Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)
Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments-and why we can't see it



One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.
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Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)
Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments-and why we can't see it



One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.
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Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

by Elizabeth Anderson

Narrated by Lauren Pedersen

Unabridged — 5 hours, 40 minutes

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It)

by Elizabeth Anderson

Narrated by Lauren Pedersen

Unabridged — 5 hours, 40 minutes

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Overview

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments-and why we can't see it



One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.

Editorial Reviews

Choice

"[Private Government] is a well-documented, captivating discussion that should be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner, and an excellent starting point to make that happen."

Times Literary Supplement

"Private Government is a welcome and important call to bring workplace governance back into political theory and discourse, and should be taken seriously if we are to promote greater democracy in the workplace."

From the Publisher

"Elizabeth Anderson is a philosopher on the warpath. Her Tanner Lectures . . . take aim at the unelected, arbitrary and dictatorial power that employers, particularly in the US where labour laws are flimsy, hold over their work-forces. . . . [Anderson's argument has] subtlety and force."—-Philip Roscoe, Times Higher Education

"In Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson . . . explores how the discipline of work has itself become a form of tyranny, documenting the expansive power that firms now wield over their employees in everything from how they dress to what they tweet. . . . [Private Government] highlight[s] the dramatic and alarming changes that work has undergone over the past century—insisting that, in often unseen ways, the changing nature of work threatens the fundamental ideals of democracy: equality and freedom."—-Miya Tokumitsu, , The New Republic

"[Private Government] gives a clear, powerful argument for ideas that many people will have already had in only inchoate form."—-Nate Holdren, History News Network

Product Details

BN ID: 2940160495040
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Publication date: 06/06/2023
Edition description: Unabridged
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