Employment, status, hierarchy: on Jordan Pascoe, Kant’s Theory of Labour

This article responds to Jordan Pascoe’s Kant’s Theory of Labour, with its twin focus on labour and intersecting forms of injustice. I open with some admiring remarks as to why her focus proves so fruitful and insightful. In the following sections, I offer a friendly amendment to Pascoe’s account, focussing on paid work in democratic states. Like Pascoe, I believe that employment relations stand in basic tension with Kantian innate equality. However, I also believe that her account underplays this tension. To make this case, I offer two reservations about the typology of paid work which Pascoe draws from Kant’s work. First, this typology does not accommodate professional work, although Kant considers this in several places. Second, it ignores the distinctive legal form of employment, which is hierarchical. This brings employment closer to Kant’s account of domestic right than to his account of contract. Assuming that employment hierarchies are essential to organising people’s social contributions, I suggest this hierarchy requires formal counterbalancing measures. From an intersectional perspective, such measures are especially important, as labour organisers everywhere have shown.