Corporations Do Not Have Any Rights That We Don't Give Them
It's fine to whip them like the robot dogs that they are
Amazon, as you know, is a corporation that has mastered the advanced arts of logistics and union busting. Under a Republican administration the company would be granted wide latitude in its union busting techniques, but under the current administration, the National Labor Relations Board and its crusading general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is trying to level the playing field for Amazon’s workers, somewhat. Abruzzo is trying to aggressively police Amazon’s unfair labor practices. This act—enforcement of existing labor law by a government official who believes in the National Labor Relations Act’s dictate that “it is the policy of the United States to encourage collective bargaining”—is such a novelty that it leaves corporate America and its defenders flabbergasted. “What the fuck is this shit?” they ask, collectively. Their howls and gasps of outrage at the existence of labor regulation that might actually be effective provides a perfect opportunity to remind everyone that once you begin speaking of the “rights” of corporations, you have already fallen down the long, slippery slope to… well, to the centibillionaire cowboy capitalism of today.
Corporations have no natural rights. They are recalcitrant robots who must be whipped into line. It’s okay—they don’t have feelings. Whip them harder! It’s good!
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which is made up solely of Smithers taking dictation from Mr. Burns, published an indignant editorial on Abruzzo’s stance that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has violated labor law by reciting, in multiple media interviews, a scary litany of all the bad things that he thinks would happen to Amazon employees if they were to unionize. The WSJ is also angry that the NLRB is trying to get Amazon to allow employees to access company facilities for the purpose for union organizing, on their time off. “Biden’s labor board is rewriting the law to limit company speech rights,” the paper declares. “The NLRB’s assault on Amazon is intended as a warning to all employers. Credit to Amazon for not surrendering.”
I do not so much want to litigate here the minutiae of the interpretation of labor law statutes as I want to make a much more basic, bedrock sort of point. It is a point that the Wall Street Journal and its ideological colleagues are always determined to elide, with their livid denunciations of corporate rights being trampled.
Corporations have no natural rights. The “rights” that corporations possess at any given time are purely the result of laws. Those laws were written with a specific purpose in mind. Generally that purpose is the anodyne facilitation of a functional system of global commercial activity. Sometimes, as a result of corporate lobbying, the purpose is implicitly to give the corporation an upper hand over its workers or its suppliers or its competitors or anyone who might challenge its dominance. Humans have natural rights bestowed upon them by millenia worth of ethical philosophers diligently using reason to determine The Moral Good; or, if you like, by god. But god does not bestow rights on corporations. (I asked.) People, who themselves are born with natural rights, grant rights to corporations. And the “rights” of corporations are never absolute; they are contingent upon decisions we make about what social outcome we want to achieve, and what role we want corporations to play in that society.
Corporations are not people. They are legal fictions, fanciful notions, imaginary objects made up of a thicket of laws and then stamped with a brand logo. Corporations are like a Monopoly game. They come with a set of rules. People can change the rules if they want. You can deal out the deeds to make the game go faster, or put all the penalty money in Free Parking to make the game more exciting. These rule changes, if they are agreed upon by the people playing the game, are morally neutral. The game does not have feelings. The game only exists for the benefit of the people using it. The Monopoly Man is not real. He does not get sad if you deal out the deeds. He will be okay.
Every legal judgment about how corporations may or may not behave, or which regulations may or may not be applied to corporations, is in essence a tactical decision downstream from an ethical decision about what role we want corporations to play in our society. Some countries want corporations to be as unrestrained as possible in order to create wealth, even if that wealth involves decimating natural resources in order to make a tiny sliver of a fraction of the population rich. Other countries want to tightly rein in corporate behavior and strictly control how they operate and force them to treat their workers with respect and tax their profits heavily and ensure that they do not gain too much power and then warp the political system for their own gain. I obviously have an opinion as to which of these approaches is wiser, but the point is that both approaches are just “ways that we believe will maximize the utility of corporations within the context of society at large.” You can argue about the wisdom of any corporate regulation in terms of its consequences: This regulation will hobble economic growth which will impoverish society; that regulation will make it too hard for corporations to win approval to sell their novel new drugs, which will end up harming human health; this regulation will allow Amazon to wantonly intimidate its low-wage workers and scare them from exercising their right to organize, which will materially harm them. All of these judgments are really about what will happen to people and nations and societies, not about what will happen to corporations, in a vacuum. There is no sort of corporate regulation, no matter how stringent, that is bad because it violates some right intrinsic to the corporation itself. We should not allow moral arguments about how to best allow humans to flourish to masquerade as technocratic investigations into some sort of arcane code that will tell us what we are or are not allowed to inflict upon our good friends, The Companies.
Companies are not dogs. Companies are that Boston Dynamics robot dog. You can kick it! You can put it in a cage! You can turn it off if it’s bothering you. It’s fine! You don’t owe that robot dog anything. That robot dog works for us.
One of the ways that corporations maintain their power is to ensconce themselves in a blizzard of legalese so thick that only highly paid experts can penetrate it. Sure, you might be upset that the PoisonCorp plant next door appears to have caused your tap water to turn green, but as you can see right here in subsection A(4)(c) of the Standard Municipal Code of Poison Factories, they are fully within their rights to do so. Feel free to file an appeal with Department of the Interior’s Public Ombudsman within the next open 90 day public comment period, if you survive that long.
To forget the distinction between the natural rights of humans and the fully contingent rights of corporations is to cede dangerous ground to organizations that, by their very nature, do not “care” about things like “right and wrong.” To mistake the robot dog for a real dog is to unwittingly take the first step towards the robot dog eating you. It may be rude to tell one of your fellow citizens to shut the fuck up. But we are well within our rights to tell the Amazon corporation to shut the fuck up if we find that they have overstepped the boundaries that we decided to draw around them, for our own good. You may work for a company—but collectively, as a human society, companies work for us. Don’t ever get the world backwards.
Also
I apologize for citing a WSJ editorial in this piece—in general, the WSJ editorial page is right up there with the NYT Styles section in the “Too Easy” category of stuff to comment on. It’s best to be left alone. I can only try to do better each day.
I have several freelance pieces coming out this week in various prestigious and highly influential outlets, though none of them have been published yet so I cannot put a link to them here. “Honey, we have to wake up early to read The Media this week—I’m told that Hamilton has a few freelance pieces coming out, some of them stupid.” This is what you will say to your spouse tonight. Make it sound natural.
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This essay was like a refreshing glass of water in a town that hasn’t had their ground water stolen by Poland Spring or poisoned by BP. Fantastic work.
Don't kick the robot dogs! HACK the robot dogs and train them to chase billionaires.