Employees cannot be compelled to work more than eight hours a day, five days a week. However, except for that and for some other basic rights (such as, employees cannot be compelled to do anything illegal or immoral), the custom in this firm is that employees work at whatever assignments they are given by the boss. If she tells them to dig ditches, they dig ditches. If she tells them to file papers, they file papers. If she insists that they work a night shift, from 10 P.M. to 6 A.M., they must do that. Or, rather, they must do these things or else be fired or quit-they always retain that right-or convince the boss to give them a different assignment.
Why do the employees agree to such a terrible scheme of employment? That's a loaded question, and we should be clear in the ways it is loaded. First, whether terrible or not, it is certainly a contractual arrangement that a priori is open-ended in precisely the sense we described in our outline of the framework: What employees will be doing a day or a month or a year hence is initially unspecified, to be determined only as necessary. Second, there is nothing terrible about the scheme if the employees can quit and find other employment without cost. If, say, the work involved is carpentry, if the employees are all skilled carpenters, and if skilled carpenters can find work easily in the local economy, then the boss is disciplined by the market; she can't ask for labor more onerous than the market-determined conditions without paying better-than-market wages, or her employees will exercise their right to quit. leia todo o artigo
