Layoffs, Job Hunts, and the State of Nature: Sic Semper Tyrannis (Thus Always to Tyrants)
The recent wave of coronavirus layoffs, my own included, has me thinking about the relationship between employer and employee. What are the responsibilities of each party with respect to the other? In my mind, the relationship between employer and employee is roughly analogous to the relationship between citizens and their government in political philosophy.
The political philosopher that comes to mind is Thomas Hobbes. According to Hobbes, governments are a type of social contract in which citizens voluntarily give up certain rights and freedoms to the sovereign—the ruler or the state in general—for the sake of their own protection and to escape the State of Nature, which for Hobbes is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XIII: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind). Morality, for Hobbes, only exists within civilized society—that is, within the social contract. Outside the social contract, in the State of Nature, it is a war of everyone against everyone, where rules of war, rules of morality, and rules of civilized society simply don’t apply.
When a sovereign—a ruler or the state—violates the terms of the social contract, when the government fails to liv up to its responsibility to protect its citizens, according to Hobbes, the social contract is canceled and all parties are thrown right back into the State of Nature, a war of all against all, a no-holds-barred situation where the rules of morality don’t apply and you are justified in doing whatever is necessary to ensure your own survival.
So what does this mean for the employer/employee relationship in terms of social contracts and the recent coronavirus layoffs? If we think of the relationship between employer and employee as a type of social contract analogous to the social contract between citizens and the government, in the style of Thomas Hobbes, we have a rich language for describing the breakdown of our social safety nets in our late-capitalist society. Employers used to take it upon themselves to provide for the security and financial stability of their employees in the form of job security, pensions, profit-sharing, and so on. These could be seen as employers living up to their end of the social contract bargain with their employees. Employees voluntarily sacrifice some of their freedom in the form of their time and labor, and employers sacrifice some of their profits for the sake of their employee’s stability and security. This reciprocal agreement is at the heart of a healthy social contract between employer and employee.
In the case of the governmental social contract, according to Hobbes, when the social contract has been broken by the sovereign—or by the sovereign’s subjects, for that matter—the gloves come off and the rules of civilized society no longer apply. If the sovereign violates the terms of the social contract, the sovereign’s subjects are entitled to revolt against, even kill the sovereign to establish a new social contract with a different sovereign power that can actually live up to the terms of the social contract between government and citizen. Similarly, if citizens do not do their part in living up to the social contract, following the rules of society that the sovereign has imposed for the safety and wellbeing of the overall population and for the state in general, then the sovereign is likewise placed back in the state of nature with authority to use the full power of the state to return society to a state of order.
So what is the analogy to the corporate world? Clearly if an employee fails to live up to the terms of the social contract, failing to provide the time or effort that employer has required, the employer is justified in terminating the social contract between employer and employee, thus terminating the employee’s employment with the company. If, however, the employer (commonly a corporation) fails to live up to the terms of the social contract, by failing to provide for the employee’s security and wellbeing, and if we grant that doing so throws both the employer and the employees back into the State of Nature, into a war of everyone against everyone, what recourse does the employee have to wage proverbial war with a former employer that has violated the terms of the social contract by sacrificing employee stability for the sake of increased profits, or for the stability of the corporation over the security of its employees?
When employers terminate their employees’ employment, employers commonly have those terminated employees sign termination agreements in which the terminated employees are granted severance pay (if they are lucky) in exchange for agreeing not to take legal action against the employer. Although these employee termination agreements are legally binding, I argue that these termination agreements themselves are morally invalid, however legally binding they might be, because the termination of an employee’s employment is tantamount to a violation of the social contract between employer and employee in the first place, thus throwing the employee back into the State of Nature with full entitlement to take whatever action is necessary for the employee’s literal and metaphorical survival.
In other words, there are no rules, no codes of conduct, no moral principles that an employee is morally bound to follow once the social contract has been violated, just as the citizen is entitled to overthrow a sovereign power that has broken the social contract with its subjects, because the rules of morality no longer apply. Both the tyrannized citizen and the terminated employee are right back in the State of Nature—a brutal place that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—with full entitlement to take whatever actions are necessary to overthrow the sovereign and escape the brutality of the life outside the social contract. This says to me that, even if employees feign the appearance of complicity with their former employers by signing layoff termination agreements, in reality the employee is fully entitled to take whatever guileful actions are necessary against the former employer to escape the State of Nature and return to civilized society—which in this corporate domain generally means a state of stability and employment.
I think of the recently terminated employee as being similar to the military commander described in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, presenting the outward signs of friendship but plotting in secret for his or her own tactical advantage against the enemy. Although I envision a much healthier relationship between employer and employee that provides both for the company’s success and for the employees’ long-term stability, sadly most employers and corporations don’t see their role in terms of a social contract with employees. Thus it is my view that terminated employees should feel much more empowered to use whatever tactics are necessary to fight for their own survival, since employers who terminate their employees are essentially tossing their former employees to the wolves anyway.
The key to understanding Hobbes is the notion that morality exists only in civilized societies within the bounds of the social contract. Before the emergence of civilized societies in the first place (i.e., in the literal State of Nature) or when the social contract between sovereign and subject is broken, thus throwing all parties back into the State of Nature—into a war of everyone against everyone—the rules of morality and the rules of civilized society no longer apply. Don’t misinterpret Hobbes here. The State of Nature is still no place to be; it is a place of utter fear and despair in which one doesn’t expect to live very long, a life of suffering and brutality—hence the need to form social contracts and civilized societies in the first place. But when a sovereign (or an employer) violates the social contract and puts the lives of its subjects (or its employees) in undue danger, the gloves are once again off and it’s a war for survival with no rules or codes of conduct, because the social contract has already been broken by those who should be sacrificing to protect their subordinates.
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