What does it mean for a worker to be exploited? Libertarians would say that along as the worker freely entered into a contract, nothing in the contract can be exploitive. Communists would say that all employees are exploited because they do not own the means of production. American Democrats would say that if the worker isn’t earning a living wage, or exposed to hazardous conditions. American Republicans would say workers are exploited by the taxes they pay to the state and by the endless diversity seminars they’re subjected to.
In Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson says that all these claims are wrong. Workers are exploited when they are subject to the unaccountable whims of their boss. Anderson’s work has historically bridged philosophy and economics, and Private Government is no exception. At its best, Anderson combines a philosopher’s knack for getting to the roots of an issue with an economist’s practical solutions. At its worst, it feels like Anderson is picking arguments from the field that leads to her desired outcome, rather than synthesizing the two fields into a coherent whole.
Private Government grew out of 2 lectures that Anderson gave at Princeton in 2015, and the scope and intended audience reflect that. This is very much an American book, aimed at the sort of people who tend to attend philosophy lectures at Princeton; that is to say, the Elites. It’s also quite a short book, only about 150 pages, and a third of that is 4 responses to Anderson by other authors. Of the responses, Tyler Cowen’s response is probably the most interesting, and the only one that I’ll discuss in any depth.
Anderson’s key argument is that workplaces are a form of government, and we should recognize them as such.
We, in 21st century America, think of “government” and “the state” as interchangeable, and any thought of “private government” immediately conjures pictures of crazy anracho-libertarian worlds like Snow Crash or David Friedman’s imagination. But Anderson thinks that our modern conception of government is too narrow, and should be expanded much more broadly.
Anderson’s definition of government is indeed extremely expansive. According to Anderson:
Government exists wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in one or more domains of life.
By this definition, most societies have historically had several organizations that are a form of government. In 17th century England, the Anglican Church could fine parishioners, extract tithes, and even exile followers from the church. Merchant guilds could fine or even jail members who did not follow the guilds strict regulations on sales. Nor did these other governments follow strict national borders. At one point, an English merchant was imprisoned in Rotterdam by England’s Merchant Adventurers, because he would not swear that he had obeyed all their regulations. In medieval Europe, the state was weak and broadly distributed, so much so that your landlord had a bigger role in your government than the king. In many societies, the state gave masters the power of government over their slaves, giving them absolute control over them. Even today, the state is not truly a monolith. We have different organizations at the federal, state, and local level that can all issue orders and enforce sanctions.
Workplaces clearly meet this expanded definition of government. They generally have a strict hierarchy, where bosses may issue orders to subordinates and expect them to be obeyed. These orders are enforced with the threat of sanctions, typically in the form of fines (withheld pay) or exile (firing). According to Anderson’s definition, this is enough for workplaces to count as a government.
Anderson goes further and argues that workplaces are not only governments, they are powerful, unaccountable dictatorships. The employer’s power is backed by their ability to fire any employee, at any time, for reasons having nothing to do with job performance or ability. Employees can be fired for drugs used outside of work (even if those drugs are legal), for speech made outside of work, and until 2020, for being gay or transgeneder. In the United States there is a clearly defined set of reasons that you can’t fire someone for (race, sex, religion, national origin, age, pregnancy, disability, whistleblowing, or union organizing). Anything else is fair game, which means that people have been fired for being too attractive, drinking Pepsi, or having their daughter raped by a friend of the boss. You can also lose your job for what you say in your tweets, your emails, your old podcasts, or for your political donations.
While we shouldn’t draw a false equivalence between firing and imprisonment, we also shouldn’t underestimate its severity. Being fired means you are losing money, just as surely as if you’d been fined, and also has significant impacts on long-run happiness. According to one study, unemployment has a greater effect on long-run happiness than the death of a spouse
The effect of events on Life Satisfaction for Men. From Clark et al., 2007
This power, Anderson argues, allows employers to abuse and exploit their workers in ways large and small, without fear of push-back or reprisal. For proof, Anderson gives a litany of examples of employers exploiting workers, including:
As a result, Anderson thinks it is reasonable to refer to workplaces as “communist dictatorships in our midst”], and declare that workplaces have “arbitrary, unaccountable power”.
While her argument that workplaces are governments is perfectly logical, I can’t help but think that there’s a bit of philosophical sleight of hand happening here. By using the term “government”, Anderson is inviting us to compare the power of workplaces to that of the state. But then she redefines government so that the scale of control isn’t relevant. Read expansively enough, basically anything would become a form of government. Consider the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. He can issue orders to customers (order quickly, no complaining, only speak English) and enforce them with the threat of sanctions (No soup for you!). Since we can all agree that the Soup Nazi should not count as a government, what is the point of calling workplaces governments?
I think there are two reasons. The first is that political philosophers have spent hundreds of years designing political systems that limit the state’s ability to dominate their subjects. Modern democracies are the beneficiaries of this philosophical thought, drawing on ideas of social contracts and inalienable rights to determine the structure of the government and limits on its power. Describing workplaces as governments encourages us to think about how insights from political philosophy could be adapted to prevent the exploitation of workers by their employers. When Anderson describes potential solutions to the issue of worker exploitation, she explicitly draws on lessons from political philosophy.
The second reason is subtler, but I think more important. Anderson wants us to start thinking of employers as an entity that can take away your liberties. In modern American discourse, the state is the sole entity that can grant or take away liberties. Liberals might talk about the harms caused by corporations or communities, but they describe it in terms of justice, fairness, or equity, not in terms of liberties. Conservatives, meanwhile, are very happy to argue that the state infringes on your liberties. Anderson quotes Republican politician Ken Cucinelli as saying “every time the government’s slice of the liberty pie grows, the citizens’ slice is reduced”. Anderson doesn’t accept that tradeoff, saying that limiting rights in one dimension can increase them in another, but at the very least she would like everyone making this argument to acknowledge that it ”generalizes to all governments, not not just governments run by the state“. By describing workplaces as governments, Anderson is encouraging our brains to start thinking of workplaces as something that takes away our freedom. Using the term “government” allows us to latch on to all our associations with that word, rather than Anderson having to build them up from scratch.
Anderson ends her book with a concrete set of policy proposals to prevent or limit the exploitation of workers by bosses. This is probably the section that benefits the most from Anderson’s familiarity with both philosophy and economics. Anderson is always sure to keep the economic perspective in mind when discussing policy solutions. It’s clear that she doesn’t want to propose solutions that depend on the goodwill of employers or leave companies vulnerable to being outcompeted by more ruthless competitors. It’s honestly a refreshing change of pace from a lot of the rest of our political discourse.
Anderson makes an analogy to political philosophy to suggest 4 ways to limit the power of employers:
Exit rights are the market’s solution to workplace dictatorships. Since workers always have the option to quit their job and find a new one, there are built-in limits on how exploitative employers can be. For this perspective, the best defense against exploitation is a strong economy that allows workers to quit feeling confident that they will be able to find a better job soon.
While Anderson acknowledges the role of exit rights, she does not consider them a sufficient check on workplace government. She highlights the proliferation of non-compete agreements, which have become so common that the standard employment contract for Jimmy John’s now includes one. She suggests the prohibition of non-compete agreements as a way to increase worker’s rights. Even without non-compete agreements, Anderson thinks that exit rights are a bad solution. She cites regions where a single employer dominates the labor market (monopsony), giving them outsize power over workers. She also cites cases where a whole industry suffers from the same ills, whether it’s sexual harassment in the restraunt industry or the decline of manufacturing and mining as examples where the advice to “just find a new job” isn’t feasible.
Anderson is skeptical of the ability of rule of law to provide sufficient protection to workers, in large part to economic considerations. While state laws and regulations can leave large amounts of autonomy for citizens, efficiency in workplaces requires that “the authority of managers over workers be both intensive .. and incompletely specified”. Managers must be able to “rapidly reassign different tasks to different workers to address new circumstances”. At the same time, Anderson notes that company policies and procedures can act as a form of rule of law for workplaces, and highlights the area as a topic for further study.
Anderson considers state regulations to be the equivalent of constitutional rights for workplaces. The Fair Labor Standards Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and anti-discrimination laws give workers protections both at work and during the hiring process. Anderson suggests that these rights could be strengthened by passing laws to ensure better conditions in the workplace and protect workers from being fired for any behaviors outside of the workplace. However, Anderson also considers this approach insufficient, as they would at most provide limits on the scope of workplace dictatorship, not remove it.
The solution Anderson likes best is giving workers a say in their workplace. Anderson is skeptical of worker-owned or worker-managed firms, saying that differing interests among workers may mean that these firms are always at a disadvantage compared to traditional corporations. For that reason, Anderson prefers to give workers a voice through collective bargaining. Anderson specifically highlights the German codetermination model. In this system, for companies with over 2,000 employees, just under half the seats on the board of directors are elected representatives of the workers.
Through these 4 approaches, Anderson argues that workplace government can be transformed from a private system, run by employers with no regard for the governed, into a public system that is accountable and responsive to the needs of the governed.
At this point, I’m guessing many readers will be howling at the screen, screaming that states and employers aren’t the same, even if you use the same word to describe them. For starters, it’s much easier to choose your employer than it is much harder to choose your state. Other than refugees and some strange edge cases, everyone is born being governed by a state, while no one is born being governed by an employer.
For a full-throated defense of the goodness of workplaces, we can turn to Tyler Cowen, who in his commentary argues strongly against the idea of “workplace as dictatorships”.
Cowen has two main arguments. The first is that the power of workplaces to exploit their workers is limited by the ability of employees to quit and seek employment elsewhere. The second is that actually, reducing freedoms at work could end up benefiting workers.
Cowen walks through some what I would consider pretty mainstream (for an economist) views on how the labor market is supposed to work. Workers are generally free to move between jobs, giving them a way out if the company abuses its dictatorial power. No, monopsony isn’t that big a deal, and even in cases where it does exist, it doesn’t automatically mean that workers will be exploited. No, Walmart and Amazon aren’t uniquely terrible, and in fact they often pay better and are more tolerant than small employers. So far, nothing you wouldn’t find from Matthew Yglesias or Noah Smith or any other neoliberal commentator.
The second, more out-there argument is that allowing workplaces to be dictatorships is actually to the benefit of workers. Cowen assumes that giving bosses arbitrary control over all aspects of the workplace maximizes profit (I think that Anderson would agree, but say that the effect is small), so that any increased freedoms for workers extract a cost that has to come from somewhere. It’s reasonable to think that workers, if given a choice between higher pay and protections against firing, might choose the higher pay. That said, I don’t think it’s obvious that higher pay would always win. Many countries have strong constraints on the ability of employees to fire workers, and for many people (myself included), protections against being fired are a major draw of working in the public sector. Cowen himself has strong workplace protections as a tenured professor.
Another way that workplace dictatorships can benefit workers is that, in many cases, workers are fired for speech because it made other workers uncomfortable. When James Damore was fired from Google, part of the stated justification was that his views were creating a hostile work environment for other employees.
As a result, Cowen argues, we shouldn’t be thinking about this philosophically at all. Instead, we should see workplace freedoms as one of many “perks” (his word) that can be used to attract workers. Far from being a philosophical nightmare, workplace freedoms are a perfectly ordinary commodity that should be traded on the open market.
For my part, I worry that Cowen is making this more complicated than it actually is. An overwhelming majority of American workers say that they like their job - 84% in 2021, 88% in 2015 when the book was written. If we accept Anderson’s statistic that 25% of employees think that their workplace is a dictatorship (I’m not sure that we should accept it, given that it comes from a single Zogby poll from 2008, but anyway), that means at least half of people who think their workplace is a dictatorship are at least moderately satisfied with their jobs.
If most workers like their jobs, that suggests that bosses are not exploiting their workers, and that the ability of workers to influence workplace policy through the job market is strong. Even Amazon, a company whose strict control over its employees has literally resulted in people dying or being hospitalized with heat stroke, is actually rated pretty highly by its workers (58% of Amazon workers said they would recommend the company to a friend).
From an economics perspective, we might say that employees are getting a raw deal, or that the market for labor is biased in favor of corporations, but it’s hard to say that workers are suffering under an oppressive dictatorship. The problem of workplace dictatorships is primarily a philosophical one, and one that Anderson has to do some pretty extensive legwork to justify.
The philosophical underpinnings of Anderson’s argument hinge on a description of three distinct types of liberty. That’s 50% more liberties than I knew about, and 200% more than show up in everyday discourse. While it’s not critical to understanding Anderson’s argument, I thought this concept was by far the most interesting and applicable part of the book, and as such, worth digging into.
According to Anderson:
There are at least three concepts of freedom: negative, positive, and republican. If you have negative freedom, no one is interfering with your actions. If you have positive freedom, you have a rich menu of options effectively accessible to you, given your resources. If you have republican freedom, no one is dominating you — you are subject to no one’s arbitrary, unaccountable will.
She then clarifies the distinction with some examples:
A lone person on a desert island has perfect negative and republican freedom, but virtually no positive freedom, because there is nothing to do but eat coconuts. An absolute monarch’s favorites may enjoy great negative and positive freedom if he has granted them generous privileges and well-paid sinecures. But they still lack republican freedom, since he can take their perks away and toss them into a dungeon on a whim. Citizens of prosperous social democracies have considerable positive and republican freedom, but are subject to numerous negative liberty constraints, in the form of complex state regulations that constrain their choices in numerous aspects of their lives.
The idea of republican freedom is new to me, and one that I’m still getting my head around. For an additional perspective on the idea, we turn to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on Republicanism.
Maybe the best way to understand republican freedoms is to contrast them with negative freedoms. If negative freedoms are generally associated with being left alone (see Anderson’s example of someone alone on a desert island as having perfect negative freedoms), then republican freedoms are associated with non-domination, or no one having the ability (even in theory) to exert arbitrary, unaccountable control over you.
The SEP gives the example of a colony of some far-off imperial power. It’s a good example, so I’m just going to quote it in full:
Now consider a second scenario. Imagine the colony of a great imperial power. Suppose that the colonial subjects have no political rights, and thus that the imperial power governs them unilaterally. But further suppose that the imperial power, for one reason or another, chooses not to exercise the full measure of its authority—that its policy towards the colony is one of more or less benign neglect. From the point of view of liberty as non-interference, we must conclude that the colonial subjects enjoy considerable freedom with respect to their government for, on a day-to-day basis, their government hardly ever interferes with them. Next suppose that the colonial subjects revolt with success, and achieve political independence. The former colony is now self-governing. We may imagine, however, that the new government is somewhat more active than its imperial predecessor, passing laws and instituting policies that interfere with people’s lives to a greater extent than formerly was the case. On the view of liberty as non-interference, we must therefore say that there has been a decline in freedom with independence. As in the first scenario, many find this counterintuitive. Surely, a nation that has secured its independence from colonial rule must have increased its political liberty.
Another way to put it is that negative freedoms are about outcomes while republican freedoms are about possibilities. If someone could decide on a whim to lock you up and throw away the key, then you are not free, even if this never happens. Republicanism is not concerned with probabilities. When a slave learns to predict her masters moods and thus avoid punishment, her well being is surely increased, but she has no more republican freedoms than she did before
Pictured: The royal court of Portugal, suffering from their lack of freedom. Via wikipedia
Unfortunately, both Anderson and the Stanford Encyclopedia are a little wishy-washy on why, exactly, a lack of republican freedoms is a problem. One strain of argument says that a lack of republican freedoms is bad because it often leads to other violations of liberty:
As a contingent empirical fact, extensive arbitrary power often brings extensive interferences in train (slave masters and absolute monarchs just can’t help meddling in their subjects’ affairs, we might suppose) [SEP, 2.1]
But in the end, many of the examples given in the SEP ultimately fall back on the intuitive idea that “it just feels bad”:
“If you understand the experience of exposure and vulnerability to another -- the experience of domination -- and if you can see what is awful about it, then you are well on your way to understanding republicanism”
“The appeal of the republican conception of political liberty as independence from the arbitrary power of a master is perhaps understandable.”
Anderson puts the same argument in more philosophical terms, asserting that “exercising autonomy … is a basic human need. ”, and not having it “demeans one’s agency”. Anderson additionally contrasts injuries suffered by firefighters and those suffered by Amazon warehouse employees, and concludes that because the injuries of the warehouse workers are unnecessary, they “inflict an expressive injury on the workers, over and above the material injury of illness”.
To flesh this out a little bit more, we could say that a lack of republican freedoms is a problem because it means that your other freedoms are never secure. As the British scientist Joseph Priestly said of the American Revolution “The man who submits to a tax of a penny … is liable to have the last penny he has extorted from him”.
While I can appreciate the philosophical ideas behind republican freedoms, I have trouble seeing how they might be important practically. Philosophically, it’s easy to construct scenarios where we need the idea of republican freedoms to prevent contradictory results. But practically, I feel like the harms of domination come not from the possibility of control, but from them actually doing it. In the American Revolution, it wasn’t the fact that Britain could tax the colonies that drove the revolution, it was that they actually did — if not, why did Britain have to pass so many taxes (the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Revenue Act, the Tea Act) before the revolution started? Surely Britain had proved that they could raise taxes after the first one. Similarly, at work, the harms that Anderson cites generally come from bosses actually giving cruel orders to their workers, not from the idea that they might do so.
I also find the idea that probabilities don’t matter to be pretty absurd. When I first started my current (cushy white-collar) job, I worried a fair amount about what my boss thought of me, and if today was going to be the day that she told me I was terrible and fired me. As time went on and that didn’t happen and I had a series of ok-to-good performance reviews, that anxiety decreased because I’m a good Bayesian and can update my views in response to new information. It’s the same reason that I worry more about getting wet when it’s cloudy out than when it’s sunny, because while sunshowers are possible, they’re much rarer than regular rain showers.
Lastly, I feel like the proponents of republicanism are a little too enamored of voice and democracy. While I vote in every election, I don’t feel like I’m in control of what the government does. If I’m fined for jaywalking or am investigated by CPS for letting my kids play in the park alone, it doesn’t feel any different because I had a miniscule role in deciding on those laws. It feels like me against the arbitrary, unaccountable power of the state. Going back to the example of the newly-freed colony, it seems totally reasonable that an individual might have had more liberties under the old imperial regime than they do in the new democratic one.
Academically, however, I find the idea of republican rights incredibly useful. In particular, I think it shows the differences between the US Democratic and Republican Parties better than any other single issue I’ve encountered.
While Private Government is focused exclusively on workplaces, Anderson’s arguments about republican rights and private government can be applied much more broadly. And basically any way you extend her arguments, you can find a Democratic party policy waiting for you.
Start with probably the closest analog to the employer/employee relationship: landlords and tenants. In most places in the country, landlords can exile tenants (i.e., decline to renew their lease) for any reason they choose, and tenants generally have no recourse. This arbitrary, unaccountable power is unjust, and we therefore need to pass tenant protection acts and rent control laws to ensure renter’s rights of non-domination.
Let’s go further - if you’re a journalist, a youtuber, or any sort of influencer, your livelihood is determined by algorithms built by a tech company, over which you have no control and no recourse if it changes. Whether it’s Facebook’s “pivot-to-video”, or getting banned from Twitter or YouTube for policy violations, you have no say in what those policies are, and often no course of action to contest the decisions. These algorithms now have arbitrary, unaccountable power over you. This is unjust, and we therefore need to break up Big Tech to prevent this domination.
Even more broadly - are billionaires inherently a problem for civic republicans? After all, if Warren Buffett wanted to, he could exert minute control over my life, by offering me enough money. Or by offering enough money to my neighbors. Republicanism says that this is a problem even if it never happens . We therefore need to raise taxes on the rich and pass a wealth tax to give the 99% the right of non-domination.
We can contrast this with the Republican party platform. I’m far less familiar with Republican policies, but my understanding is that much of the traditional Republican party platform is based on negative rights. The role of government, according to the Republican parties, is to protect individuals but otherwise leave them alone. Reading through the 2016 Republican Party Platform (there wasn’t one in 2020), most of the economic proposals focus on scaling back the role of government, reducing taxes, and repealing regulations. It’s not about using government to prevent exploitation, it’s about reducing the power of government to interfere in our lives.
I’m not saying that republican rights explain all the differences between the American Democratic and Republican parties. At most, I think it can only give insights into economic policies. I don’t think republican rights can explain the parties’s positions on the environment, abortion, or gay marriage. But since reading Private Government, I’ve been surprised just how often liberal arguments can be reframed in terms of republican rights.
Anderson’s proposed solutions to the problem of workplace dictatorships all seem like they’re taken straight out of the leftish playbook. I could imagine Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren arguing for any of them.
But at the same time, these aren’t the only solutions possible. Maybe the right response to bosses having too much power over employees is to make the employer-employee relationship less formal, less structural. Maybe health care benefits shouldn’t be tied to the employer at all, and instead should be purchased in an open market. Maybe instead of agreeing to work 9 am - 5pm, Monday-Friday, workers could work when there was work available and they were available. In other words, maybe we should all become part of the gig economy.
Would this solve the problem of workplace dictatorships? On the one hand, gig workers can still be exiled (i.e., barred from the platform). On the other hand, since there’s nothing keeping gig workers from being on several platforms, exile should be a much smaller deal. There’s no direct boss to require you to come in on weekends and wax their car, but there is an opaque algorithm that assigns you jobs and rates at unpredictable intervals.
So maybe instead we should be figuring out how to make everyone a small business owner. That might mean lowering taxes, or giving tax breaks specifically to small businesses. It might also mean radically reducing the number of state regulations, to allow people to start small businesses without having to wade through 2000 pages of legal jargon.
Or maybe instead we should cut to the chase. The real problem is that all of us are dependent on employment for our livelihoods. There is no solution to the issue of terrible bosses without making us independent from work. The best solution, and possibly the only solution, to workplace dictatorships is a universal basic income. By guaranteeing people some income regardless of their job, UBI would dramatically lessen the pain of being fired, allowing all workers to quit their jobs as soon as workplace conditions deteriorated.
I’m not sure how much this is a knock against Anderson specifically, versus how much it is a general problem with philosophy. After all, philosophy has a long history of making high-level, intellectual arguments that are difficult to translate into concrete policies. Some might even say that’s philosophy’s whole thing. After all, Bentham proposed that we should take the action that best increases pleasure and reduces pain, and 200+ years later, we’re still arguing how to translate that idea into practice.
Overall, I was disappointed with Private Government. While it offers a fresh perspective on issues of fairness in the workplace, I’m not convinced that Anderson’s approach is especially illuminating. At many times it seems to prioritize the abstract potential for harm over concrete instances of it. While I would agree that work is often terrible, especially for low-income workers, it’s hard to square that intuition with data showing overwhelming majorities are satisfied with their job. I think any discussion of the evils of the workplace needs to grapple with that paradox.
At the same time, I’m grateful to Anderson for introducing me to the concept of republican rights. It’s one of those concepts that I never would have come up with on my own, but once you know about it, you start seeing everywhere. For that alone, I’m glad to have read it.
Maybe the best way to think about Private Government is as an attempt to answer the question “how much power does a worker have?” After reading Private Government, I’m mostly convinced that this question doesn’t have an easy answer. I think Anderson’s philosophical approach misses the mark by assuming that because some workers are exploited, all workers all (or at least could be). At the same time, I think a purely economic approach would also fail, but focusing exclusively on dollars and cents rather than emotions and social dynamics. Even directly asking people about their workplace may not be sufficient, because we may just learn about individual employers relative to each other, and not about employment as a whole. I don’t know what the right answer to the question is, but I appreciate Elizabeth Anderson for asking it. I just wish she had provided a better answer.
