FIVE TAKEAWAYS FROM PRIVATE GOVERNMENT
Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives ( and Why We Don’t Talk About It) By Elizabeth Anderson Princeton University Press 224 pp; $34.95
Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, asks a simple question: why do we allow employers control over our lives — even our non- work lives — to an extent that we would not allow the government. This is the jumpingoff point for her book, Private Government.
And here are your takeaways:
1 Out of sight, out of mind. Anderson argues that Adam Smith’s notion of the free market was egalitarian in that it dismantled statesponsored monopolies. Workers were free because their business was always transactional, in a happy constellation of relatively independent operators. The Industrial Revolution, which ushered in economies of scale and associated large firms, effectively ended that. Anderson notes that opportunities for self-employment shrank drastically during the 19th century — a reality that continues in the present. Sorry, gig economy, you don’t really count.
2 Don’t let the door hit you... There is a misconception that the ability of an employer to fire and the ability of an employee to quit are comparable; that quitting, as Anderson puts it, “is equivalent to firing one’s boss.” But employees do not generally have means to remove a boss from within the organization. Furthermore, as Princeton’s Stephen Macedo writes in his introduction, “The costs of exit for most workers are extremely high.” It bears noting that this book was written and published in the United States, where many employees rely on employer- sponsored primary health care: the cost of leaving a job in some circumstances can be catastrophic.
3 Above the law. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a master in a trade worked side-by-side with subordinates doing similar work — and therefore cared about working conditions to which he was also subject ( it was, of course, always a he). Post- Industrial Revolution, employers usually don’t perform the same kind of work as employees. “The mostly highly ranked individual takes no orders but issues many,” Anderson writes. “The lowest-ranked may have their bodily movements and speech minutely regulated for most of the day.” It’s good to be king, at least according to political theorist Tom Petty.
4 Big brother and the holding company. Despite widespread concern about government surveillance of the citizenry, we typically cede the right to privacy to employers each workday — and beyond. It is imagined, Anderson describes, that the private sphere is where government ends and individual liberties begin. But the reality is often that employers control employees to whatever extent is not prohibited by the state. “Private governments impose controls on workers that are unconstitutional for democratic states to impose on citizens who are not convicts or in the military,” she writes, citing dress codes, surveillance, search and seizure, medical testing and language regulation. It’s not all bad, though — this morning I lost a draft of this article, but the secret keylogging software installed on my laptop was able to retrieve it ... along with a report of my time browsing NBA trade rumours.
5 Meet in the middle. A recurring point in Private Government is that libertarians frequently allow for domination in private enterprise that they would oppose from the state. They treat employment as a transaction, but an employment agreement, “instead of leaving the seller as free as before,” as in a sales transaction, “puts the seller under the authority of the boss.” It is well demonstrated that privacy advocates on both the far left and far right have common ground, and are in fact able to act in concert when it comes to the public sphere: the same should be true in the private sphere. To extend Anderson’s original question, we must ask ourselves: how much employer control is actually necessary for the profitable functioning of the firm?