Dictatorship in the Workplace
A Review of E. Anderson's Private Government
I’ve recently finished reading a provocative book by the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson and felt compelled to share my thoughts about it here with all the philosophically-minded Substackers.
The book’s title is Private Government and it was published in 2017.
Who’s Elizabeth Anderson?
Anderson is a contemporary philosopher who teaches mostly ethics and political philosophy, with strong leanings towards feminism and egalitarian views.
The Book in a Nutshell
The content of the book is based on the Tanner Lectures held at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.
The work is structured into three parts:
Part 1 is dedicated to Anderson’s lecture;
Part 2 presents critical observations related to the lecture raised by cultural critic David Bromwich, economist Tyler Cowen, historian Ann Hughes, and philosopher Niko Kolodny.
Part 3 focuses on Anderson’s response to the criticisms contained in Part 2.
In this book, Anderson critiques the hierarchical structures in the workplace, comparing them to forms of private government that can be as authoritarian as undemocratic political regimes.
The author’s main message is that workers often have little say in their work environments, similar to how citizens might have little say in a dictatorship.
The Core Argument
Here’s a breakdown of Anderson’s main argument.
Anderson begins by defining "government" broadly as any institution that exercises authority over others. This definition extends beyond just political governments to include the reality of most workplaces. In fact, many workplaces function as private governments because they exercise significant control over employees' lives.
Employers often have the power to dictate workers' actions, both within the workplace and, sometimes, outside of it.
Anderson directs her readers’ attention to a number of appalling concrete examples of abuse of power in the workplace in support of her point, including intrusive checks and demands on what workers can do and say outside the workplace, and attacks on workers’ dignity like denying bathroom breaks to workers employed in the poultry industry.
Unlike political governments in democratic countries, which are accountable to citizens through mechanisms like voting and public discourse, private governments (workplaces) are largely unaccountable to those they govern (workers).
Employees typically have little say in the rules that govern their work life.
Anderson compares these workplace dynamics to authoritarian political regimes, highlighting the lack of worker autonomy and democratic control within many companies.
In essence, workers are subject to the will of their employers without the protections of democracy.
What obfuscates the reality of private governments and prevents both workers and politics from becoming fully aware of it is the misapplication of the liberalist view of the market as the place where free subjects, employers and workers, negotiate their agreements for the mutual benefit of all the parties concerned to the socio-economic reality of advanced capitalism.
Once the mistake of reading our economic reality and the reality of the workplace through the free market ideology is brought to light, Anderson argues, we’ll realise the importance of working out appropriate remedies to improve the working conditions of most ordinary people, albeit within the constraints of advanced capitalist economies where powerful entities like banks and corporations can’t be done away with.
The mismatch between free market ideology and late capitalist economy
Viewing the reality of the contemporary workplace through the lense of the free market liberalist ideology is misleading for the following reason.
This ideology might have reflected the aspirations of egalitarian philosophers and thinkers during the mid-17th century through to the 18th and early 19th centuries like the Levellers, Paine, Adam Smith, and John Locke.
Back then, most people were small farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers who worked for themselves. They weren't controlled by a boss or an employer, so they had a lot of independence. The free market, in this context, meant that people could trade and do business freely, making their own decisions without interference from the government or other powerful figures. This freedom was seen as a way to promote equality because everyone had the chance to succeed on their own merits.
For these early thinkers, the free market was a way to break free from the rigid social hierarchies of the past, where your status was mostly determined by your birth.
Anderson writes:
Early modern England was characterized by pervasive hierarchies of domination and subordination. Nearly all people but the king had superiors, who claimed nearly unaccountable discretionary authority to rule their lives. Lords governed their tenants and retainers, masters governed their servants, bishops their priests, priests their parishioners, captains their sailors, guilds their members, male heads of households their wives, children, and servants. Government was everywhere, not just in the hands of the organizations we identify today with the modern state. (p.8).
In a free market, they believed, anyone could rise or fall based on their own efforts, which was a more egalitarian idea.
Anderson points out that this view of the free market made sense at the time because most people were their own bosses or could realistically become independent through an apprenticeship that would open the door to setting up their own business.
But with the Industrial Revolution, as the economy changed and big companies started to dominate, this idea of the free market no longer matched the reality of most people’s lives, where they were now working for employers doing less meaningful and fulfilling work, and had less control over their own jobs and lives.
In the world of economies at scale and international corporations, the encounter between employer and worker is all but fair in terms of freedom and negotiating power. For example, Anderson’s opponent might point out that, while it’s true that employers in most cases can fire an employee in the blink of an eye and often quite arbitrarily, employees too can leave their workplace at will.
To this, Anderson replies:
…This leads (the opponent) to represent quitting as equivalent to firing one’s boss. But workers have no power to remove the boss from his position within the firm. And quitting often imposes even greater costs on workers than being fired does, for it makes them ineligible for unemployment insurance. It is an odd kind of countervailing power that workers supposedly have to check their bosses’ power, when they typically suffer more from imposing it than they would suffer from the worst sanction bosses can impose on them. Threats, to be effective, need to be credible. (p.56).
So, while the free market ideology remains in place, the socio-economic reality which this ideology is supposed to justify and explain has shifted from a world where egalitarianism among individuals was a concrete possibility to one where it’s hopelessly out of reach for the majority of us.
Anderson points to the urgency of acknowledging the disconnect between free market ideology and socio-economic reality and coming up with ways of empowering workers so as to enable them to be less subject to the arbitrary rule of private governments in the contemporary workplace.
My Opinion
Most ordinary people experience, or have experienced, the sting of arbitrary power from a boss, the frustration of having no way out for lack of better opportunities, and the stifling sensation of having to trade an increasing portion of one’s time for what looks more and more like subsistence money.
In fact, it could be that today’s positive outlook on the growth of the creator economy is partly due to an increasing number of people trying to reclaim spaces of individual freedom and self-realization through meaningful independent work as opposed to the alienation of the corporate environment.
So, from this perspective, it’s hard to disagree with Anderson.
But, by highlighting the arbitrariness and totalitarian tendencies of private governments (in the workplace), she seems to be oblivious to the same tendencies developing in traditionally democratic governments and their institutions.
In fact, Anderson distinguishes between the relative accountability of public governments in democracies and the lack of such mechanisms in private workplaces.
However, in today’s world, the collaboration between large corporations and political governments challenges this distinction.
As governments form closer partnerships with big businesses, the safeguards of democratic governance—such as accountability, transparency, and checks on power—may be compromised.
These collaborations can create a situation where the influence of corporations extends into the public sphere, potentially undermining the democratic principles that Anderson sees as a counterbalance to private government.
This blurring of lines raises the concern that the very problems Anderson identifies in private workplaces—such as the lack of worker autonomy and the concentration of power—might also be creeping into the public domain.
Here are a number of instances in support of my claim:
In many general elections, voters often face a limited range of choices, with political parties offering platforms that are not significantly different from one another. This convergence reduces the meaningfulness of electoral choice, leading to a situation where, regardless of who wins, the policies enacted often don’t reflect the promises made during campaigns. This is particularly troubling when the policies that are implemented align more closely with the interests of powerful corporations than with the electorate's will.
The media, which ideally should serve as a check on government power, often mirrors the government’s narrative, further diminishing the diversity of perspectives available to the public. This alignment can make it difficult for citizens to access independent, critical viewpoints, effectively stifling public debate and reinforcing the status quo.
The frequent invocation of emergencies to bypass standard legislative procedures is another red flag. Emergencies can be used to justify shortcuts in the democratic process, sidelining parliaments and concentrating power in the executive branch. This trend erodes the very checks and balances that are supposed to safeguard democracy from authoritarianism.
Arguably, we’re seeing a parallel in how governments are using digital tools to monitor, control, and censor their citizens. Under the banner of fighting disinformation, governments are increasingly resorting to data mining, AI, and digital devices to gather information on citizens and limit the spread of certain ideas. While these measures are presented as being necessary for public safety or the protection of democracy, they can stifle free speech and suppress dissenting voices, much like how private employers might suppress workers’ rights or freedoms within the workplace. For example, the European Union’s Digital Services Act is a recent development intended to regulate online content, but it may be argued that it could lead to increased censorship on social media platforms. This kind of legislation, coupled with the growing power of tech companies and their close ties with governments, suggests a disturbing trend where the lines between public and private control over information are increasingly blurred.
This erosion of free speech and privacy echoes the concerns Anderson raises about authoritarian control within private governments, but it extends these concerns to the public sphere, showing how the use of technology might amplify these issues in ways that were previously unimaginable.
A democratic government is the subject or entity whose distinctive task is to defend the interests of ordinary citizens vis-a-vis private governments. The fact that the latter have gained so much power over the lives of their workers is a clear symptom that public democratic governments have been failing their electorate and ceased to represent the interests of their citizens, therefore losing sight of their mission and raison d’etre in the process. Not only that, but public governments and other public institutions in democratic countries have come to work quite closely with powerful economic entities and even adopted some of their authoritarian approaches to the exercise of power.
To conclude, the challenge of addressing authoritarian structures in the workplace might be even more complex and pervasive than Anderson’s analysis suggests, requiring us to reconsider how power is exercised not only in the workplace but across society as a whole.
Anderson does a great job in conducting a thorough and accessible analysis of the contemporary workplace at its worst and what keeps it in place, although in my view she falls short of pointing out the share of responsibility modern public governments in democratic countries bear in the scenario she paints so well.
Worth reading and discussing, not least for Anderson’s historical journey in the egalitarian ideology of early capitalism, the clarity and accessibility of her philosophical arguments, and her skill in answering her critics’ objections.
Reference
Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about it), Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017.