Dead Men’s Shoes: Diversity, Distributive Justice, and Job Security

In this article, we make a normative argument for weakening the job security of those in senior positions in the workforce. This would increase turnover in these roles, which would facilitate diversifying those who occupy them in a way that distributes the burdens of doing so fairly. We draw particular attention to the fact that current measures to enhance diversity do not fare so favorably in distributive terms, because they decrease the opportunities of some of those applying to these roles while asking very little of those who currently hold them. Concerns relating to historical injustice, cohort inequality, and diachronic inequality all support distributing the burdens differently, and weakening the job security of those in senior positions is a plausible way to do so.