Implicit Public Values and the Creation of Publicly Valuable Outcomes: The Importance of Work and the Contested Role of Labor Unions

• Published date: 01 July 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12134
• Date: 01 July 2014
• Author: John W. Budd

John W. Budd is professor of work

and organizations in the Carlson School

of Management at the University of

Minnesota, where he holds the Industrial

Relations Land Grant Chair and is director

of the Center for Human Resources

and Labor Studies. His books include

Employment with a Human Face:

Balancing Eff‌i ciency, Equity, and

Voice (Cornell University Press, 2004),

Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives:

Bringing Workplace Law and Public

Policy into Focus (with Stephen Befort;

Stanford University Press, 2009), and The

Thought of Work (ILR Press, 2011).

E-mail: jbudd@umn.edu

506 Public Administration Review • July | August 2014

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 4, pp. 506–516. © 2014 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12134.

John W. Budd

University of Minnesota

 e deep importance of work for families and communi-

ties means that discussions of public values and debates

over public policies to create publicly valuable outcomes

must not overlook work, the workplace, and the employ-

ment relationship.  is article considers the range of

public values on work and the options for creating work-

related publicly valuable outcomes. Labor unions feature

prominently in the analyses because they are the most vis-

ible nonmarket institution for creating publicly valuable

outcomes relating to work. Ultimately, however, there is

no consensus on the desired public values about work or

the best ways of fulf‌i lling them. Rather, these are deeply

contested issues rooted in contrasting frames of reference

on work and the employment relationship, which makes

the realization of publicly valuable outcomes challenging.

Public values are the values of a society that pro-

vide “normative consensus about (a) the rights,

benef‌i ts, and prerogatives

to which citizens should (and

should not) be entitled; (b) the

obligations of citizens to society,

the state, and one another; and

(c) the principles on which

governments and policies

should be based” (Bozeman

2007, 13).  e complexity of

modern societies means that a modern society’s public

values are broad ranging. Public values necessarily

intersect with the full range of societal issues; this

article focuses on issues related to work. Moreover,

the creation of publicly valuable outcomes consistent

with a society’s public values can involve a diverse set

of actors and institutions. In the domain of work, the

creation of publicly valuable outcomes is shaped by

economic markets, government policies, private and

public sector organizations, diverse worker advocacy

and community groups, protest movements, and

others. Part of this article highlights the role of labor

unions because of their central role in trying to create

publicly valuable outcomes in the work domain and

because debates over labor unions reveal contrasting

perspectives on the nature of public values as well as

contested views on how best to realize these values

within the workplace and beyond. By deepening our

understanding of these traditional roles, we can better

understand the needed roles of new institutions as

unions are increasingly limited in their abilities to cre-

ate publicly valuable work-related outcomes because

of their long-standing decline in the private sector

and more recent attacks on public sector unions in

Wisconsin and elsewhere.

It is common to see work primarily as an economic

activity that generates commodities, services, and

income. From such a perspective, work is largely

a private activity that occurs between consenting

economic actors in a distinct sphere of life, and the

favored work-related public values are those that

ref‌l ect economic individualism. But this is an exces-

sively narrow view of work (Boyte and Kari 1996;

Budd 2011). Work can be a

source of personal fulf‌i llment

and psychological well-being

that provides more than extrin-

sic monetary rewards. Work is a

way to intimately care for others

and to serve others through vol-

unteering, civic service, military

service, and other means. On

an even deeper level, work can be a source of identity

by helping individuals understand who they are and

where they stand in the social structure. Work is also

a source of freedom from the dictates of the natural

world—a way to express creativity and build culture.

Work “builds and sustains our basic public goods and

resources,” and thus it is an essential element of citi-

zenship (Boyte and Kari 1996, 16). And many believe

that work is not simply a commodity traded in the

marketplace but is something done by human beings

who therefore merit a set of workplace standards con-

sistent with human dignity (Budd 2004; Gross 2010;

Kaufman 2005).

Work is therefore a fully human activity—it is “how

we earn a living, build a material world, develop (or

Implicit Public Values and the Creation of Publicly Valuable

Outcomes:  e Importance of Work and the Contested Role

of Labor Unions

Work can be a source of

personal fulf‌i llment and

psychological well-being that

provides more than extrinsic

monetary rewards.