Consider some facts about how employers today control their workers. Walmart prohibits employees from exchanging casual remarks while on duty, calling this “time theft.”1 Apple inspects the personal belongings of their retail workers, who lose up to a half-hour of unpaid time every day as they wait in line to be searched.2 Tyson prevents its poultry workers from using the bathroom. Some have been forced to urinate on themselves, while their supervisors mock them.3 About half of U.S. employees have been subject to suspicionless drug screening by their employers.4 Millions are pressured by their employers to support particular political causes or candidates.5
If the U.S. government imposed such regulations on us, we would rightly protest that our constitutional rights were being violated. But American workers have no such rights against their bosses. Even speaking out against such constraints can get them fired. So most keep silent.
American public discourse is also mostly silent about the regulations employers impose on their workers. We have the language of fairness and distributive justice to talk about low wages and inadequate benefits. We know how to talk about the Fight for $15, whatever side of this issue we are on. But we don’t have good ways to talk about the way bosses rule workers’ lives.
Instead, we talk as if workers aren’t ruled by their bosses. We are told that unregulated markets make us free, and that the only threat to our liberties is the state. We are told that in the market, all transactions are voluntary. We are told that, since workers freely enter and exit the labor contract, they are perfectly free under it: bosses have no more authority over workers than customers have over their grocer.
Labor movement activists have long argued that this is wrong. In ordinary markets, a vendor can sell their product to a buyer, and once the transaction is complete, each walks away as free from the other as before. Labor markets are different. When workers sell their labor to an employer, they have to hand themselves over to their boss, who then gets to order them around. The labor contract, instead of leaving the seller as free as before, puts the seller under the authority of their boss. Since the decline of the labor movement, however, we don’t have effective ways to talk about this fact, and hence about what kinds of authority bosses should and shouldn’t have over their workers.
These lectures aim to answer two questions. First, why do we talk as if workers are free at work, and that the only threats to individual liberty come from the state? Second, what would be a better way to talk about the ways employers constrain workers’ lives, which can open up discussion about how the workplace could be designed to be more responsive to workers’ interests?
My focus in both lectures is on ideology. An ideology is an abstract model that people use to represent and cope with the social world. Ideologies simplify the world, disregarding many of its features. An ideology is good if it helps us navigate it successfully. To help us, it must identify the normatively important features of the world, and the main causal connections between these features to which people can respond, enabling them to discover effective means to promoting their goals. Ideologies also help us orient our current evaluations of the world, highlighting what we think is already good or bad in it. Finally, they are vehicles for our hopes and dreams. A model may expose problems in our current world but also identify the causes of those problems such that, if those causes were removed or counteracted, we could achieve a better world. In other words, ideologies also function as ideals, offering us not only representations of the world as it is, but as it attractively could be if certain actions were undertaken.
I have so far explained what ideologies are in the nonpejorative sense of this term. We can hardly do without them. In personal experience, we have contact only with a small part of the world. To enable more comprehensive evaluation and planning, we need to represent aspects of the world that are not immediately experienced. And even the part that we do experience we filter through our ideologies to get a sense of what that experience means. We need to simplify to enable us to focus on the important things.
These facts about our cognitive limitations give rise to the danger that our models of the world may be ideological in the pejorative sense of this term. This occurs when our ideologies mask problematic features of our world, or cast those features in a misleadingly positive light, or lack the normative concepts needed to identify what is problematic about them, or misrepresent the space of possibilities so as to obscure better options, the means to realizing them, or their merits. Of course, no model can capture all normatively relevant features of the world. If it misses only relatively small, random, and idiosyncratic features, we should not condemn it. When these features are structurally embedded in the social world, so as to systematically undermine the interests of identifiable groups of people in serious or gratuitous ways, we need to revise our model to attend to them and identify means to change them. This is harder to do when the interests of those who dominate public discourse are already served by the dominant ideology.
Lecture 1 answers my first question—why we talk as if workers are free at work—by delving into the history of free market ideology. I argue that originally, many pro-market thinkers were sensitive to the liberty interests of workers, and had reasons to believe that free markets would help them, by liberating them from subordination to employers and other powerful organizations. They vested their hopes in a model that predicted that freeing up markets overall would reduce labor markets to minor features of a world in which most adults—at least if they were men—were self-employed. The Industrial Revolution destroyed those hopes, but not the idea of market society on which those hopes rested. The result is that we are working with a model of our world that omits the relations between employers and employees within which most of us work.
Lecture 2 corrects this omission by offering a way to understand and talk about what the employment relation is: it is a form of government, in which bosses govern workers. Most workplace governments in the United States are dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don’t merely govern workers; they dominate them. This is what I call private government. I offer this model as a critical tool to help us focus on important and problematic features of our world that affect the vital interests of workers, which the dominant ideology omits. I don’t offer a blueprint for a better constitution of workplace government. I offer a way of talking about the workplace, within which we can articulate how workers’ interests are affected by the power employers wield over them, and how alternative constitutions of workplace government could be designed to be more responsive to their interests and more respectful of their dignity and autonomy.
I wish to thank Princeton University for inviting me to deliver the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 2015, and the Tanner Lectures corporation for supporting my work. Don Herzog read the first draft of my lectures and provided very helpful comments that enabled me to polish my lectures for delivery. My commentators David Bromwich, Tyler Cowen, Ann Hughes, and Niko Kolodny, along with two anonymous reviewers for Princeton University Press, supplied splendid comments that enabled me to sharpen my ideas and clarify them for a broader readership. Alex Gourevitch, Stephen Macedo, and my editor, Rob Tempio, also made helpful suggestions. I thank them all for being such wonderful interlocutors.