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The U. of Michigan prof joins us to discuss Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (2017) and “What Is the Point of Equality?” (1999).
What is government? Liz points to the historical use of the term to refer to not just the state, but any organized power relations, including the relation between a firm and its employees. What is it for something to be private? The term is relative, meaning that something is not private in itself but private with regard to some people: it's not their concern. A state can be a public government if it's nominally responsive to the concerns of the people, i.e., if it's representative. A tyranny would be a private government.
With these terms in place, Liz wants to describe companies as private governments, and hence we should use the scholarship of political science to evaluate them and try to make them more just, more accountable to the people whose lives they affect.
The employer-employee relationship is defined by law as by default "at will" employment. The workers have no right to determine anything what they do within the workplace or how they do it, and even outside of work hours, employers can restrict employee speech or other activities, even if these restrictions don't have a work-related rationale.
The book is thus a critique of the libertarian ethos driving contemporary political discussions that resents government power but fails to recognize that most of us are living under private dictatorships, that our employers have a much greater day-to-day influence over our lives than the state, and we should be just as defensive of our autonomy against that type of power.
We think of employment relations as voluntary due to the right of exit (you can always quit), but our relationship to our employers is very different from our relationship to a vendor we shop from. Since virtually all employers are private dictatorships (and Liz includes working within a government agency within this description), the chance to choose among these hardly constitutes freedom. And realistically, for most workers, the power imbalance is such that the worst that a worker can do (quit), is more of a hardship for the worker than for the employer.
The book goes into historical depth about Adam Smith, Thomas Paine and others who were champions of economic liberty and saw this as liberating in what we would now consider a "leftist" manner. Smith, for instance, thought that breaking up the guild system and getting rid of tariffs and other barriers to economic activity would result in nearly everyone being his or her own boss. He just didn't know about the impending industrial revolution and how that would drive economic power to centralize in large firms. Smith argued for universal public education, and Paine argued for a universal social insurance.
Liz stresses that this book is about the philosophical task of uncovering the concepts involved here and why our current ideology makes us blind to both problems and solutions. She is not herself making concrete policy proposals. But still, you can see in a general way what sort of solutions are possible here: More representation of workers' interests within company decision-making, a change in the legislation that currently establishes the relationship as "at will" by default (i.e., this is not a matter of government intervention in a heretofore private relationship; the relationship is already constituted by law, and Liz just wants that law to improve), removing health care from the responsibility of employers through a public program, potentially other measures to increase the feasibility of exit from a bad employment situation for low-skilled workers like a universal basic income, and measures such as campaign finance reform to keep the rich from exerting undue political power and so corrupting public decision-making in their favor.
Liz claims that the argument (represented within Liz's book itself by a response essay by economist Tyler Cowen) that moving power in these ways more into the hands of workers will doom economic growth and hence be bad for utilitarian reasons over the long term, is simply not supported by empirical evidence. You can hear Liz being grilled by libertarian-leaning economist Russ Roberts in this episode of EconTalk.
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Will y’all reach out to Wendy Brown Professor of Political Theory at Berkeley. Her insights are above and beyond anyone that’s speaking out currently.
Also the questionable and downright fraudulent practices our States and local municipalities use to bond their subjects to debt is an access point to the historical truth of Neoliberal finance and the loss of the commons.
It maybe the only point to legal action that the public has. Contract Laws are very clear on these matters and the same standard must be enforced in our Country.
I would also like to say that your work has really meant a lot to me.
What philosophical insights do you find in her work that others miss?
Actually listening Mrs. Anderson I think Mrs. Brown maybe a little to cynical with respect to her attitude of the commons being able to create a policy model for government to implement. However pushing it through our corrupt system would literally take a grassroots movement that has to be on the same page regarding the policy model and rolling back Institutional power.
Interesting this question of what ideologies (models of systems in general really) afford us in terms of grasping situations and what they cover up ( or just leave out), leaving aside outright duplicity/propaganda I wonder if there is anything that can be said in general about such phenomena or it we have to take it case by case (considering the particularities of interests and contexts), and if case by case is this the end of Philosophy or can there be a philosophy of such cases?
http://the-orb.org/2018/03/12/genealogical-anxiety-an-interview-with-amia-srinivasan/
Anderson is really onto something here.
In the media all we hear is that “free markets are great” and “end bureaucracy” and “corporations are good for YOU” — all quite aside from the situation we actually live in. Corporations funnel money to inflated middle managements and CEO’s. Workers who actually make the corporation function are disposable.
We’re convinced this is ok because we all get nice doodads like phones while things that matter (like healthcare and education) are gutted for us.
I like David Graeber’s books— particularly “Utopia of Rules” which tracks the ways bureaucratic conventions actually came from “private” enterprise and demonstrates that the lines between public and private are quite blurred and we lack a language for addressing it aside from corporate propaganda distracting us.