POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

The Economic Policy Institute has prepared a quiz to answer the question that is the title of this post.

To be honest, once you have taken the quiz, I am guessing that you will not find the assessment of the fairness of your own job to be especially enlightening.

I asked my son, who has been working as a line cook while finishing a degree in computer programming, to take the quiz. Because his job is not categorized as anything close to awful, he wondered out loud how many people have jobs that could be worse from a fairness perspective—that is, with even lower pay, fewer than no benefits, less than no recourse, etc. (In case you are wondering, I am not placing his job at risk. He is starting a new job this week.)

But I am sharing the quiz, because with each answer, there is a drop-down box containing a succinct passage about the current state of labor—of working conditions—in the U.S. Many of these passages are quite enlightening.

Lastly, I know that I have a very good job. So, if you were considering me as the typical university employee or even the typical faculty member, you might think that it’s somewhat ridiculous that I should even be posting this quiz.

But many university employees and all too many faculty members are not receiving the compensation and benefits and do not have the working conditions and protections that I have. You would think that universities, of all places, would do much better than most employers in insuring fairness to their workers. But fairness, as a fundamental institutional priority, has been eroding in our universities as it has in most other sectors.

There is too little regard for the “public good” and for how our guiding principles are manifested in our treatment of individuals. The devotion to deregulation means that pronouncements about “equal opportunity” are worse than lip-service to lost ideals. They are, instead, a very calculated means to make the betrayal of those ideals more broadly acceptable.

In any case, the quiz is available at: https://www.epi.org/multimedia/how-fair-is-your-job-quiz/.