Spotlight on Research: Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It)
In U-M Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies Elizabeth Anderson’s book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It), Prof. Anderson seeks to answer two questions: “First, why do we talk as if workers are free at work, and that the only threats to individual liberty come from the state? Second, what would be a better way to talk about the ways employers constrain workers’ lives, which can open up discussion about how the workplace could be designed to be more responsive to workers’ interests (xx)?”
In noting that many of today’s workplaces operate as de facto dictatorships, Anderson makes the case for equality in an increasingly unequal society and has drawn national buzz, most recently in a New Yorker profile, “The Philosopher Redefining Equality,” published in December 2018:
Working at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, social science, and economics, she has become a leading theorist of democracy and social justice. She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society. Her work, drawing on real-world problems and information, has helped to redefine the way contemporary philosophy is done, leading what might be called the Michigan school of thought. Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree (New Yorker 12/31/19).
The book is comprised of two lectures, plus commentary from scholars, and Anderson’s response to that commentary. The first lecture looks at the history of the association of free markets with liberty and egalitarianism in the English Civil War, the Levellers movement, and in Adam Smith’s economic theories. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century brought about a profound change to this thinking:
Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government (6).
The second chapter examines this concept of private government that does not recognize individual autonomy, conducts top-down central planning, controls all income, and can sanction through demotion or exile. This is “the modern workplace, as it exists for most establishments in the United States…most workers...are governed by communist dictatorships in their work lives”(39) and have little personal liberty. Anderson argues that contrary to the libertarian fear of state control, “private governments impose a far more minute, exacting, and sweeping regulation of employees …private governments impose controls on workers that are unconstitutional for democratic states to impose on citizens who are not convicts or in the military” (63). She concludes the chapter by pointing out that we are not living in the free, egalitarian market society described by people like Adam Smith and Thomas Paine; the greater threat to freedom and egalitarianism is in the “private authoritarian government, not through their own choice, but through laws that have handed nearly all authority to their employers,…” (71). Anderson suggests that this reality needs to be more widely acknowledged than it has been thus far.
The scholars who provide commentary on Professor Anderson’s lectures include Professor Ann Hughes of Keele University in the United Kingdom. She argues the Levellers were not as egalitarian as often depicted, thus the Industrial Revolution did not cause as profound a change as described by Anderson. George Mason University Professor Tyler Cowen in his response, “Work Isn’t So Bad After All,” argues just that – he sees Anderson as “too negative” (116). He argues that there is a downside to too much worker control in that managers often have a more holistic view of what is good for the majority; companies are motivated to create pleasant working environments in order to attract and retain good employees; workers often choose more money over freedom; and unemployment has “major negative effects on happiness and health, far beyond what the lost income would otherwise induce” (114).
Private Government concludes with Professor Anderson’s response to the commenters in which she clarifies her points regarding early pro-market theorists like the Levellers and Thomas Paine: “I argue not that (they) were correct, but that they had good reasons to believe at the time that making markets more free, along with other reforms would liberate working people” (125). Then the Industrial Revolution created wage laborers and exposed the inability of their reforms to address the problems of workers.
Anderson devotes a few paragraphs of her response to describe the intimidating and unhealthy conditions for workers at the behemoth (and still growing) Amazon, revealed by Salon’s 2014 expose. Anderson points out that the company does not care at all about its workers’ interests: “The issue is inequality: Amazon treats workers’ vital interests as of no account, in comparison with its own and its customers’ relatively trifling interests” (129). To critics like Cowen, Anderson replies that while she understands industry owners and managers have some expertise and a right to limited authority, “I object… to the subjection of workers to arbitrary, unaccountable government, in which they have no voice other than what their employers care to give them (which is often none at all) and are vulnerable to abuses of power” (133). She points out that she does not recommend a specific workplace “constitution,” but discusses “four ways to promote the freedom and equality of workers: exit, rule of law constraints on employers, constitutional rights, and voice” (133).
Professor Anderson does not make a recommendation for how these are to be best implemented or institutionalized. Private Government was released in paperback this year.
Tracey Van Dusen is a former high school AP government teacher, an editor, and a history buff. She currently serves as the administrative coordinator for the Center on Finance, Law & Policy.
