The Causal Tapestry

The time has now come to gather up the threads from the last few chapters and weave an answer to the question, “Why is workers' control so rare?” As explained in Section 6.1, the challenge is to identify a physical or institutional asymmetry between labor and capital that accounts for actual asymmetries in the control rights held by the suppliers of these inputs. I will argue that the symmetry between capital and labor is broken by the fact that capital is alienable, while labor is not.

Ownership rights over productive non-human assets, ranging from agricultural land and office space to machines and computer software, are easily transferred from one person or group to another. The same is true for financial wealth including cash, bonds, or claims on the net incomes of firms. The bundle of ownership rights in this context is the standard one: the right to decide how an asset will be used, the right to derive income from its use, and, crucially, the right to transfer the first two rights to other people. Nothing rules out the collective ownership of non-human assets provided that there is a well-defined collective choice procedure through which the owners exercise the rights just described.

The capacity of a person to supply labor services, together with that person's skills, talents, experiences, and other aspects of human capital, cannot be transferred to another person because these attributes are integral to personhood itself.