Spangler Blog Post "Funkadelic" 14

In chapter two of Private Government, Anderson outlines the way in which the ‘private sphere’ of employee-employer interaction is actually a form of private government and has the potential to be abused and mistreated in similar ways to public government. She describes much of firm-ruled private government as a “communist dictatorship,” permeating most of the modern workplace (39). She highlights all the ways that firms have taken on authoritarian hierarchical tendencies since the industrial revolution. She even acknowledges the fact that “the key to the superior efficiency of hierarchy is the open-ended authority of managers,” (52). It’s interesting that she compares the workplace to a communist dictatorship when one of the world’s current economic superpowers, China, is run exactly like that. While the benefits debatable of authoritarianism’s benefits to productivity, one cannot deny the striking similarity of Anderson’s “modern workplace” and China’s entire state, both in their infringements of rights and baffling productive power.

The primary difference between our society and China’s is the amount of freedom that money grants the individual. If the economic power granted to every employee was sufficient to grant them freedoms against their employer, then there would be no issue. Where I think that Anderson’s account is lacking is its failure to discuss the importance of money in all this, because that is, on my view, where the key distinction between one’s relationship to a firm and one’s relationship to a government. She regularly notes the analogy of being able to ‘fire’ one’s employer in the same way they fire you by leaving the firm is a lacking one, with which I would agree (54). But the same can be said of government; if I try to ‘fire’ my government by not paying taxes because I believe that it is not correctly allocating its resources or refusing to address injustice, that action is futile and will likely have no effect on the system as a whole. The key difference between this and the employer-employee relationship is that the employer is subsidizing you for your services, and, as Sen notes, there are substantive freedoms granted by increased economic power.

Money is incentive in a tangible form and thus we cannot, most of the time, take employment agreements in the social-contract-esque manner that Anderson does. She often alludes to the fact that it is often those who are working low-end jobs that suffer the most infringements. I take this to show that the wages being received by the employees are not granting them sufficient economic freedom to counterbalance their reduction of republican freedom. If there were brackets for how much an employer could expect of its employees, based on the financial power they gain from working with the firm, then I believe that there would be great improvements in these relations. As Anderson highlights, much of the dictatorial power of the employer comes from their ability to financially dominate the employee in any lawsuit or charge (56). If the number of rights that could be ‘given up’ in a working contract were proportional to the wage and salary, it would encourage employers to give higher wages to more grueling and selective jobs. Lower wage jobs would be much more rigorously protected to ensure that employees could not be abused due to their low socio-economic status and lack of employment options.