Justice in Labour Market Design

Present day labour markets display a particular structure. First, there is a great range in the size of the rewards they offer: whereas some individuals have jobs that are (amongst other things) interesting, widely respected, and lucrative, other individuals must take on work that is toilsome, stigmatized, and very poorly paid. Second, the distribution of these jobs is highly unequal, such that there are many fewer attractive jobs than there are unattractive ones. The upshot of this is that, within the lottery of the labour market, there are a large number of losers who lose big. My two goals in this paper are: first, to evaluate the justness of this structural feature of existing labour markets; and, second, then to clarify the just response to these facts. Though my conclusion is an unsurprising one – present labour markets are structurally unjust and we have reasons to set up institutions and introduce policies that change this – I show that the justifications for these verdicts are much more complex than is typically recognized.