Author’s Preface
1. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2008), 157.
2. Frlekin v. Apple, Inc., 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 151937 (N.D. Cal., Nov. 7, 2015) (dismissing on summary judgment employees’ claim that Apple violated minimum wage law in failing to pay them for time spent waiting to be inspected, notwithstanding the law’s definition of “hours worked” as “the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer,” because during that time, employees are not allowed to work).
3. Oxfam America, No Relief: Denial of Bathroom Breaks in the Poultry Industry (Washington, D.C., 2016), 2, https://www.oxfamamerica.org/static/media/files/No_Relief_Embargo.pdf.
4. William Becker, Salimah Meghani, Jeanette Tetrault, and David Fiellin, “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Report of Drug Testing Practices at the Workplace Level in the U.S.,” American Journal on Addictions 23, no. 4 (2014): 357–62.
5. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Paul Secunda, “Citizens Coerced: A Legislative Fix for Workplace Political Intimidation Post–Citizens United,” UCLA Law Review 64 (2016): 1, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2740649.
Chapter 1
1. Of course, this usage of the term “left” is anachronistic. But it serves to fix ideas. I hasten to add that some egalitarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—notably, the Diggers and Rousseau—rejected market society. My focus in this lecture is on those who embraced it.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), I.ii.2.
3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, edited by Frederick Engels, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 195–96.
4. This is not just cynicism on Smith’s part. He points to a transcultural social fact, that every gift implies a debt that, until reciprocated in kind, subordinates the recipient to the giver. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift, translated by I. Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967); William Miller, Humiliation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 1.
5. Marx, Capital, 195.
6. Thus, the so-called Adam Smith problem—the purported tension between Smith’s moral theory, founded on sympathy with others, and his economics, supposedly founded on pure egoism, is dissolved.
7. “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, III.iv.10.
8. On this point, I fully agree with Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 11, 29, 51.
9. For the first statement of the army’s program, see “Agreement of the People,” in The English Levellers, edited by Andrew Sharp (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92–101. “Agitators”—Leveller officers chosen by their men—debated this proposal with Cromwell and Ireton at Putney in 1647. The Putney debates offer some of the most riveting reading in the history of political thought, at a level of intellectual depth and seriousness vastly exceeding contemporary public discourse. See “Putney Debates,” in Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, ed. A.S.P. Woodhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 1–124.
10. “Putney Debates, 29 October 1647,” Puritanism and Liberty, 75.
11. John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Thomas Prince, and Richard Overton, “An Agreement of the Free People of England, 1 May 1649,” in The Levellers: Miscellaneous Writings, ed. James Otteson, vol. 4 of The Levellers: Overton, Walwyn and Lilburne (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003), articles XXX, XVIII, XX, XIX.
12. John Lilburne, “Englands Birth-Right Justified,” in Works of John Lilburne, edited by Otteson, vol. 3 of The Levellers, 62–64.
13. John Lilburne, “Londons Liberty in Chains Discovered,” in Works of John Lilburne, 175–77.
14. William Walwyn, “For a Free Trade,” in Works of William Walwyn, vol. 2 of The Levellers, edited by Otteson, 399–405.
15. It would be anachronistic to attribute such ideas to any seventeenth-century thinkers because the modern notion of distributive justice was not invented until the end of the eighteenth century. Samuel Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
16. See “The Root and Branch Petition (1640),” Documents Illustrative of English Church History, edited by Henry Gee and William John Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 537–45, http://history.hanover.edu/texts/engref/er97.html, a contemporary document calling for an end to the church’s powers in these respects.
17. Thomas Leng, “‘His Neighbours Land Mark’: William Sykes and the Campaign for ‘Free Trade’ in Civil War England,” Historical Research 86, no. 232 (2013): 230–52.
18. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1st ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), ch. 15.
19. For some legal complexities in the early modern era, see Karen Pearlston, “Review of Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 44, no. 1 (2006): 219–21; for documentation of women’s contestation of husbands’ authority, along with contemporary cultural recognition of its limits, see Don Herzog, Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
20. Recall John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), §77: “The first society was between man and wife, which gave beginning to that between parents and children; to which, in time, that between master and servant came to be added … and make up but one family, wherein the master or mistress of it had some sort of rule proper to a family.” Locke here includes employees in the family, and represents it as a kind of government, which, in the state of nature, is not essentially patriarchal. I shall return to Locke’s feminism later in this lecture.
21. See Blackstone, Commentaries, ch. 14; Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) (documenting the early modern English law of master and servant, and how it continued to govern U.S. employment relations well into the nineteenth century).
22. See Don Herzog, Happy Slaves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), ch. 1.
23. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).
24. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha: Or the Natural Power of Kings (London: W. Davis, 1680).
25. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 155.
26. See Saint Augustine, City of God, translated by Marcus Dods (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1888), XIX.15.
27. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, chs. 3, 4.
28. Herzog, Happy Slaves, ch. 1.
29. See Hill, World Turned Upside Down, esp. ch. 8; Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011), esp. ch. 5. Thus arose the endlessly repeated conservative charge that egalitarians believe in the perfectibility of human beings. Absurd as applied to today’s believers in an egalitarian distribution of income and wealth, democracy, and other secular egalitarian doctrines, the charge makes sense as applied to historical Christian millennialist egalitarian social movements, which needed to refute the authoritarian doctrine of original sin.
30. Samuel Torshell, The Womans Glorie: A Treatise, First, Asserting the Due Honour of That Sexe, by Manifesting That Women Are Capable of the Highest Improvements and Instancing Severall Examples of Womens Eminencies …, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for John Bellamy, 1650), 11.
31. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 310–12.
32. John Lilburne, “The Free-Man’s Freedom Vindicated,” Works of John Lilburne, 105–6.
33. Elizabeth Chidley, “Petition of Women, Affecters and Approvers of the Petition of Sept. 11, 1648 (5th May 1649),” in Puritanism and Liberty, 367.
34. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 312.
35. “Root and Branch Petition,” articles 10, 12, 24.
36. Michael Levy, “Freedom, Property and the Levellers: The Case of John Lilburne,” Western Political Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1983): 116–133, here 120.
37. See Walwyn, “For a Free Trade,” 403–4 (complaining that the burdens of guild government lie “more heavily upon the more moderate Traders” who suffer from the guilds’ “many unreasonable Orde Oathes, fines, Censures” and that they spend too much time “in Courts & meetings about others affaires”).
38. Leng, “‘His Neighbours Land Mark,’” 233, 236.
39. Thomas Johnson, A Plea for Free-Mens Liberties: Or the Monopoly of the Eastland Merchants (London, 1646), 2, 3, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88–2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99861268.
40. Walwyn, “For a Free Trade,” 403.
41. Ibid., 402, 401.
42. Johnson, Plea, 4.
43. “Reason being the fountain of all honest laws, gives to every man propriety and liberty; propriety of interest, freedom of enjoyment and improovement to his own advantage … those who have bereft us of our liberty, have made bold with our propriety” (ibid.).
44. Jacqueline Stevens, “The Reasonableness of Locke’s Majority: Property Rights, Consent, and Resistance in the Second Treatise,” Political Theory 24, no. 3 (1996): 423–63.
45. As Jeremy Waldron decisively demonstrates, in God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 2.
46. “As justice gives every man a title to the product of his honest industry … so charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise: and a man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity to force him to become his vassal, by with-holding that relief God requires him to afford to the wants of his brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and with a dagger at his throat, offer his death or slavery.” John Locke, “First Treatise of Government,” The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, 12th ed. (London: Rivington, 1824), §42.
47. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, III.4.4 (emphasis added).
48. Ibid., III.4.5–8.
49. Ibid., III.4.9.
50. Ibid., III.4.10.
51. Ibid., III.4.11–15.
52. Ibid., III.2.6.
53. Ibid., III.2.7.
54. Ibid., III.2.8–13.
55. Ibid., III.4.19.
56. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, V.1.E.32. Joint-stock corporations tend to fail because their governance structure cannot solve the principal–agent problem of holding directors accountable to investors. Surveying the history of joint-stock corporations, Smith finds that directors lack expertise, initiative, and energy because they are risking other people’s money, and allow employees to squander the corporation’s resources (ibid., V.1.E.18, 27).
57. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, I.ix.20. It follows that, while a free market economy would be more unequal than primitive society, it would be far more equal than a feudal or mercantilist economy. For further support of the view that Smith’s vision of a free market society has egalitarian tendencies, see Deborah Boucoyannis, “The Equalizing Hand: Why Adam Smith Thought the Market Should Produce Wealth without Steep Inequality,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 4 (2013): 1051–70.
58. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, I.1.3.
59. Other Enlightenment figures shared this view: “It is easy to prove that fortunes tend naturally toward equality, and that excessive differences of wealth either cannot exist or must promptly cease, if the civil laws do not establish artificial ways of perpetuating and amassing such fortunes, and if freedom of commerce and industry eliminate the advantage that any prohibitive law or fiscal privilege gives to acquired wealth.” Antoine-Nicholas Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (Chicago: G. Langer, 2009), 10th epoch.
60. Medicine was so unreliable that one might be better off not being able to afford a doctor’s services. No one could travel in comfort or speed at any expense. The penny press made news available to all. Theaters offered cheap seats. No wonder Smith disparaged the quest for great wealth as not worth the trouble. See The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.3.2.1, III.3.31, IV.1.6.8.
61. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, III.4.16.
62. So was the fact that the hope was predicated on mass, violent expropriation of land from its former possessors. In contrast to slavery, which received substantial attention from many Euro-American egalitarians, Native American claims received little attention.
63. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 89; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 32, 43–44.
64. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Part the Second: Combining Principle and Practice, 8th ed. (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792), 7–8.
65. Ibid., 59n*.
66. Ibid., 60.
67. See for example, Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2, 82; Thomas Paine, The Crisis: In Thirteen Numbers. Written during the Late War. By the Author of Common Sense (Albany, NY: Charles and George Webster, 1792), no. 3, 40.
68. Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2, 150.
69. Foner, Paine and Revolutionary America, 183–200.
70. See ibid., ch. 5, for an extended discussion of Paine’s thought and activities regarding price controls.
71. Ibid., 190.
72. Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2, 16.
73. Ibid., 69.
74. Ibid., 3–4.
75. Ibid., 113–31.
76. The Republican Party, however, has not followed Paine in other respects: his critique of Christianity (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason [Boston: Thomas Hall, 1794]); his feminism (see Eileen Hunt Botting, “Thomas Paine amidst the Early Feminists,” in Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, edited by Ian Shapiro and Jane Calvert [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014], 630–54); his opposition to the death penalty; his opposition to military spending, war, and imperialism. Most of all, Paine, who experienced poverty for much of his life, had profound sympathy for the poor and never disparaged them as lazy, lacking enterprise, or corrupted by “welfare.” As we shall see, he argued that everyone had a right to sufficient income to avoid poverty.
77. Craig Calhoun, The Roots of Radicalism: Tradition, the Public Sphere, and Early Nineteenth-Century Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
78. Paine, Rights of Man, Part 2, 11.
79. Ibid., 63, 100.
80. Ibid., 92–98.
81. Ibid., 67–69.
82. Ibid., 105–6. When Paine complained that people on government pay were parasites, he was not speaking of magistrates, parish officials, or other government workers who perform actual public services for modest pay. He was complaining of the court, and of sinecures. Genuine civil servants, by contrast, are entitled to reasonable pay (ibid., 54, 72, 119).
83. Ibid., 4, 77–80, 87, 100–102, 155. In contrast to the U.S. Republican Party today, Paine opposed regressive consumption taxes and supported taxes on inheritances and bonds.
84. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Edinburgh: Eighteenth Century Collections Online; Gale, 1776), 33.
85. Paine expressed his objection to wage controls, and preference for market wages, in an era when regulations set maximum wages.
86. Thomas Paine, “Agrarian Justice,” The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. III (1791–1804), edited by Moncure Daniel Conway (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1894), 322–44.
87. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, with a new introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), is the indispensable work on this subject.
88. James Henry Hammond, “Speech in the Senate, 35th Congress, Session 1,” Congressional Globe, March 4, 1858: 71.
89. Abraham Lincoln, “Annual Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, at Milwaukee, September 30, 1859,” Abraham Lincoln, Complete Works, edited by John Nicolay and John Hay, vol. 1 (New York: Century Co., 1859), 581.
90. “There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.… The hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account to-day; and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow. Advancement—improvement in condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.” Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on Free Labor,” Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 3, edited by Roy Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1859), 463.
91. Foner, Free Soil, Kindle loc. 332–37.
92. Ibid., Kindle loc. 434.
93. Ibid., Kindle loc. 377–80.
94. Lincoln, “Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society,” 581–82.
95. Lincoln may have baked it into the ideological infrastructure of his party. A century and a half after his pronouncement, Eric Cantor, then Republican House majority leader, tweeted on Labor Day 2012: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success,” https://twitter.com/ericcantor/status/242654833218293760. Cantor appears to be viscerally incapable of recognizing how a day could be dedicated to honoring wage laborers.
96. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 508–16.
97. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Knopf, 1984), 78. See, for example, Jeremy Bentham, Pauper Management Improved: Particularly by Means of an Application of the Panopticon Principle of Construction (London: R. Baldwin, 1812).
98. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 97.
99. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 2, V.1.F.50.
100. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments,
I.3.3.1.
Chapter 2
1. This is true of the corporate form. Legally, the corporation, not the shareholders, owns the firm’s assets. In a partnership, an oligarchy governs and owns all the assets.
2. R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4, no. 16 (1937): 386–405.
3. Eugene Volokh, “Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity: Statutory Protection against Employer Retaliation” (2012), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2174776.
4. Ken Cuccinelli, The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), 52, 231.
5. This may sound like a positivist account of law. But government need not rule by law—that is, general rules of conduct. It can rule by orders or decrees, issued ad hoc to particular persons for particular occasions. I take no stand here regarding a positivist account of law.
6. Max Weber, Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 56.
7. John Adams, “Letter to Abigail, April 14, 1776,” Letters of John Adams Addressed to His Wife, edited by Charles Adams, vol. 1 (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown, 1841), 96–97.
8. I draw on Herzog, Household Politics, 89–94, who spends more time distinguishing the entailments of privacy than I do here.
9. Here I focus on “external” conceptions of positive freedom in terms of opportunity sets within individuals’ budget constraints, legal permissions, and other external conditions. I set aside psychological notions of positive freedom, such as freedom from addictions, compulsions, or other motives with which the agent does not identify.
10. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5.
11. See, for example, Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), linking private property to political and not just economic freedom.
12. Joyce Shaw Peterson, American Automobile Workers, 1900–1933 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 57, 72.
13. Natasha Singer, “Health Plan Penalty Ends at Penn State,” New York Times, September 19, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/business/after-uproar-penn-state-suspends-penalty-fee-in-wellness-plan.html.
14. Coase, “Nature of the Firm.”
15. Oliver Williamson, “Markets and Hierarchies: Some Elementary Considerations,” American Economic Review 63, no. 2 (1973): 316–25, here 322.
16. Coase, “Nature of the Firm,” 388.
17. Ibid., 391.
18. Only fifteen states do not allow a disclaimer to count as a per se defense against a charge of wrongful discharge under an implied-contract exception to employment-at-will; twenty-two states allow disclaimers and limit impliedcontract exceptions to written documents; thirteen states do not recognize any implied-contract exception to employment-at-will. Charles Muhl, “The Employment-at-Will Doctrine: Three Major Exceptions,” Monthly Labor Review, January 2001: 5.
19. Nelson v. Knight, Iowa Supreme Court, No. 11-1857, July 12, 2013.
20. Neela Banerjee, “Ohio Miners Say They Were Forced to Attend Romney Rally,” Los Angeles Times, August 29, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/29/news/la-pn-miners-romney-rally-20120829/.
21. Dugan Arnett, “Nightmare in Maryville: Teens’ Sexual Encounter Ignites a Firestorm against Family,” Kansas City Star, October 12, 2013, http://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/maryville/article329412/Nightmare-in-Maryville-Teens%E2%80%99-sexual-encounter-ignites-a-firestorm-against-family.html.
22. Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” American Economic Review 62, no. 5 (1972): 777–95, here 777.
23. Even the addition of immigration rights to new governments—something workers do not enjoy at work—does not dissolve their authority. Within the European Union (EU), citizens are guaranteed the right not only to exit but also to enter other member states. Yet this has not eliminated the authority of EU member states.
24. Michael Jensen and William Meckling, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure,” Journal of Financial Economics 3 (1976): 305–60, here 310.
25. John Tomasi, Free Market Fairness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 23, 77, 81.
26. This tendency facilitates a common abuse of labor law, in which employers pretend that their employees are independent contractors, to avoid minimum wage, maximum hours, benefits and safety regulations; to shift the burden of employment taxes on their workers; and to force them to pay for equipment and uniforms. The court test in such cases is always whether the employer exercises control over the worker. See, for example, Alexander v. FedEx Ground Package System, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 16585 (9th Cir. Aug. 27, 2014), which ruled that FedEx misclassified thousands of its California truck drivers as independent contractors.
27. Josiah Wedgwood, a pioneer of the Industrial Revolution in promoting worker discipline in his pottery factory, was also a major abolitionist.
28. Blackstone, Commentaries, ch. 14.
29. Karen Orren tells the story for the United States in Belated Feudalism. Similar developments took place in other common law countries and the rest of Western Europe during the nineteenth century. An important lesson of her work is that some nineteenth-century labor law legal doctrines in the United States and England that are thought to be novelties of laissez-faire free contract ideology—for example, that an employer could confiscate a worker’s entire accrued wage for the slightest insubordination—were in fact merely continuations of English labor laws established in the feudal era. In other words, laissez faire at the level of market relations left feudal authoritarianism intact at the level of intrafirm relations.
30. Robert Allen, “Engels’ Pause: A Pessimist’s Guide to the British Industrial Revolution,” Explorations in Economic History 46, no. 4 (2009): 418–35.
31. Under employment-at-will, the legal reach of employers’ authority extended to the entire day, as it still does today except when expressly limited by law or contract, or, in fifteen states, by implied contract. However, for practical purposes, the separation of the workplace from the home substantially raised the costs and reduced the benefits to many employers of reaching that far, and thereby opened up room for workers to enjoy freedom from their bosses when off duty.
32. As I argue in Elizabeth Anderson, “Equality and Freedom in the Workplace: Recovering Republican Insights,” Social Philosophy and Policy 31, no. 2 (2015): 48–69. One consequence of this point is that the traditional libertarian argument that the state should simply stop “interfering” with the economy is misguided: it is like saying that the commissioner of baseball should stop interfering with the game by promulgating its rules. It turns out that to facilitate efficient cooperation at the vast scales of modern developed economies, the rules have to be remarkably complex. This opens up room both for democratic control in the public interest and for regulatory capture.
33. For the classic exposition, see Blackstone, Commentaries, ch. 15.
34. As I argue in Anderson, “Equality and Freedom in the Workplace.”
35. See, for example, Sidney Pollard, “Factory Discipline in the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 16, no. 2 (1963): 254–71. He notes the “deliberate or accidental modelling of many [factory] works on workhouses and prisons, a fact well known to the working population” (254). I stress that it did not take Marxists or socialists to see the problem in the terms in which I have presented them. American labor republicans also understood it. See Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
36. Most famously, the inability of comprehensive centralized planning to use the information needed to allocate resources efficiently. See Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35 (1945): 519–30.
37. Those of you who are adjunct or contingent faculty, on the other hand, understand firsthand what I am talking about.
38. Workplace Democracy Association, “Zogby Poll: As Independence Day Nears, Workplace Democracy Association Survey Finds One in Four Working Americans Describe Their Employer as a ‘Dictatorship,’” June 23, 2008, https://workplacedemocracy.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/workplace-democracy-survey/.
39. Pollock v. Williams, 322 U.S. 4, at 18 (1944). In this opinion, Justice Jackson, writing for the Supreme Court, struck down a Florida statute criminalizing failure to specifically perform a labor contract on which an advance was made, as contrary to the Thirteenth Amendment prohibition on involuntary servitude. Note the late date of the decision. Risa Goluboff, “The Thirteenth Amendment and a New Deal for Civil Rights,” in The Promises of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment, edited by Alexander Tsesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 119–37, explains how Jackson’s reasoning reflected New Deal (positive liberty) rather than Lochnerera freedom of contract (negative liberty) principles.
40. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 331; Walter Block, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Inalienability: A Critique of Rothbard, Barnett, Smith, Kinsella, Gordon, and Epstein,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 39–85; Stephen Kershnar, “A Liberal Argument for Slavery,” Journal of Social Philosophy 34, no. 4 (2003): 510–36. For libertarians opposed to the validity of slave contracts, see Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 40–41; Randy Barnett, “Contract Remedies and Inalienable Rights,” Social Philosophy and Policy 4, no. 1 (1986): 179–202.
41. Matt Marx, “The Firm Strikes Back: Non-Compete Agreements and the Mobility of Technical Professionals,” American Sociological Review 76, no. 5 (2011): 695–712; Steven Greenhouse, “Noncompete Clauses Increasingly Pop Up in Array of Jobs,” New York Times, June 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/noncompete-clauses-increasingly-pop-up-in-array-of-jobs.html; Clare O’Connor, “Does Jimmy John’s Non-Compete Clause for Sandwich Makers Have Legal Legs?” Forbes, October 15, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/10/15/does-jimmy-johns-non-compete-clause-for-sandwich-makers-have-legal-legs/.
42. Orly Lobel, Talent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
43. Patricia Bromley and John Meyer, “‘They Are All Organizations’: The Cultural Roots of Blurring between the Nonprofit, Business, and Government Sectors,” Administration & Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0095399714548268.
44. There may be legitimate limits to this for higher-ranked managers and press agents who are regarded as official spokespersons for their firms. It is one thing to fire an ordinary Pepsi worker for drinking Coke on the job (Suzanne Presto, “Coke Employee Fired for Drinking Pepsi on the Job,” CNN Money, June 16 2003, http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/13/news/funny/coke_pepsi/index.htm), and quite another for the CEO of Pepsi to publicly disparage Pepsi in comparison to Coke.
45. Mark Linder and Ingrid Nygaard, Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1998), 46.
46. James Whitman and Gabrielle Friedman, “The European Transformation of Harassment Law,” Columbia Journal of European Law 9 (2002–3): 241–74.
47. Cynthia Estlund, “Why Workers Still Need a Collective Voice in the Era of Norms and Mandates,” Research Handbook on the Economics of Labor and Employment Law, edited by Cynthia Estlund and Michael Wachter (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2013), 463–90, here 470–71.
48. See John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, edited by J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), vol. 3 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ch. 7, for a classic defense in the liberal tradition. For a contemporary economic view, see Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Bo Gustafsson, eds., Markets and Democracy: Participation, Accountability, and Efficiency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
49. See Henry Hansmann, “Employee Ownership of Firms,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and Law, edited by Peter Newman, vol. 2 (London: MacMillan, 1998), 43–47, here 45–46. I thank Steve Nayak-Young for this reference.
50. Gerald Mayer, Union Membership Trends in the U.S. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2004), iv, http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=key_workplace.
51. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Members—2014, USDL-15–0072 (2015), 1, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf.
52. By contrast, in Europe, unions often deliver benefits to workers across entire industries, and often to workers as a whole, even when their membership is only a small proportion of all workers. For international comparisons, see Jelle Visser, ICTWSS: Database on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts in 51 Countries Between 1960 and 2014 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS), 2013), http://www.uva-aias.net/en/ictwss.
53. It does not follow that nonunionized firms are free from monopoly. Monopsonistic conditions are pervasive in labor markets. Alan Manning, Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labor Markets (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
54. Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers, What Workers Want (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press; New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 84.
55. For a brief introduction to Germany’s system of works councils, see Rebecca Page, Co-Determination in Germany: A Beginners’ Guide (Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, 2009).
Chapter 3
1. Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 1. Since this comment was written, a new account of the Levellers, scholarly and politically engaged, has appeared: John Rees, The Leveller Revolution (London: Verso, 2016).
2. Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 103.
3. Sharp, ed. English Levellers, 136; Alan Houston, “‘A Way of Settlement’: The Levellers, Monopolies and the Public Interest,” History of Political Thought 14, no. 3 (1993): 381–420.
4. Thomas L. Leng, “‘His Neighbours Land Mark’: William Sykes and the Campaign for ‘Free Trade’ in Civil War England,” Historical Research, 86 (2013): 230–52.
5. Sharp, ed., English Levellers, 94.
6. Sharp, ed., English Levellers, 171–72. No one could be elected to two parliaments in succession, no person receiving public money could be elected, and “if any lawyer shall at any time be chosen, he shall be incapable of practice as a lawyer during the whole time of that trust.” It is clear the Levellers thought it unlikely the English people would elect any lawyers to Parliament.
7. The organizers of the summit located it in the context of celebrations of the anniversary of Magna Carta: “Rally at Runnymede,” https://www.opendemocracy.net/rally-at-runnymede-and-join-opposition; Anthony Barnett, New Statesman, February 26, 2015, on the “spirit of Rainborough.”
8. Speakers at the “Lilburne 400 Conference” held on March 14, 2015, at the Bishopgate Institute in London included several historians who had written on the Levellers, alongside the radical lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, and the politicians Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn MP. It was organized by the Leveller Association: www.leveller.org.uk. Corbyn attended the launch of John Rees’s book, Leveller Revolution, in November 2016, and see also the article by Edward Vallance in the Guardian, August 20, 2015, and for Ali, Guardian, February 20, 2015. The original Grand Remonstrance was a denunciation of the personal rule of Charles I produced by the House of Commons. As Vallance notes, more right-wing British politicians have also appealed to the Levellers’ libertarian legacies.
9. An optimistic account can be found in John Tosh, Why History Matters (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). On the other hand, David Armitage and Jo Guldi argue in The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) that the potential of recent historical scholarship to influence contemporary decision-making is not being realized. Their arguments and conclusions have been attacked by Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler: see the debate in American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (April 2015): 530–53.
10. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities in Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 139. My account of social and economic change is deeply indebted to this book.
11. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 226.
12. For a comprehensive study of the social and political implications of the poor law, see Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).
13. For the army, see Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
14. For Rainborough and Walwyn, see The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; and for Walwyn’s 1652 paper defending opponents of the Levant Company and delivered to the Council of State, see The Writings of William Walwyn, edited by J. R. McMichael and Barbara Taft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 446–52.
15. Sharp, ed., English Levellers, 130, 170. The visionary and failed merchant Digger leader, Gerrard Winstanley, also had a profound hostility to wage labor, writing that he had been inspired by God to lead an experiment to work collectively on the common lands of Surrey—“to eat my bread with the sweat of my brows, without either giving hire, or taking hire, looking upon the land as freely mine as anothers”: The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by Thomas Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), I, 517 (The New Law of Righteousnes).
16. Foxley, The Levellers; Ann Hughes, “The English Revolution,” in David Parker, ed., Revolutions and Revolutionary Traditions in the West, (London: Routledge, 2000), 34–52.
17. Barbara Taft, “Walwyn, William (bap. 1600, d. 1681),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
18. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 150–51, is quoted. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), first published 1944, insists on the political and social constructions of “the market.” See also Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), who stresses the importance of assessments of people’s economic worth in social relations within “a pervasive culture of appraisal” (308).
19. Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, 278, drawing on Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
20. Leng, “His Neighbours Landmark”; Melissa Mowry, “‘Commonwealth Wives Who Stand for Their Freedom and Liberty’: Leveller Women and the Hermeneutics of Collectivities,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 77, no. 3 (2014): 305–29; Foxley, The Levellers, 143.
21. Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 289–90.
22. My argument is taken from Ann Hughes, “Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature,” in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, edited by Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995), 162–89. It is challenged and qualified by Mowry, “Commonwealth Wives,” and Loxley, The Levellers.
23. Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 2011), 145.
24. Indeed, a respectable male-headed household had an advantage in the relationships of credit and trust described by Craig Muldrew.
25. The small farm too is a household rather than an individual enterprise, so it is hard to argue that Paine was proposing an individually based egalitarianism in the American context.
Chapter 4
1. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Glasgow Edition, 1981), vol. 1, 69, http://www.econ.uba.ar/www/institutos/economia/Ceplad/HPE_Bibliografia_digital/Wealth%20of%20Nations%20-%20Vol.1.pdf.
2. Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith (London: Longman, 1969), 678.
3. Lonsdale, ed., 694.
4. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 72.
5. Polanyi, 73.
1. Elizabeth Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109 (1999): 287–337.
2. With the aid of other work, in a similar vein, that appeared around the same time. Most notably, Samuel Scheffler, “What Is Egalitarianism?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (2003): 5–39.
3. Of course, to the extent that the patriarchal family was itself a little firm, or to the extent that the operation was just a sweatshop in what was also a place of residence, there was government even in the tenements. For the required contrast, we have to imagine that piecework, perhaps contrary to fact, wasn’t like this. This makes the thought experiment no longer so “natural.”
4. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1911).
5. R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4 (1937): 386–405.
6. Granted, this worry may not be limited to the firm. A monopsonist might threaten to refuse to do business with an independent artisan, unless he votes for his candidate. But, at very least, the worry is not a worry about compensation, conditions, or security. It’s a worry instead about the relations of power between laborers and those buying the labor, or its fruits.
7. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964).
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, translated and edited by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
9. Minimizing the low costs of exile: “Exile … can have severe collateral consequences. The vast majority have no realistic option but to try to immigrate to another communist dictatorship” (38). “Alternatively, their claim might be that where the only sanctions for disobedience are exile, or a civil suit, authority does not exist. That would come as a surprise to those subject to the innumerable state regulations that are backed only by civil sanctions. Nor would a state regulation lack authority if the only sanction for violating it were to force one out of one’s job. Finally, managers have numerous other sanctions at their disposal besides firing and suing: they can and often do demote employees; cut their pay; assign them inconvenient hours or too many or too few hours; assign them more dangerous, dirty, menial, or grueling tasks; increase their pace of work; set them up to fail; and, within very broad limits, humiliate and harass them” (55). “Laissez-faire liberals, touting the freedom of the free market, told workers: choose your Leviathan. That is like telling the citizens of the Communist bloc of Eastern Europe that their freedom could be secured by a right to emigrate to any country—as long as they stayed behind the Iron Curtain” (60). “Freedom of entry and exit from any employment relation is not sufficient to justify the outcome” (61). Minimizing consent: “Perhaps the thought is that where consent mediates the relationship between the parties, the relationship cannot be one of subordination to authority” (55). Minimizing the regulation of employment by democratically enacted law: “What, then, determines the scope and limits of the employer’s authority, if it is not a meeting of minds of the parties? The state does so, through a complex system of laws.… The state has established the constitution of the government of the workplace: it is a form of private government” (53–54).
Chapter 6
1. For two looks at monopsony, see William M. Boal and Michael R. Ransom, “Monopsony in the Labor Market,” Journal of Economic Literature 35, no. 1 (1997): 86–112 and Orley C. Ashenfelter, Henry Farber, and Michael R. Ransom, “Modern Models of Monopsony in Labor Markets,” IZA Discussion Paper No. 4915 (2010). On Walmart, see Alessandro Bonnanno and Rigoberto A. Lopez, “Is Wal-Mart a Monopsony? Evidence from Local Labor Markets,” Working paper (2009). For a look at why the monopsony model has not won over most economists, most of all as an explanation of medium- to long-run phenomena, see Peter Kuhn, “Is Monopsony the Right Way to Model Labor Markets? A Review of Alan Manning’s Monopsony in Motion,” International Journal of the Economics of Business 11, no. 3 (2004): 369–78.
2. On the wage premium from larger firms, see Brianna Cardiff-Hicks, Francine Lafontaine, and Kathryn Shaw, “Do Large Modern Retailers Pay Premium Wages?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 20313 (2014).
3. For analyses of some related scenarios under monopsony, see Kip Viscusi, “Union, Labor Market Structure, and the Welfare Implications of the Quality of Work,” Journal of Labor Research 1, no. 1 (1980): 175–92; Alison L. Booth and Gylfi Zoega, “Why Do Firms Invest in General Training? ‘Good’ Firms and ‘Bad’ Firms as a Source of Monopsony Power,” Unpublished manuscript (2000); and Francis Green, Stephen Machin, and Alan Manning, “The Employer Size-Wage Effect: Can Dynamic Monopsony Provide an Explanation?” Oxford Economic Papers 48 (1996): 433–55.
4. If Anderson really thinks more job perks is the way to go, she could argue for higher taxes on worker incomes to bring about that end. Furthermore, she might want to oppose the Earned Income Tax Credit and other policies that subsidize pecuniary wages and likely lower the quality of workplace perks (the employer may lower perks to capture more of the value of the subsidy for the firm, rather than it going to the worker).
5. See, for instance, Sanford J. Grossman and Oliver D. Hart, “The Costs and Benefits of Ownership: A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration,” Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 4 (1986): 691–719 and also Oliver D. Hart and John Moore, “Property Rights and the Nature of the Firm,” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 6 (1990): 1119–58.
6. A starting point here is Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer, and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Self-Control at Work,” Journal of Political Economy 123, no. 6 (2015): 1227–77.
7. See Harvey Silvergate, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (New York: Encounter Books, 2011).
8. On some of these mechanisms, see Richard B. Freeman, Douglas Kruse, and Joseph Blasi, “Monitoring Colleagues at Work: Profit Sharing, Employee Ownership, Broad-Based Stock Options and Workplace Performance in the United States,” CEP Discussion Paper No. 647 (2004).
9. See, for instance, Ben Craig and John Pencavel, “The Behavior of Worker Cooperatives: The Plywood Companies of the Pacific Northwest,” American Economic Review 82, no. 5 (1992): 1083–1105.
10. Gary Gorton and Frank Schmid, “Class Struggle inside the Firm: A Study of German Codetermination,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Working Paper (2002).
Chapter 7
1. Debra Satz, comparing classical with neoclassical economists, draws up a similar set of contrasts as I do between early pro-market advocates and nineteenth-century laissezfaire theorists. “[A]lmost everything that the classical economists considered of interest in economic life—in particular their crucial insights into the social effects of different markets on human capacities and social relationships and the ways that different markets are socially embedded—has been omitted” from the models and evaluative standards of neoclassical economics. Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 61. Smith, in particular, has been misread as a theorist of benign “invisible hand” self-interest and socially disembedded, selfequilibriating markets. Bromwich rightly invokes Polanyi against such illusions, but wrongly supposes that Smith held them. For corrections, see Gavin Kennedy, “Adam Smith: Some Popular Uses and Abuses,” in Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, edited by Ryan Hanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 461–77.
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), I.10.2.61. Nor did Locke support unregulated labor markets. Although he prescribed harsh measures for dealing with those among the poor whom he imagined to be voluntarily unemployed, he also argued that property owners should be required to hire the involuntarily unemployed at a state-prescribed minimum wage. John Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law,” Locke: Political Essays, edited by Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 188.
3. Elizabeth Anderson, “Ethical Assumptions of Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2004): 347–60.
4. Bromwich supposes that Locke supported enclosure on the ground that those excluded were not possessive individualists. This reading, probably derived from C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), fails to distinguish Locke’s justification for unilateral enclosure of the commons in the state of nature from his views of what was permitted once a state is established. Locke argued that, whereas unilateral enclosure of the (open-access) commons in the state of nature was permissible because it would leave enough and as good for others, this was not true for the (jointly communally owned) commons in England. The latter were justly held in common by joint agreement of community members. No individual could unilaterally abrogate that agreement. See Locke, Second Treatise, §35. Locke supported people’s aspirations to self-employment on the same basis that Lincoln did: all the “vacant” land in America was available to anyone willing to mix their labor with it. Second Treatise, §36. In practice, this position had grievous consequences for Native Americans, and implementing it was inextricable from genocidal racism. However, Locke mistakenly held that privatizing the supposedly uncultivated land in America would redound to everyone’s interests, including that of Native Americans. He did not appeal to racist premises to justify his position. On this point, see Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of John Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Kindle loc. 2256–2335, 2402–15.
5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), V.1.f.61.
6. Locke contradicted himself on this point. Notoriously, he invested in the slave trade, and probably helped draft The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 1669, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp, which upheld slavery. However, there is no way to reconcile the actual institution of chattel slavery with his theory of property. Although he allowed the traditional justification for slavery—punishment in lieu of execution for combatants in an unjust war—this principle could never justify enslaving noncombatants, particularly not the passing of slave status from mothers to children. See Locke, Second Treatise, ch. IV, and the nuanced discussion of Locke on slavery in Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, ch. 7.
7. Hence he also had no answer to Bromwich’s challenge, regarding market-dominating firms such as Google or Apple. Smith supposed that states were needed to create monopolies. He never imagined that increasing returns to scale would create natural monopolies or oligopolies.
8. I will not discuss what’s bad about occupying the superior position, although this is an interesting question in its own right. Egalitarians have things to say about it, regarding the corruptions of character and deprivations of the goods of relating to others as equals, entailed by superior status.
9. I’ll set aside the “passive-aggressive, that’s-not-how-youdo-it-but-far-be-it-from-me-to-interfere father-in-law” in the tenement. He is bossing his daughter-in-law around, even if he pretends not to, and even though he lacks the formal authority to do so.
10. Erik Loomis, “This Day in Labor History: December 28, 1973,” Lawyers, Guns & Money, December 28, 2015, http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/12/this-day-in-labor-history-december-28-1972.
11. Simon Head, “Worse Than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s Sick and Secret History of Ruthlessly Intimidating Workers,” Salon, February 23, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/.
12. Spencer Soper, “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse,” Morning Call, August 17, 2015, http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/mc-allentown-amazon-complaints-20110917-story.html.
13. Head, “Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s Sick and Secret History of Ruthlessly Intimidating Workers.”
14. Only after suffering from bad publicity and customer complaints about how it treated its workers did Amazon improve ventilation at its warehouses. Corporate reputation and customer satisfaction matters, but workers’ health doesn’t. Spencer Soper and Scott Kraus, “Amazon Gets Heat over Warehouse,” Morning Call, September 25, 2011, http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/mc-allentown-amazon-folo-20110917-story.html. It is worth noting that Amazon’s abuses of workers reach deep into their white-collar ranks. See Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0. Although my replies focus on the bottom half of workers, who face the worst conditions, many in the top half also suffer from domination at work.
15. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), II.3.1.5.
16. Contra Cowen, the rule of law does not mean every infraction should be punished. The optimal degree of enforcement for nearly all laws is vastly less than 100 percent.
17. Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America.
18. Social Security Administration, Measures of Central Tendency for Wage Data, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html, reports a median net compensation for U.S. workers of $28,851.21 in 2014, the latest data available.
19. Saru Jayaraman, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
20. U.S. Department of Labor, US Labor Department Seeks Enforcement of Subpoena Issued to Forever 21 (Washington, D.C., 2012), https://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/whd/WHD20121989.htm#.UIrdYfmfG31.
21. Oxfam America, No Relief: Denial of Bathroom Breaks in the Poultry Industry, 2–3.
22. Marc Linder, Void Where Prohibited Revisited: The Trickle-Down Effect of OSHA’s at-Will Bathroom-Break Regulation (Iowa City, IA: Fănpìhuà Press, 2003).
23. Hertel-Fernandez and Secunda, “Citizens Coerced: A Legislative Fix for Workplace Political Intimidation Post-Citizens United,” 6.
24. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Enhancing OSHA’s Records Audit Process Could Improve the Accuracy of Worker Injury and Illness Data (Washington, D.C., 2009), 22, https://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/gao-report-on-osha-october-2009.pdf.
25. Ibid., 24.
26. Susan Lambert, Peter Fugiel, and Julia Henly, Precarious Work Schedules among Early-Career Employees in the U.S.: A National Snapshot (Chicago: University of Chicago, EINet, 2014), 13, 7, https://ssascholars.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/work-scheduling-study/files/lambert.fugiel.henly_.precarious_work_schedules.august2014_0.pdf. See also María Enchautegui, Nonstandard Work Schedules and the Well-Being of Low-Income Families (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2013), http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/412877-Nonstandard-Work-Schedules-and-the-Well-being-of-Low-Income-Families.PDF.
27. Alyssa Figueroa, “The Ugly Walmart Truth: Some Managers Treat Workers Like Dirt,” Alternet, January 29, 2015, http://www.alternet.org/labor/ugly-walmart-truth-some-managers-treat-workers-dirt.
28. U.S. Department of State, “2014 Trafficking in Persons Report” (2014), https://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/countries/2014/226844.htm.
29. Colleen Owens, Meredith Dank, Justin Breaux, Isela Bañuelos, Amy Farrell, Rebecca Pfeffer, et al., Understanding the Organization, Operation, and Victimization Process of Labor Trafficking in the United States (Boston: Urban Institute, Northeastern University, 2014), xii; Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “The New American Slavery: Invited to the U.S., Foreign Workers Find a Nightmare,” Buzzfeed News, July 24, 2015, http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/the-new-american-slavery-invited-to-the-us-foreign-workers-f.
30. U.S. Department of State, “2014 Trafficking in Persons Report.”
31. Garrison, Bensinger, and Singer-Vine, “The New American Slavery: Invited to the U.S., Foreign Workers Find a Nightmare.”
32. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” American Economic Review 103, no. 6 (2013): http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.6.2121.
33. Elizabeth Anderson, “Values, Risks, and Market Norms,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (1988): 54–65.
34. David Dayen, “The True Cost: Why the Private Prison Industry Is about So Much More than Prisons,” Talking Points Memo, August 18, 2016, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/features/privatization/two/.
35. U.S. Office of the Inspector General, Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Monitoring of Contract Prisons (Washington, D.C., 2016), 65, https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/e1606.pdf.
36. Kim Bobo, Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid—And What We Can Do About It, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2011), Kindle loc. 259–72.
37. Ibid., Kindle loc. 283–84.
38. Brady Meixell and Ross Eisenbrey, An Epidemic of Wage Theft Is Costing Workers Hundreds of Millions of Dollars a Year, Issue Brief #385 (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2014), http://s3.epi.org/files/2014/wage-theft.pdf.
39. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 132–34.
40. Larry Fauver and Michael Fuerst, “Does Good Corporate Governance Include Employee Representation?: Evidence from German Corporate Boards,” Journal of Financial Economics 82, no. 3 (2006): 673–710; John Addison, Claus Schnabel, and Joachim Wagner, “Works Councils in Germany: Their Effects on Establishment Performance,” Oxford Economic Papers 53 (2001): 659–94; Simon Renaud, “Dynamic Efficiency of Supervisory Board Codetermination in Germany,” Labour 21, nos. 4/5 (2007): 689–712; Felix R. FitzRoy and Kornelius Kraft, “Co-Determination, Efficiency, and Productivity,” IZA Discussion Paper Series, No. 1442 (2004), http://hdl.handle.net/10419/20741; Steffen Mueller, “The Productivity Effect of Non-Union Representation,” BGPE Discussion Paper No. 74 (2009), http://hdl.handle.net/10419/73422.
41. Brad Delong, “Hoisted from the Archives: A Non-Socratic Dialogue on Social Welfare Functions” (Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, 2009), http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-a-non-socratic-dialogue-on-social-welfare-functions.html.