Are Low-Wage Laborers Free?

                Robert Nozick argues that only in a free market society (or at least never in a society such as those favored by John Rawls and Karl Marx) is individual freedom respected.  Any extensive state, he argues, will necessarily violate people’s rights.  He further argues that, through the principle of justice in transfer, holdings freely acquired from others who acquired them in a just way are justly acquired.  What is fuzzy to me about this is that I’m not entirely sure what constitutes freely acquiring something.  When one signs a contract, for example, one must be of sound mind and body, and one is presumed to be acting in good faith.  With Nozick, I’m uncertain as to whether an agreed upon transfer is defensible, for example, if an individual is not capable of understanding the consequences of the decision, or if the individual feels coerced. 

      

          In the symposium today, the Nozicks seemed to suggest that, even if a laborer’s only options are work for extremely low wages (one can even entertain, with Nozick, a scenario in which there is no minimum wage, so the worker will receive much less than subsistence) or to not work at all, the worker’s acceptance of the low-wage job is still a just transfer.  When the employer (or the industry, or the society) places an individual in a situation in which one option is complete destitution and the other is destitution + $2/hour, or much less, and the wage is so low only because the employer knows that the employee will accept it as better than his/her only other option, is the employee capable of making a free, rational, sound-of-mind-and-body decision?  Is the employer acting at all in good faith?  Similarly, is this following one of the major tenets of Nozick’s theory of justice – that free markets are the only kinds that respect individual freedom?  One can easily argue that these employees are coerced into low-wage jobs and that their freedom is in fact limited by the market.

       

         Are these laborers truly free?  When one is placed in a circumstance where they would be better off leaving civil society to return to a state of nature, we  have to consider that our system is unjust.  Nozick is a social contract theorist, so I wonder if he would believe that life in society, in order to justify the intervention of government necessary to establish and maintain the society, must be better than life in the state of nature in order to be justified.  If so, I think his own theory proves problematic. 

          

      Have I completely misunderstood Nozick?  Are the terms too vague to apply to specific scenarios?  What are your thoughts? 



Work Cited:  

Nozick, Robert. Distributive Justice. Justice. Ed. Jonathan Westphal. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1996. 7-21. Print.