The Moral Dilemmas of Guestworker Programs by Lea Ypi. By and large, I found her argument very convincing, particularly her argument showing class exploitation. In this commentary, I want to explore the idea of long-term positive effects and investigate a comment she says in passing: “[economic] growth and exploitation are perfectly compatible with each other.” (p. 170) I want to suggest that significant economic growth can outweigh even the “collective” exploitation she describes.

Let us begin by granting her general argument and assume guest worker programs are exploitative in all the manners she explained. I imagine Ypi would be quite satisfied at this point; indeed, my comments go beyond the scope of her aims and do not explicitly engage her arguments. I want to highlight a practical concern: would the guest worker care if they were being exploited? I think, as an empirical fact, generally no. When deliberating whether to take part in guest work programs, people have the capacities to weigh the costs, like giving up certain rights, with the benefits. Taking such an opportunity away from the worker because it is exploitive is to disrespect the worker as a rational, autonomous agent.

Now, a worry here might be that this misses the point of what it is to be exploited. Ypi gives two conditions for exploitation: “an offer that he could not refuse, on pain of being left with not enough resources to lead a minimally decent life,” and “the transaction is less beneficial or most costly than it would be if the agent started to bargain from a point of sufficiency.” (p. 162) The thought is that exploitation takes away the choice (“an offer that he could not refuse”) and does so on the basis of the worker’s disadvantaged economic position. The lack of a choice (or reasonable alternatives) may undercut the claim that taking away such opportunity disrespects their autonomy since they do not have any choices anyway.

I think this is a sort of victimization of workers; namely, it imagines workers as subjects of exploitation who need to be rescued. Again, this conception, I think, disrespects the worker as a rational, autonomous agent. Let me illustrate my point with a hackneyed (Frankfurt-style) example from free will arguments. Imagine you want to exit a room and had two doors to choose from, A and B, and, unbeknownst to you, A is unlocked and B is locked. You freely choose A, and you are happily out of the room. In reality, you did not have much of a choice, since only A could have led you out of the room, but we might say you still exercised your free will. Similarly, the worker could have no other choice in exploitative scenarios, yet still exercise their capacities as rational, autonomous agents. This analogy is not perfect, but I think it still fits.

 This is all very fast, and much more objections to this view must be dealt with. The obvious reply is saying we can have both long-term economic growth as well as non-exploitative practices. I think this is a case of having your cake and eating it too; in short, restructuring practices will ultimately lead to a loss of opportunity for some, meaning a loss entirely of long-term economic growth. More must be said, but here I merely wish to raise some interesting commentary.