2045

You work for a boss

Each night and day,

The value you make,

You make for his sake.

You work for a boss,

The value you take

Is barely enough for survival’s sake.

Be your own boss,

Step out that line,

Keep all the value,

Make your own time,

What’s yours is yours to hold and claim.

The value you make is

Value maintained.

The above is a little ditty that started out as a commercial for reasonably priced legal services to help workers form their own companies. It is now incorporated into elementary school curricula as the equivalent of a nursery rhyme. It is the year 2045 in the United States. There are very few remaining payroll employees. Employees, for the most part, have been legally redefined as entities owned by natural persons for the purpose of seeking employment. Nearly all workers in the United States now operate as LLCs – limited liability companies.

There are no employer-based health care benefits. There are no paid vacations. There is no such thing as overtime, or family leave, or maternal leave. There are no employer-based retirement plans, no employment-based health care, or dental benefits. There is no employer-based unemployment insurance or disability insurance. There is no social security for those under the age of 40. For those under the age of 40 in the workforce, all contributions made to date are returned in the form of a tax credit, amortized over the time it takes for each to reach age 75. For those people between the age of 40 and retirement age and still in the workforce, benefits earned to date are frozen, locked in and prorated for distribution upon reaching retirement age.

The genesis of all of this was a lawsuit, brought by a prospective worker who was refused employment because the employer, as a condition of employment, insisted that all workers form their own companies and handle all their own benefits. The Supreme Court, consistent with its rulings that corporations, and similar so-called “artificial entities,” are persons with Constitutionally protected rights, expanded the rights of these artificial entities. They ruled, by a 7-2 majority, that corporations, as “persons” with the right of free speech, also have the right of association, including the right to deny work dependent upon the form of entity to be employed. In other words, corporations were entitled to require that any contracted employment be made through artificial entities.

Following this precedent-setting Supreme Court ruling, the Republican-led Congress passed legislation that made entity-based employment mandatory. And for good measure, Congress made “right to work” a federal law, effectively undercutting what little power remained within labor unions. State governments were exempted from the requirement unless they opted in. By opting in they became certified “right to work” jurisdictions, able to enforce “right to work” challenges in the private sector and empowered to disband municipal unions.

This legislation passed as a fiscal measure to reduce the deficit and “save” social security for those already at or near retirement. As a fiscal measure, the Senate passed the bill with a bare majority through budget reconciliation. The last version of the bill included what Republicans referred to as a progressive provision long sought by Social Democrats, although not nearly in the amount provided or for the stated purpose behind its passage. In that provision, each citizen, having reached or upon reaching majority age, receives a one-time capital grant of $10,000, enough to form a limited liability company, purchase tax and accounting software, and have a few thousand to spare to start a business or make a deposit on a personal retirement plan. The President signed the bill into law soon thereafter. The preamble of the bill describes the new public policy as follows:

“This legislation recognizes the right of employers to exercise the freedoms accorded them by the Constitution, particularly the rights of association and voluntary contract afforded them by the First Amendment. The refusal by many to recognize this right under our constitution is hereby addressed directly. In addition to the rights of corporations to certain freedoms, including freedom to enact policies consistent with their religious beliefs; freedom to contract freely and to benefit from and be bound by the terms of those agreements; freedom of speech, including political speech, and freedom against unlawful searches and takings, in concert with recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, this legislation explicitly recognizes a corporation’s rights to associate and contract with whomever they choose and to determine the form through which the engagement will take place. These denials of corporate rights by individual employees and organized labor groups, besides violating constitutional freedoms, also lead to unrest with the explicit intent of burdening or obstructing commerce by (a) impairing the efficiency, safety, and operations of the instrumentalities of commerce; (b) interrupting the flow of commerce and the supply chains necessary for maintaining the quality of life of American consumers; (c) materially affecting, restraining, or controlling available services and the flow of raw materials and processed and manufactured goods; (d) causing an unnecessary increase in the cost of goods to the American consumer along with a disruption of community life, which suffers with the diminution of consumer purchasing power, including disposable income, and (e) impacting the rights of every American to work due to the demands of a free market economy, which relies on job accessibility, the free flow of capital and labor, and expectations of predictable market operations.

The unfair and discriminatory burden placed upon employers who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract tends to aggravate recurrent business downturns and depressions, by artificially lowering the rates of profit and dampening the investment power of industry to expand and provide more employment opportunities to the greatest number of Americans. 

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions by requiring that each worker, upon demand by an employer and as a condition of continued employment, become and independent contractor, organized as a limited liability company. This requirement will have the added benefit of incentivizing entrepreneurship and ensuring that employers no longer have the burden of social expenditures associated with costs outside of the scope of work.

It is further declared that the federal government amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide each worker, upon application of same, with a tax credit of not less that $10,000 in 2045 dollars so that affected workers have the capital necessary to form these work entities and some amount of excess capital for personal training and investment.”

And so, it begins. Following on the heels of the Supreme Court case that provided the platform for the radical federal re-organization of the United States workforce, many other activist rulings were to follow, eviscerating modern precedent and using guidance from 19^th Century and early 20^th Century court precedents. A representative sampling of the holdings of those rulings can be summarized as follows:

• Except for explicitly recognized Constitutional rights like Habeus Corpus and Rights of Assembly, any and all equal protection cases must be litigated in State courts.
• The 15^th Amendment does not provide an unqualified right to vote. It only provides that a State may not give preference to any group over another.
• Reinstituting the “State Action Doctrine, the court ruled that the 14^th Amendment does not cover private acts of violence, only government acts of violence. It also ruled that equal rights violations could only be attributed to government action, not private action.
• The Constitutional right of free association trumps any purported right to oppose voluntary, private segregation.
• Local decisions that are challenged on the grounds of giving preference to any one group or groups over another or others is a state issue and one that can only be challenged because of explicit and enunciated racial animus.

Following each of these and other such rulings, Congress was quick to take advantage of the new “Age of Original Intent,” and passed laws in concert with those rulings. It is the year 2045 in the United States, the year that democracy was unofficially but decisively laid to rest. Who would have thought comments made by John Jay, the country’s first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the 18^th Century would amount to prophesy some 250 years later: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” And they do. Consistent with the prognostications of the proto-fascist, Thomas Carlyle, our country is formally and explicitly run by the “captains of industry.”

“Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in
confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness!
They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and
supply-and-demand principle: they will not; nor ought they, nor
can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them.
To order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for
noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be
sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered bewildering mob; but
as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them, will
these men march any more. All human interests, combined human
endeavours, and social growths in this world, have, at a certain
stage of their development, required organising: and Work, the
grandest of human interests, does now require it.”

And so, it has come to pass in the year 2045.