 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Elizabeth Anderson. She's the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. And she was, I believe, one of the earliest guests on this show. Definitely in the first 30 or so, I would say. Yeah. So welcome back to Free Thoughts, Professor Anderson. It's great to be back. So today we're talking about your newest book, Private Government, How Employers Rule Our Lives and Why We Don't Talk About It. I think this is a book. It's to some extent written to libertarians, arguing that libertarians are missing an important aspect of the way that power plays out in society and one that we used to be concerned about but seem to have lost interest in, I guess. But you start at the beginning of the book, you start by saying that your focus is on specifically ideology. So maybe start by defining that term. What do you mean by ideology? Yes. So there's two senses of the word ideology. One is neutral and the other is pejorative. So first, let me tell you about the neutral sense of the word ideology. All it means is that we all operate with a general picture of our social world and how it works, what the basic institutions are, how people interact in our society. And we need these large-scale pictures to navigate the world and orient ourselves politically, to take positions on what we favor or disfavor. So I think we need ideology because we don't have direct contact or experience with the entire social world. We only are like little ants in a big colony. We need a bigger picture. We don't have direct access to that. And ideology gives us a picture of the meaning of a lot of our local activities by situating it in a larger understanding of how society works. Now, ideology could also be negative, though, if it leaves out important institutions and doesn't allow us to understand what's really going on. Misrepresent how they're actually operating. Misrepresent potentials for change or other ways of organizing society. Misrepresent causal connections in a way that justify institutions that aren't really working out well for people. Then we say that something's ideological in a pejorative sense. That is, it's distorting our understandings in a way that legitimates some unjust institution. And that one in particular, you think that there is a distinct problem with the way that bosses, workers are dominated by their bosses and that's being ignored by ideology to some extent. Yes, that's correct. So in my book, I discuss a number of cases which I think should outrage people who read the book. And I've gotten outrage reactions from libertarians. Just to give you an example, most workers in poultry slaughterhouses are not allowed to use the bathroom for their entire eight-hour shift. When they complain that they can't hold it in for eight hours, their boss just tells them to urinate in their pants or wear a diaper. Apple warehouse workers or Apple retail workers have to stand in line for a half an hour, unpaid every day while their persons and effects are searched. They don't get paid for that. It's a half hour of their day wasted. 90% of restaurant workers experience sexual harassment on the job. Even if we look at professional managerial upper middle class workers, enormous numbers of them, millions of them get pressured by their boss to make a political contribution to their favorite political action committee or to show up in support for the boss's political candidate. I could go on and on. There's lots of cases where I think it's pretty clear that managers are exercising extreme and unjust authority, oppressive authority over their workers. And for the most part, this is legal. Or if it's not legal, as in the case of sexual harassment, workers in practice have very little recourse. So I want to then take a step back because much of your book is about that world that you just described and how we got there and how we ought to think about it. But you begin with, I think, a claim that might be rather surprising to a lot of our audience. More or more surprising to actually the left. I thought I thought I had much of our audience. Our audience might know. Our audience might, but I think, yeah. For the left, it'll certainly be surprising to the left too. So you say, you write from a historical perspective, you say the ideal of a free market society used to be a cause of the left. Can you unpack that a bit for us? Give us this historical picture. So I'm defining the left as committed to an egalitarian society, a society in which human beings interact with each other on terms of equality. And what I mean by that, by the society of equals, is best understood by contrast with the opposite of an egalitarian society, namely a hierarchical society. And hierarchy, social hierarchy has three dimensions to it. You have hierarchies of authority. That's where some people get to order other people around in a fairly unaccountable way. There are hierarchies of esteem in which some people are honored and other people despised and the inferior people have to bow and scrape and humiliate themselves before the superior people. And then we have hierarchies of standing. And that has to do with whose interests count when third parties are making decisions about them. This could be policymakers and the government, or it could just be ordinary people in civil society. Can you give us an example of that just to make it a bit more concrete? So, you know, if Congress is considering some law, are they only considering the rich and the powerful and their interests in passing that law, or are they considering the interests of everyone? That would be a hierarchy of standing if it's just taken for granted that only some people count. According to some political scientists, the opinions and interests of the bottom third of the population are pretty much ignored by Congress and really only the top third get any attention in contemporary legislation. So, an egalitarian society in which is a society in which people interact on terms of equal standing, everyone counts equally, their interests all count in the eyes of others. Equality of esteem, you don't have any group stigmatization or honor of other groups like aristocrats. And equality of authority, you don't have anybody entitled to order somebody else around arbitrarily or with impunity. So, it seems like as you point out, a free market, if you're thinking about the world of 1650, which is full of a bunch of unequal situations as you describe, then a free market is actually a step up from that. Absolutely. And I think I go back to the levelers in the English Civil War who were also free marketeers. They wanted to trade freely and put petitions before parliament to get that right and they were arguing against monopoly. So, at the time, manufacturing was controlled by monopoly and land was locked up in monopolies of a tiny number of aristocratic landholders. The laws of inheritance were written in such a way that it was actually illegal for a landlord or a great aristocrat to break up his estate and sell it off into small pieces. The entire estate had to be inherited intact by the first born son. So, all the land was captured and monopolized by a tiny class of people. Manufacturing was monopolized by the great manufacturers and small craftsmen had to obey the rules that were laid down to them by the big manufacturers who ran the guilds. And ordinary people really didn't have many opportunities. So, the levelers said, we want to get rid of this. We want to get rid of aristocratic privilege. They wanted to abolish the House of Lords. They wanted free markets and land, abolition of monopoly. So, anyone was free to trade with anyone they wanted. Get rid of all these oppressive regulations that determined the hours and places of trade. Why not allow any town to be open to trade? In those days, there were specific marketplaces. Certain towns had a monopoly on those. So, if you didn't live in those towns, you had much lower opportunity. The levelers, of course, were completely right about this. And what they predicted was, if you broke up the monopolies, opportunities would dramatically expand for ordinary people to be able to make money and also practice their religion freely. They wouldn't have to pay taxes to the Church of England. They could publish and print what they wanted instead of having to submit to the censorship of the Church of England. They could manufacture what they wanted without having to submit to the courts of the guilds, which were all run by the big manufacturers. People would be both much more free and also much more equal. People would be able to interact on a plane of equality. They wouldn't have to bow and scrape before Lords. And they wouldn't be subject to the arbitrary authority of the guilds, the Lords, and all these other oppressive big wigs. And even Adam Smith, who I'm a big fan of, and I sometimes will get attacked as being some proponent of Adam Smith, that selfish capitalist guy who didn't care about the common man. But as you point out, Adam Smith was in the same boat as the levelers. Absolutely. In fact, the image of Adam Smith that is in the popular imagination is almost the opposite of what he actually was. Yeah, we say that all the time, but it's really good to hear you say that. Yeah. Look, I'm an endless admirer of Adam Smith. His theory of moral sentiments is one of the greatest works of moral psychology ever written. It's packed dense with empirically testable hypotheses. There's actually a fellow here at University of Michigan, Ethan Cross, who is testing some of Smith's hypotheses and coming up with favorable empirical evidence for them. Cool. Smith was the great advocate of sympathy as the foundation of morality. And he argued that the market was also deeply based on sympathy. And this is really important. He didn't think that market interactions were based on selfishness. His whole model of how successful market interactions arise is that each party needs a healthy appreciation of the interests of the other party that they're transacting with. If you have no idea what the other person wants or you don't appeal to their interests, you're not going to get a successful negotiation. So on Smith's view, it was the market actually promotes sympathy between individuals because it makes them more vividly aware of other people's interests. And in a well-functioning market with the rule of law, people realize that they have to appeal to other people's interests to get their own interests satisfied. So the market for him was a great sphere in which people would learn to pay regard to other people's interests. It wasn't a selfish realm at all. And then you say kind of stepping forward historically. You then make the claim that this Smithian vision of the market was, I guess, an effect like the original version of the American dream. Absolutely, yes. So the real place where this vision gets picked up is America and in particular the United States. And the reason for this is the historically unique position of the United States, perhaps in all of world history, you had extraordinarily high rates of self-employment among the free population of the United States at the time Smith was writing at the time of the American Revolution. Perhaps about 90% of the free workers of the United States were self-employed. They owned their own farm or their little shop. That's really astonishing because around 1776, if you look at the world population, probably around 95% of them were submitted to some kind of unfree labor. If it was a slavery, it was indentured servitude or apprenticeship, some kind of debt bondage, all kinds of involuntary servitude. In America, of course, there was slavery and there was a great stain on America's claim to be promoting freedom. But among the free workers, those workers enjoyed astonishing levels of freedom and autonomy at work because they were their own bosses. So Smith's vision of how liberating free markets could be was really picked up in the United States in a huge, huge way and the great advocate of free market society was Tom Payne, who was also, of course, the most influential revolutionary pamphleteer. And what made Payne important from a philosophical point of view is that he advocated the revolution not only because no taxation without representation. It wasn't just a complaint about how England was excessively taxing Americans. It was much more that if America could break free, it could set up a society of free society of equals and that would be a model for the rest of the world of how to organize society on a non-aristocratic, non-hierarchical basis that would bring prosperity and freedom to everyone. Okay, so I'm going to say let's enough then now with this relentless optimism. Yeah. So you then say, though, that what began as a hopeful, inspiring, egalitarian vision in the United States self-destructed in three ways. So what were the three ways that this all went very wrong? Yeah. So we see Payne's vision that free markets are going to bring universal self-employment aligned with the United States right up to the Civil War. Lincoln campaigned on it. His 1860 stump speech, which you can find on the web, his address to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society lays it out explicitly. The problem is the Civil War brought it all down. Even though the Civil War was actually fought largely over slavery. That is, Lincoln wanted to strangle slavery and the slave states rebelled. The Civil War ended up propelling the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The Industrial Revolution was the absolute key to the collapse of this older vision from the levelers through Payne and Smith and Lincoln of how free markets would lead to a free society of equals with everyone self-employed. The key issue with the Industrial Revolution is that it created enormous economies of scale. Large scale factories arise with huge concentrations of capital railroads. These are really huge concentrations of capital. They can't be worked by just one hand or the hand of a family. They have to be worked by dozens, hundreds of people. In some cases, thousands. And once you get that, you get the employment relationship. People are no longer their own boss. Now they have a boss who tells them what to do often in arbitrary and oppressive ways. So that was really the key turning point was the Industrial Revolution. And that was the point at which the left, the egalitarians turned against free markets because what they were fundamentally against wasn't markets in general. It was actually labor markets. What they were opposed to was the oppression of factory labor and the oppression of workers under the thumbs of their bosses. You know your job of pointing out something that a lot of people kind of aren't aware of, that you could be a very big Adam Smith fan and then also be in the free markets as a general concept but also be into high levels of worker protections. And of course, Mark didn't disregard Adam Smith and think that he was a dumb. He thought it was just a different kind of situation than before. And there are people who, libertarians, we have Thomas Hodgkin for example who was a very big free market guy and a really big labor rights, labor unions guy. Something that seems incompatible today but it's much more of a continuum and as you point out that Industrial Revolution and the situation of the worker is what changes everything and it does even bring about the Marxian critique. That's exactly right, yes. And so once you get the Industrial Revolution and there is kind of something ironic about this because if you look at who the most radical workers were during the Industrial Revolution it wasn't actually the factory workers. Marx was wrong about that. The most radical workers were the craftsmen and the reason is the craftsmen were getting wiped out. The Industrial Revolution just bankrupted them all. Whereas the factory workers, that was everything they knew was working in the factory and so they actually had more of a stake of working within the system rather than toppling it over. That's why they organized into labor unions. It wasn't to destroy the system. It was rather just to get more of the fruits of the massively higher productivity that the Industrial Revolution was bringing about. So ironically, the labor movement far from being a revolutionary movement was really working within the system much more than the craftsmen who saw they were doomed if they didn't topple it all together. You make the provocative phrase when you're talking about the structure we find ourselves in now with people employed in large firms, this post-Industrial Revolution world you say that we basically all work for a whole bunch of communist dictatorships. Most of us, we live in the United States. We don't live under communism. We like to think we live in a free country and we don't go to work thinking of it as a... I'm headed across the Iron Curtain. So how is the typical American large firm a communist dictatorship? Okay, well, first of all, let's just get clear. It is a government. It's a form of government. Okay, and it's a form of government because you have government wherever you have some people giving orders to others that they are able to back up with sanctions and certainly employers are able to do that. They give orders to their subordinates and if you don't obey those orders you could be fired or demoted or your pay could be cut or they could just yell at you and harass you and so forth. There's all kinds of sanctions that are available to bosses. Wait, I just want to stop. Would that include just to make sure we're clear on this a club, the benevolent order of the Elks? Correct. There's all kinds of governments. In my view, government is absolutely pervasive. We're not talking about the state, right? The state is just one form of government which asserts a monopoly on legitimate use of force. But there's all kinds of other governments, right? So clubs have to be governed, churches, all kinds of things have a government. And then the question is, how does the government relate to the governed, to those people who have to take the orders? And here I draw a distinction between public government and private government. So if something is kept private from you, it means it's not your business. You're not allowed to know about it. You don't have any standing to insist that that thing be organized for your interests. If it's private to you, then it is your business and you're allowed to keep other people out from meddling with it. If something is a public thing, if a government is public, what it means is all the governed, everyone who is governed under that government, gets standing. They have a say in how the government is run. They get to know everything about its operations. Then the government is a public thing. So it turns out though that the vast majority of workplaces are private governments in the sense that management can keep all kinds of vital information secret from the workers. The workers don't necessarily know even if their job is going to be around next week. They could just get notice overnight. It means they can't plan ahead for that catastrophe. Workers don't get to elect their managers. Managers can issue orders and workers really just have to suck up and obey. So the form of government is a private government and basically it's a dictatorship. The constitution of the typical workplace is a dictatorship because the workers can't elect their managers and don't really have any say over the orders that are issued to them. Now, there are exceptions with if you're represented by a labor union, but not many workers are represented by unions anymore. Oh, now on some of that could be what you're saying could be really interesting. On some of that could be kind of undate in the sense so it's a private house, a dictatorship. I mean, I could walk in and say, I'm not going to take my shoes off and I'm going to wipe my mouth on your tablecloth and all the stuff and you can make arbitrary rules if you're there and say get out and I don't have any say in that if I go into that private house. So would that be a dictatorship too? So if it is, then why can't private workplaces also be dictatorships? Yeah, so in my view, government has to cover a domain of life. So if you're just a guest in somebody's house, sure they can lay down the rules, but that's not a whole domain of your life because you're just going to be there for a couple of hours having dinner with them or something. It's when government exists over domains of your life, like work or your capacity as a citizen or subject of a state. I mean, it depends how you define it, though. Now, of course, there is a government of the family and kids definitely, right? They're living under dictatorship and there are reasons for that, mainly that they're not capable of self-government. And of course, we hope that the dictatorship is benevolent, that parents love their children so they're not going to be oppressive to them. There's probably no other way to run parenting other than some kind of dictatorship. But in the workplace, we have other options. And here, we're talking about autonomous adults should have standing in a major domain of their lives or they're spending about a third of their life as adults of their waking hours at work. But in work is not necessarily a dictatorship. I mean, whereas you said you're just going over to someone's house to eat, but still in a private domain, my house, my rules and everyone is okay with that or they don't go there. It seems like there's not a categorical distinction you're making. It's just actually how much of your life is there and work is not necessarily a dictatorship, correct? Well, let's put this way. The default constitution of the workplace is a dictatorship. So that's just as a legal point of view. We have employment at will. That's the default regime. And that means that the employer can hire or fire you for any or no reason. So there's a level of arbitrariness there. The people can be fired, demoted or pay cut for any or no reason. It's arbitrary. It's unaccountable. And that's what makes it, in my words, a private government. You can also quit for no reason, though. That's right. But quitting carries enormous costs for the workers. Often to the business, too, though. Sometimes or sometimes not. It depends on how many people are lined up, certainly in times of high employment or in regions of high employment. Employers don't really care that much about turnover. And you see a lot of workplaces with pretty high turnover. It shows how little regard they actually have for the workers. So then this is why you would reject a typical libertarian response to the claim that the firm is a communist dictatorship is another form of government is to say, look, I mean, I always have that option to exit. That when I'm living within the bounds of a country, I'm kind of subject to its laws unless I'm going to leave and leaving if I wanted to emigrate from the United States, it would be incredibly costly and might be impossible. But if I wanted to jump ship to another think tank, that would be, if not easy, at least easier than moving to Europe. And so that possibility of exit then gives us not only a greater degree of freedom because we can always just say, screw it, I'm going elsewhere, but also gives us some check because even if an employer isn't extraordinarily harmed by a single employee leaving, if they have an environment, you're creating an environment where all of your employees are unhappy or where employees, you know, you can't build up any human capital in the firm because employees leave really rapidly is not a good way to become successful in the marketplace, but you don't think that that's a persuasive counter. Well, there are a couple of things to say here. Certainly the freedom of exit is a very important freedom for workers and it ought to be enhanced. It's worth keeping in mind that in recent years, there's been a dramatic increase in labor contracts where workers are forced to leave their human capital behind if they quit the firm. There are non-compete classes that say, you can't work in the same industry for a number of years if you work for us. I find that pretty outrageously unjust. So do we. Yeah. Most libertarians are against those. Well, and good for libertarians. You ought to be against them. You know, it used to be there's only a tiny number of knowledge workers who are subject to those things. And now, you know, you've got Jimmy John's sandwich maker who can't jump over to subway. But one of the difficulties with relying on exit alone to deal with these problems is that what do people have? What jobs can they exit to? What jobs can they enter? It's just another dictatorship. I have a big problem with that. And as we see in environments where workers don't have much bargaining power, their options are even worse. Their whole regions of the country with chronically high unemployment, we have business cycles where you have people go for years with high unemployment, right? The exit option isn't really working very well for people like that. It seems odd that it sounds like you're defining all at-will employment relationships as dictatorships, which it seems like you need more for a dictatorship than an at-will employment relationship. Because as again, it does empower workers to some, but it seems like you would need oppressive bosses. And you mentioned, you know, horrible things that I don't doubt exist. It would be astounding to me if there weren't horrible bosses. The thing that you're trying to do though is empower workers to be able to move around and increase their well-being. And that's what strikes me as interesting in your book because when you think of farming, for example, going back to the story we were telling about Anna Smith. Farming sucks, right? Like even though it's self-sufficient, there's a lot of really bad things about farming, especially your well-being is very much tied to the weather and you have to be the one who works. And so even moving into that industrial life and say like low in Massachusetts with the women going to work in the garment factories there, yeah, so they were under a dictatorship. They probably were leaving a dictatorship of their families on the farm, but they got one day a week off and they had a library and they got wages that were guaranteed to them and didn't move with the weather. And that was a trade-off they were willing to make. And sometimes it seems like self-sufficiency is great, but that also means uncertainty and the possibility of extreme loss. That means that today if you want to start a business, you trade that off to security of a salary that you're contractually obligated to pay someone but less freedom in other regards. So why is it okay that some workers make that decision? I mean, not everyone can be an entrepreneur. That's quite right. And in fact, I don't think that the ideal economy would be one of universal self-employment, especially in modern conditions. They're a lot better than they are in the Industrial Revolution. They're a lot less polluted. Here I'm talking about in the advanced countries. Obviously, if you go to El Salvador, you're going to see horrible sweatshops that aren't much different from what they had in the Industrial Revolution. And even in the United States, there are sweatshops and garment factories and so forth that are pretty horrible and often staffed by undocumented immigrants who don't really have any effective power or rights in society. My point isn't that there shouldn't be government at work. I think any large-scale organization is going to need some kind of government that's going to involve authority relations, some kind of hierarchy of offices in which some people are giving orders to others. The theory of the firm and economics explains why efficient production on a large scale typically requires some kind of hierarchy that is a government at work. My objection isn't to authority at work or government at work. My objection is to arbitrary unaccountable authority. That's what private government is. I think that workers being subject to dictatorship should have some remedies to that. And standardly in political philosophy, right, if we look at dictatorship, it's got a lot of problems. Dictators have tendencies to abuse their underlings. And we've devised remedies. You get a bill of rights, and you get some voice. You get government in some way, a public thing that's accountable to the government. I'm curious about the work that the word arbitrary is doing here and what you mean by that and what you mean by unaccountable. Because it seems like the objection, as I understand it, is not, as you said, to the fact that there are people who have authority in workplace or even necessarily in the fact that they're unaccountable because if I'm an entrepreneur leading the business and I say, as they say in Silicon Valley, we need to pivot our business. And so we're going to switch from being an instant messaging app to a social payments app. It makes sense that I, as the head of the firm, get to make that decision and that the engineer is employed for me, can't say no, no, no. Because that's the nature of entrepreneurship and having someone who's charged the product. So that's like unaccountable in a certain way. It could also potentially be arbitrary because I might not have good reasons for switching from an instant messaging app to a social payments app. But that's not necessarily as much the problem as the particular uses that you object to. So when you talk about the abuses, it's the forcing employees to urinate on themselves or dictating what sorts of stuff they can do in their home life, those kinds of much more almost authoritarian uses of it. So is it, I mean, do you think that do we need to get rid of the unaccountability and the arbitrariness simply because it enables these other things, no matter what other benefits it might have? Or do you think there's just something inherently wrong with the very notion of someone at a firm being in a position where they can dictate what the firm does and the employees can't override them? Right. So first of all, I have great respect for entrepreneurs and often it takes somebody with a big vision to really bring about some dramatic innovation. For the most part, workers don't have any complaints if say some dramatic new product is the new vision for this company. Workers don't really complain about that because they're still going to be doing basically the same kind of labor. It's just now on a new project. You direct your software engineers to build this new cool software and they're okay with that. The complaint isn't about the entrepreneurial vision and the people at the top being able to direct the larger course sort of the strategy of the company. It's more about the complaints are more focused on the character of the managerial relation and in particular how it is restraining choices by workers that they really ought to have. So one clear boundary is between what you do at work and what you do off-duty in your private life. Under employment at will, those boundaries are afaced and that's really problematic. So just to give an example that I think should be of interest to libertarians about half of all workers get drug tested. I'm not a fan of drug addiction or recreational drugs but if you want to do that on the weekends I don't think your boss has any business firing you at work. Now if you come to work high and your work is incompatible with being high then of course sure you could be fired but of course drugs, drug tests, test drugs that were only consumed over the weekends you know are on vacation and it seems to me that it's really not a boss's business to trample on people's private recreational choices. Well let me ask about that because so God was it a couple of few years ago the Has Justine Landed Yet hashtag thing on Twitter where a woman who worked for I think it was a PR agency maybe I don't remember or she was in PR for her firm hopped on a plane to Africa and right before getting on the plane and so being you know without internet she made a joke, I mean an extremely racist joke or at least a extremely racially insensitive joke and very poor taste and it trended and so the Has Justine Landed Yet hashtag was everyone knew she was going to get fired the moment she landed so that was you know I don't know that she was traveling on her I think it was a vacation so this was her own time but this was an instance where you know a firm it seems like the only option the firm had was to fire her because it would have been extremely damaging to their business. So I actually think in this case look it's it's an outrageous internet pylon sure she said something that was that was really stupid and offensive but please the idea that you should lose your job or something like this I think is really crazy. Well I know I agree that I agree that the pylon. She hears away to it's now there are certain cases if you have the spokes person somebody who is acting for the firm in the capacity of the spokesperson like the leading executives or maybe even official PR person then there is legitimate expectation that what they say is in some sense speaking for the firm and their attitudes even off duty have implications for the firm I think a small number of workers at the higher ranks and official spokes people then I think it is proper for the firms to say we're going to distance ourselves but if it's just some ordinary low-level person I think they should be entitled to freedom of speech and there's a way to protect workers in this way and simultaneously protect the firm if workers had something equivalent to first amendment rights against their employer free speech rights so that they couldn't be fired for this then the employer would have a perfect excuse why didn't they fire them because they're not allowed to this is this is the usefulness of a bill of rights it would secure the freedom of speech of workers but also secure the firm against any backlash on account of that because the firm has a great excuse we're just not allowed to fire people for saying stuff like this they have their private life their independent rights and we can't fire them for saying something stupid on Twitter or whatever so as the as the practicing lawyer in the room I have to point out that this is there's an irony what you're saying about the thesis of your whole book a lot of what these businesses are doing when they fire someone for Facebook posts or Twitter post is has been created by government involvement through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the ability and the ability to sue on discrimination and disparate impact claims which is the government has created so the firms have to be hyper vigilant that they can't get a claim against them for racially biased say serving you know if you're Chick-fil-A and you have someone who's tweeting this stuff out your lawyers will tell you because of the government's ability to authorize suits against you to fire those people immediately because every one of those people if they're sexist if they make these comments their liability of the company and they can create a hostile work environment lawsuit against you that's what I would tell any employer on the planet and it's interesting what I would say is there's a difference between what you say at work and what you say off-duty I wouldn't say that I mean knowing the law I would say that that that they're going to find those employees they're going to find their racists and then they're gonna say do you really think that this employee at your company didn't treat black people differently and create an environment that is now we're going to sue you for billions of dollars I'm just saying that that is why they do it well it's not it's coming from the government I don't think that what somebody says off-duty they're not they're not addressing their fellow workers you know people can have all kinds of obnoxious opinions the irony the irony is and and you can you can insulate that from how they behave at work I find it just ironic because a lot of this these these policies so sexual harassment and things like this which you mentioned previously the change in the law in this originated with people who were afraid of the things that you're talking about in this book they were trying to change the workplace for domination and they were trying to make it more hospitable to people of color and people in different less sexual harassment claims so in doing that they created extremely hostile to free speech and this is interesting because in some of your prescriptions I think that we should you know if you do instantiate more workplace voice and more labor union what rights and stuff we have to ask the question are we going to have a backlash where where it's impossible for workers to get higher because of the extremely costly a bunch of things that are unintended consequences I'm saying this an unintended consequence of what you're talking about is is the worker free speech problem that you highlight in your book well I think it wouldn't be hard to legally define the workplace narrowly in terms of how the how this worker is interacting with co-workers and setting aside how the worker interacts with random people off duty so I had just bar the introduction of some stupid Twitter remark or whatever into a sexual harassment trial so I wanted to ask about so that one way that you're saying we could address these issues is through change in the legal regime worker by the rights basically changing the relationship that the law enables or allows within the firm but I wanted to ask about other sorts of changes and how they might impact the concerns that you raise in the book because to some extent the system as you describe it now is a result of technological changes like the industrial revolution was a set of technological changes that enabled new kinds of businesses to operate and to operate at scales that that made it you know that made other arrangements less profitable or unable to compete that you know we invented manufacturing in certain ways but that because of the way that the tech worked it was easiest to do that in these concentrated firms but we have a lot of technological changes now that I wonder if those push back in the other direction so for one it would seem like you would be something of a fan of the gig economy especially people are able to earn a living within the gig economy where everyone because you talk in the book about kind of everyone being effectively a freelancer and so do you think that the gig economy is a step in the right direction and then do you think that so I had emailed you I think yesterday I had come across in research for a prior podcast a decentralized organization building system that would let you know everyone have stakes and vote and have contracted payment and stuff but it's done without a central authority and it's done without arbitrary control and these are the kinds of things that simply from a communications technology and a financial technology standpoint would not have been possible even five or ten years ago so do you think that even in the absence of perhaps legal changes we may see move back to the kind of world that Adam Smith envisioned simply because the tech is allowing us to that's really interesting so there are a lot of people for whom the gig economy works the downside of the gig economy is precarity it's very hard to cobble together an actual living and on top of that too for people who want to look back on their working life something which really adds up to something there are a lot of people who have ambitions for a career they want to actually build on their skills and be able to produce something bigger than just a million random tasks that they fulfilled so I don't think the gig economy definitely works for some people and that's a great option for them but for most people I think it has too much precariousness to it and for a lot of people it just doesn't carry the same kind of meaningfulness as a career in which you build your skills and work on some larger projects with other people that add up to something big so that's why maybe this alternative this kind of non hierarchical networking kind of economy where groups of people can work together and produce something big but on a plane of equality I think that's an incredibly interesting idea whether networking will be able to deliver the productivity and the high degree of coordination that the modern workplace under hierarchical management does I think I'm all in favor of experimentation along those lines and you know let's see where it takes us but for right now your biggest concern as you've said in the book it's not the year against exit it's not the year against markets and things like this but your biggest concern is highlighting the abuses that workers are experiencing and toward the fixing that you basically have focused on as your best solution but you don't actually lay it out but your book is first just an argument for explaining what the problem is but is giving greater voice to workers you talk a little bit about that yes right so if we look at traditional firms not these high-tech network things what I what I argue is we should really be looking at the German example of co-determination it's an alternative to labor unions under co-determination workers work jointly with capital owners to manage the workplace both at the factory floor level or the shop floor level and even some of the larger strategic decisions how do you do with things like client closings Germany is very prosperous you don't see high unemployment in Germany looks like you don't have a lot of negative side effects workers have a genuine voice in that system obviously it's not the same as a pure socialist workers cooperative it'd be fun to explore that option too I don't think that's really viable for most workers because they can't scrape up enough capital to actually own the firm so I think this is an interesting middle position that ought to be explored for American workers thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and Evan Banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org