Will markets provide humane jobs? A hypothesis

Many features of today's jobs have not been produced by market forces emerging in individual private contracts. Instead, they resulted from social struggles and union bargaining, appear collective agreements, labor regulations, international laws. This paper presents one hypothesis explaining this observation: A negative correlation between workers' taste for amenities unobserved productivity. I show that such implies a sub-optimal provision the since providing leads to lower quality workers. Mandating is optimal when strong, or dispersion worker productivity large.