But that I think is sort of an applied derivative issue, not really fundamental to what it is to be a bleeding‐​heart libertarian.


Now, he doesn't say more about what his disagreements are about the adjunct issue, so I can't exactly respond to whatever his unknown criticisms are. I'll email him and ask.

What exactly did I say about adjuncts? Well, for one, Phil Magness and I calculated what it would take to give them what they want (according to a bunch of different proposals out there), and it turns out that it would cost somewhere between $15-60 billion a year (a 15-60% increase in overall faculty pay) and would also require that we fire most adjuncts to help the more privileged, better credentialed few. Given that, empirically speaking, adjuncts tend to have poor credentials compared to tenure-line and full-time faculty (e.g., the overwhelming majority lack a PhD), many of the proposals (e.g., turn adjunct gigs into full-time gigs) would lead to job gentrification. Current adjuncts would not get long-term jobs, but rather be replaced by better qualified people. Further, if we free up $50 billion a year to spend on adjuncts, social justice demands we instead spend that money on, say, scholarships for poor students. After all, adjuncts are not like, say, sweatshop workers in poor countries. Adjuncts have excellent, high-paying exit options, while sweatshop workers don't. Adjuncts put themselves in a bad position, while sweatshop workers were born into it.

I'm not sure what, if any of that, Matt disagrees with. But what's especially puzzling is that Matt makes arguments just like these about...wait for it...actual sweatshop workers. Matt's most famous academic work is all about why the anti-sweatshop movements actually hurt sweatshop workers. He argues that the fact that sweatshop worker takes a sweatshop job is very strong presumptive evidence that it's her best option. He argues that simply avoiding sweatshop-made garments or products will greatly harm these workers. He argues that attempts to raise their wages above prevailing market conditions will largely lead to job gentrification, for companies to switch to richer workers in richer countries, or for companies to substitute capital for labor and thus fire most of the workers. All this when the workers in question are literally poor people taking sweatshop jobs because they live in countries with bad institutions, not because they chose to get a PhD from 126th ranked English program that never places anyone.

Odd.