“We demand dignity!” is a common demand that I’ve seen pop up across labor unions, tenant unions, and people slighted by bourgeois mechanisms (such as houseless people). It's a reasonable demand with broad appeal, but it's easy for this to be phrased in a way where it becomes a strategically unhelpful demand in the long-term. There are a couple reasons why a broad call for “dignity” is unhelpful, but the main reason is that for people to guarantee their dignified treatment, those people need real institutional power.
“Dignity” is poorly defined.
For people going through the shit, it's obvious what sort of undignified treatment they've faced. But for others, it's less obvious, and this opens the door to people defining “dignity” in a way which doesn't actually guarantee people proper treatment.
Especially for empowered decisionmakers, there's usually a disconnect. Empowered decisionmakers often don't bother to understand why normal people can’t simply jump through all the bureaucratic hoops—so they blame the person for lacking individual responsibility. These decisionmakers don’t usually have much experience being at the short end of bureaucratic sticks—they lack the empathy to understand the pressures that normal people face.
Often, outside onlookers (who are on the fence of which side to support) will also lack the exact experiences of the aggrieved group. Saying, “We want dignity,” doesn't add much more useful information to these people.
Undignified treatment is usually the final result of a broken system that privileges the wealthy and powerful. A simple demand for “dignity” makes it easy for bad-faith actors to move the conversation away from the broken imbalance of power, and toward a few crumbs of bureaucratic policy change or temporary material concessions.
Usually, a proletarian demand for “dignity” is accompanied by a few other demands, which are more precise. Higher wages and benefits, more job security; better maintenance at an apartment complex, lower rent or fees; more public services, an end to encampment sweeps. But this can give the impression that such demands are what fully constitutes “dignified” treatment. This is not the case; your boss, landlord, or bourgeois state can always invent some new way to fuck you over.
When “dignity” is not well-defined, then antagonistic, empowered decisionmakers can try to define it in ways that are in their own interests.
The result of all this is that the antagonistic, empowered decisionmakers try to define “dignity” in a way to divide the people who would otherwise take collective action. The bourgeoisie try to appeal to the undecided outsiders, and try to win over a few members of the aggrieved group by focusing on small, specific examples of undignified treatment. They fix those specific problems, try to convince people that simply doing that is good enough, and complain that any more concessions are asking too much of them.
All of this distracts from the fact that they're not trying to change the system which has a tendency to deprive people of dignity.
The bourgeoisie target specific workers to make their lives better in small ways; or they focus on repairs for the loudest apartment tenants and houseless people. The bourgeoisie hope to give off the impression that, “See, we care!” They want outside observers and the particular aggrieved members to shut up about their complaints. By focusing on a few specific examples of “lack of dignity”, they hope that they won't have to change their bureaucratic system in a way that systematically prevents these sorts of things in the first place.
And the motivation for this is obvious: Business owners benefit from having the power not to pay or treat their workers well, or to not have to listen to workers’ ethical concerns about their business; Apartment owners benefit from having the power to decide not to spend so much money on maintenance, and from having more control over whether a tenant can live in their complex; The city officials and business owners benefit from being able to force homeless people around to the outskirts of cities, away from the eyes of tourists, consumers, housed constituents; et cetera.
people shouldn't simply demand dignity, they should demand decisionmaking power.
“Dignity” has broad appeal—everyone knows that people deserve dignity. But it has broad appeal largely in part because it's so poorly defined. This wide range of definitions makes it easy for the already-powerful bourgeoisie to scuttle collective action among the proletariat.
Don't settle for any half-measure of dignity. People shouldn't have to beg to be treated with dignity. Dignity is not something that should be bestowed from on high. In fact, dignity cannot exist when it depends continuously on the whims of higher-ups.
Instead, people need decisionmaking power. People should be in control of the decisions that affect their lives, to the degree that their lives are affected by those decisions. This is how we can live with perpetual dignity. We should not settle simply for fixes-from-on-high to the few examples that people can point to and describe today—we need the power to prevent and solve our problems going into the future.
By changing our organizing goal away from “dignity” and toward “decisionmaking power”, the organizing people have a better-defined goal to coordinate around. It's now far more difficult for people to be divided by the fact that they might have different ideas of dignity. Through the struggle, people come to learn what sorts of democratic decisionmaking structures they like, and what sorts of structures they want to be put into practice in society.
“Dignity” is a good motivation, and is probably good to explicitly mention. But “decisionmaking power” has been—and always will be—the solution.