The Right to Have Rights
Earl Warren | The Unfreedom of Work
Citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.
| Earl Warren, 14th chief justice of the United States from 1953 to 1969.
The Unfreedom of Work
Alex Gourevich and Corey Rubin collaborated on a paper published in 2020 — Freedom Now — that I only recently encountered after discovering other writings by Robin1. The Freedom Now thesis is captured in the abstract [emphasis mine]:
To reclaim freedom as a value of the left, we have to begin with the daily experience of most people: the unfreedom of the workplace. The authoritarian organization of work is not just an offense against freedom; it also helps us understand how freedom requires emancipation both from the economy and within the economy, and why that emancipation requires mass struggle.
The authors make a deliberate and academically-reasoned argument that the left should extend its struggle for civil rights into the inner workings of businesses, in which workers are inherently unfree, both in the conduct of the workplace, and subordination of the individual to the economic marketplace:
The promise of freedom begins with the fact of unfreedom. The source or locus of that unfreedom changes over time, but unfreedom today is most widely experienced in and because of the economy. The unfreedom of the economy has two dimensions: domination in the workplace and the extension of market discipline to all areas of social life. The upshot of this unfreedom is a world awash in choice yet organized by subordination and limitation.
I am reminded of the observation by Hannah Arendt that ‘The right to have rights should be recognized as a precondition for the protection of every human right’. This is echoed by the quote at the top by Earl Warren, which focuses on the rights of the citizen in relation to the powers of the state.
However, as Elizabeth Anderson spells out in Private Government, reviewed by Joshua Rothman,
In “Private Government,” Anderson explores a striking American contradiction. On the one hand, we are a freedom-obsessed society, wary of government intrusion into our private lives; on the other, we allow ourselves to be tyrannized by our bosses, who enjoy broad powers of micromanagement and coercion. Anderson believes that many American workers are constrained by rules that would be “unconstitutional for democratic states to impose on citizens who are not convicts or in the military.” She estimates that more than half are “subject to dictatorship at work.” In “Private Government,” she asks whether this might be a failure of our political system— a betrayal of America’s democratic promise.
Gourevich and Rubin pick at the core prop holding up authoritarianism in the workplace: the idea that the worker has willingly agreed to be paid for their labor, the relation is purely economic, one made through agreement of the parties:
The most obvious dimension of unfreedom is in the workplace. Workplace unfreedom is seldom discussed. Because the exchange of money for work is thought to be analogous to the exchange of money for goods, employment seems to lie beyond the realm of power and politics. “An economic transaction,” the economist Abba Lerner once said, “is a solved political problem.” Unlike politics, which involves the enforcement of law through coercion, the market is “a form of unanimous consent arrangement,” declared the chair of Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers. On this account, we are to believe that a worker is no less free with respect to her boss than is a customer with respect to his grocer.
But the power imbalance between the worker and the boss — between all workers and all bosses — shows this is not the same, whatsoever, as checking out groceries at Walmart. The difference is submitting to the will of the boss:
The legal definition of employment is subordination to the will of a superior. In exchange for remuneration, employees agree to perform a job under the authority of another. That authority is extensive, because what constitutes “the job” is not—cannot—be stipulated in advance, even by contract, with any specificity. It is the employer who determines, on the job, what the job is. The first obligation of the employee is to abide by the rule or obey the command of their employer. That can mean that they must urinate—or are forbidden to urinate. It can mean that they should be sexually appealing—or must not be sexually appealing. They may be told how to speak, what to say, whom to say it to, where to be, where to go, how to dress, when to eat, and what to read—all in the name of the job.
While reading this I was reminded of the ‘enforced happiness’ brouhaha at Pret A Manger in 2013, where the employees were closely monitored to ensure they were acting ‘happy’, touching each other, and never, ever acting moody. The desired behaviors were posted on the company website, and ‘mystery shoppers’ would report on what they observed, with store-wide bonuses in play for those performing as good little automatons.
Critics of the private government/business authoritarianism thesis often point out that employees are free to work elsewhere, if they chafe under the company’s rules. Gourevich and Rubin, again:
But isn’t the worker free to leave a bad boss? Formally speaking, yes, but even if they are free to exit this workplace, they are not free to exit the workplace. Roughly eighty percent of American adults have no reasonable alternative to entering and staying in the labor market; they need employment to meet their living expenses.
Again, many states allow ‘stay or pay’ — training repayment agreements — where employees have to pay back training investments if they leave before some period of time. And add to the impediments to leaving non-compete clauses, which may force a worker to not work within 100 miles of a former employer, or to not work for a competitor of a former employer.
Because employment provides for so many of our necessities, and because it is a provision the employer has the power to deny, workers often have no choice but to do whatever their employer asks of them.
At the foundation is the American healthcare arrangement. Notwithstanding Obamacare, a majority of working age Americans (and their dependents) receive health insurance benefits from their employers. They are at precarious risk of losing those benefits if they leave their job, and face financial ruin without that coverage.
Gourevich and Rubin point out that the capitalists behind the companies are themselves coerced by market forces:
The coercion of the worker by the capitalist, as Marx noted, is a translation of the coercion of the capitalist by the market.
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That omnipresence of the economic [realm], and its contributions to unfreedom, is not accidental. For several generations, a bipartisan array of policy makers and intellectuals has sought to bring the force of the economy to bear on more and more areas of life.’ ‘“What the market does,” wrote Milton Friedman, “is to reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means.”’
[…]
The political question did not disappear; it found a new home.
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The demands of social democratic decision making would now be expressed in the intrusiveness of market decision making.
Markets are not determined by the laws of the universe, like gravity: they are shaped by policy decisions, made by people, by political choices.
Gourevich and Rubin believe we must make better choices to gain our freedom, and turn away from the choices that have led to unfreedom, and the advocates for the system we’ve been trapped in, such as Friedrich Hayek:
This is the medium in which Hayek believes we are making choices that reflect our ultimate values and priorities in life. This is the medium of our freedom: a sphere where we are not protected from but subjected to the preferences and pressures of others and without any of the features we normally associate with politics or democracy. Without collective deliberation, without democratic contestation. This is collective life viewed through a glass darkly. It is a vision—really, an anti-vision: inarticulate, indirect, mysterious, obscure—that we must confront if we are to be free.
The authors advocate for a wholesale rejection of this anti-vision and the human oppression it represents. The left must take up the banner for freedom, and ‘the left’s freedom program must begin with work’ [emphasis mine]:
First, as noted, the workplace is a major site of human domination today. While other institutions—the prison, for example—are more coercive than the workplace, the workplace is where the vast majority of the population spend the bulk of their waking hours. It is the most widely experienced institution of domination and one that intensifies and enhances so many other experiences of unfreedom.
Second, the extent of the market discipline one experiences off the job is substantially determined by what happens on the job. For men and women in the top income and wealth brackets, the proliferation of market-based goods is a boon. For the vast majority in the lower income brackets, market discipline entails a loss of free time or subjugation through debt. Income and discretionary time are not simple rewards of the market. They are related to power in the workplace, to the presence of unions and collective bargaining, to the status and standing of women and people of color, and to other domination-related factors. Confronting unfreedom off the job requires confronting unfreedom on the job.
And that confrontation will require people taking the lessons of collaboration from the workplace, and the sense of a collective destiny for the employed, and pushing for freedom.
Given the understanding of freedom offered here, which begins with the effort to remove or limit unfreedom, the left’s position is straightforward: workers should control the conditions of their work.
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The idea of self-government at work is not just a way of limiting the worst excesses of capitalists or reducing inequality; it is a way of making us free by making the workplace free.
And we will have to push for other social policies to counter unfreedom:
Policies like a universal basic income, as well as public education, public pensions, and socialized medicine, do more than meet people’s basic needs. They free people from the discipline of work and from domination on the job. With these goods publicly provided through the state, rather than through the job or other market mechanisms, men and women would not only be free at work; they would be freer to choose the kind of work they would like to do. Because that would have tremendous ramifications for the economy, the democratic deliberation we call for at work must be extended over the economy as a whole.
Employer-provided health insurance is one of the great barriers to this emancipation, and any attempt at work freedom will need to include socialized medicine, so that health care can no longer be used as a means of control.
The authors do not spell out a platform of social policies — for example, they do not discuss childcare — because this movement will be political, and therefore, proceed as politics unfolds:
The content of a freedom program is necessarily vague because the core of reclaiming freedom is a question not of policy but of politics. Whatever its precise content, the program must express the organized demand for freedom by those who seek that freedom. The politics of freedom is about collective struggle, not reasonable agreement or bipartisan consensus. No amount of rational policy talk, inspiring imagery, or principled discussion can alter this fact.
And the resistance to this movement will be fierce:
Any truly emancipatory project will face resistance. Those few who benefit from our current arrangements—mistakenly called the 1% but closer to being 10 or 20% of the wealthiest—are likely to oppose the sorts of changes we envision.
Think about the reaction to Mamdani’s universal childcare proposals, and free buses: even the establishment Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, are reticent to support those policies, which are couched as affordability, but are ways to increase freedom for those that work.
The authors are calling for a politics of freedom, and I believe that Democrats should embrace this fight:
A real politics of freedom posits a belief in the capacity of people to revise the terms of their existence and a commitment to the institutions that make these collective revisions possible. In this instance, that translates into the belief that freedom is best realized not through tending our own gardens but through disciplined commitment and collective struggle, in activities like mass strikes and party politics. These democratic struggles are not simply expressions and experiences of freedom, though they are that. They are also the means to the freedoms people deserve.
As Rothman observed, the way businesses control employees is a ‘a betrayal of America’s democratic promise’, and we should fix it.