None of that’s supposed to be necessary, because individual workers will get what they’re worth in a free market.Īccording to Boreing, contract negotiations initially fell apart because Crowder wanted $30 million a year instead of the $12.5 million a year he’d been offered. Nor do they want to change labor laws to make it easier for workers to organize labor unions so they can bargain collectively and get a better deal. None of these people support raising the minimum wage to help low-wage workers who struggle to afford rent and groceries every month. Isn’t any contract both parties assent to supposed to be “mutually beneficial” - power imbalances be damned?
But everyone concerned seems to have forgotten that, as good laissez-faire ideologues, they were supposed to deny the very possibility of workers being screwed over by employment contracts. Boreing and Shapiro defended it as reasonable and generous. Crowder thought the Daily Wire’s offer was outrageously unfair. What interests me, though, is that Crowder’s complaint and the Daily Wire’s response both take for granted a point that all these guys are normally at pains to miss. And it might seem particularly absurd given the amount of money that the Daily Wire was offering Crowder. One of Karl Marx’s core contentions in Capital is that even though capitalist employment contracts take the form of voluntary agreements between legally equal parties, they still involve relations of power and domination that can be meaningfully compared to earlier and more naked systems of control like slavery and feudalism.Įven if you accept Marx’s argument, you might still think that calling any legally voluntary employment contract a “slave contract” involves an unhelpful amount of hyperbole. It’s not like literal slaves ended up in chains because they didn’t read over the proposed language in their employment contracts carefully enough.īut it’s worth pausing to acknowledge that Crowder is hardly breaking new ground in making this kind of comparison. On its face, there’s something absurd about the phrase “slave contracts.” Contracts are things you sign when you’re a free citizen who gets to decide whether to accept or reject a particular job offer. “Slave Contracts” for Thee but Not for Me And nothing about the way this has played out makes any sense until you realize that the whole ecosystem of right-wing media is swimming in billionaire cash. There’s a striking disconnect between the way these guys talk about their own employment contracts and their complete indifference to the complaints of ordinary workers. The whole sordid incident speaks volumes about the Right. The feud escalated from there, with Crowder gleefully publicizing a phone conversation he’d secretly recorded with Boreing a week before, and Shapiro responding with a long Twitter thread, and… well… you get the idea. Crowder, Boreing revealed, wanted more than twice that figure. Among other things, he revealed that the “slave contract” would have given Crowder $50 million over four years.
Last week, Crowder released a video denouncing the terms the Daily Wire had offered him as a “slave contract.” Boreing hit back with a long response going through the details of the offer. Late last year, before The Blaze let him go, he was in negotiations to switch over to one of their competitors - Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing’s the Daily Wire. Conservative commentator Steven Crowder used to work for Glenn Beck’s company, The Blaze.
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