A follow-up on who actually has to do the work

Yesterday, I made an appeal to the owner class. I laid out the case for why labor — as a commons resource — benefits from being managed well, and why it's in the long-term interest of those who draw from that pool to treat it with some care. I meant it. I stand by it.

But let's be honest about the odds of that landing.

So I'm going to flip this around a smidge. To us.

(I did warn you about a little light chaos did I not?)

Here's the thing that keeps ping ponging in my mind: the labor commons is unlike every other commons that has ever existed. Fisheries, forests, pastures, water systems — these are resources that cannot speak for themselves. They can't tell you they're being depleted. They can't organize a response. You have to manage them from the outside, with information they can't provide, using judgment that is always, at best, a guess.

Labor is different. Profoundly different.

We are the resource. And we are sentient. We know when we're being depleted. We can feel the conditions of our own extraction. We can articulate what we need to be sustainable. And this is the part I keep coming back to – we can organize ourselves.

No other commons can do that. Fish are just fish.

Which means we have something no other pooled resource in human history has ever had: the capacity to advocate for our own health and care. And with that capacity, I'd argue, comes something that looks a lot like a moral obligation.

We've tried this before, of course. Unions are the traditional answer, and they've done real and important work. But they also carry a lot of baggage — some earned, some not. Organized crime. Corruption. Rigidity. The caricature has done its damage, and it's made it easier for people to dismiss collective action wholesale rather than examine what went wrong and what could go right.

Here's what I think went wrong, at least some of it: unions that failed tended to violate the very principles that make commons governance work. Elinor Ostrom spent her career studying what separates commons that thrive from commons that collapse, and she identified a set of design principles that hold up across wildly different contexts — fisheries in Maine, irrigation systems in Spain, forests in Japan. The pattern is consistent.

Successful commons governance requires things like: clear definitions of who belongs and what the rules are. Monitoring that isn't captured by the powerful. Graduated consequences rather than all-or-nothing enforcement. Mechanisms for the people most affected to have a real voice in the rules. Nested structures that can handle both local and large-scale coordination.

When you look at unions that got corrupted or calcified, you can almost always trace it back to failures on this list. Leadership that stopped being monitored. Rules that served insiders. Boundaries that excluded the people who most needed protection. These aren't failures of the idea of collective labor governance — they're failures of implementation. And Ostrom's framework tells us pretty specifically what implementation needs to look like.

But I want to push further than just "fix unions."

We are living in a genuinely unusual moment. The siloes that used to contain knowledge are dissolving. Ideas that lived in labor economics, commons theory, behavioral psychology, civic governance, and organizational design are suddenly in conversation with each other in ways they haven't been before. We have access to frameworks and cross-domain thinking that previous generations of labor organizers simply didn't have.

So why are we still assuming the only model is the one we inherited?

I'm not saying abandon everything. I'm saying we should be asking harder questions. What does worker self-governance look like when information flows differently? When work itself is more distributed and less legible? When the traditional boundaries of "who counts as a worker in this commons" are genuinely blurry?

The moral imperative — to care for the resource you belong to — is not new. What's new is our capacity to think creatively about how to fulfill it.

There's one more idea I want to leave with you to ponder.

You cannot exit the labor commons. Not really. You can opt out of formal participation — refuse work, live off-grid, drop out in whatever way feels available to you. But you cannot exit the society that the labor commons sustains. Even the famous hermit in Maine, who lived for decades outside the social contract, turned out to have been quietly using cabins, raiding camps, existing in the shadow of the infrastructure he claimed to have left behind.

We are embedded. That embeddedness is not a trap — it's actually the source of our power. We're not managing a resource from the outside. We are the resource, and we are here, and we are not going anywhere, no matter how often my husband proclaims he's voting for The Meteor..

That means the work of governance falls to us in a way it can't fall to anyone else. And it also means we have more stake in getting it right than any external manager ever could.

The owner class may or may not hear the case I made last time. And honestly, fine. This was never only addressed to them.