Employers as moral watchdogs

Craig Charles has - hopefully temporarily - lost two jobs because of allegations by an organization with a proven record of mendacity.
I'm not happy about this. Leave aside the sheer hypocrisy: if the BBC and ITV were to sack every drug-user, we'd see the biggest-ever rise in unemployment. Leave aside too the fact that an organization headed by a man with a record of unprovoked violence has no business judging others' behaviour.
No. What worries me is that this is part of a trend for employers to increasingly pass moral judgments upon workers.
This is, of course, most marked in the rise of paternity leave - a signal that bosses think it morally acceptable for an employee to skive in order to spend time with their kids, but not with their cat, ukelele or computer games.
The economics of this has been brilliantly described in this classic paper (pdf) by Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis and Melissa Osborne.
Start from a fact about work organization. Increasingly, employers cannot directly supervise workers. This is because (say) their work is complex and bosses lack the skills to judge it. Bosses must, therefore, trust their workers.
But how do they decide whom to trust? They must judge their moral character. So they look for people with a "good attitude".
And they are happy to let workers have paternity leave, because a man with kids has financial commitments that make him terrified of losing his job, and so more likely to work hard. A man with a ukelele is less reliable.
There are several dangers here.
1. Attitudes that are good for employers aren't necessarily good for society. For senior management or sales jobs, employers want men (naturally, men) with aggressive, Machiavellian traits.
2. "Good attitude", even more than cognitive skills, is inherited. As Bowles, Gintis and Osborne say:

Success in the labour market is transmitted from parents to children, and the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education, the inheritance of wealth, or the genetic inheritance of cognitive ability.

Barriers to social mobility are therefore increased. Is it really a coincidence that social mobility has fallen as the search for "trustworthy" employees has increased?
3. Employers' demand for the right attitude can often go beyond a search for good employees, and become free-standing moral judgments. This seems to have happened to Mr Charles: his employers don't seem to be questioning the quality of his work, but are just passing judgment on his private life.
Bosses, it seems, are no longer content to deprive us of our liberty merely whilst we're in the factory, studio or office. 

Comments

[dearieme]

"A man with a ukelele is less reliable."
Well said.
I fear also that you are right to observe the merging of managerialism with mad-mullah-ism. Time for a war on them both?

[OneEyedMan]

This isn't anything new. It used to be impossible to be hired in many jobs without letters of reference attesting to your moral and working qualities.

[CB]

You obviously don't know many crackheads, it's a *lot* more destructive to the user than any other drug, including heroin. I don't think someone who's developed a crack habit can be considered the same as someone who has a ukulele, or children.

[dearieme]

But, CB, they didn't sack him for having rendered himself unemployably incompetent, did they? I had a boss once who told me that the biggest problem he'd ever had was when he employed a transvestite. But what, I enquired, was the problem? The plonker couldn't say. Ooh, he was a bear of little brain. Very keen on "management" though.

[Matt]

Well, you could argue that there are simple externalities for government/society to encourage paternity leave... in which case I don't think you can use it to make this argument. However, I do like the argument yhou make about the reliability of fathers.

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