Gregory Robson and James R. Otteson (both @University of Notre Dame) “Freedom in Business: Elizabeth Anderson, Adam Smith, and the Effects of Dominance in Business”
Philosophy of Management, 2024
In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), Elizabeth Anderson details cases of worker abuse—everything from workers being disciplined for what they do outside of work to workers being harassed or, shockingly, forced to wear diapers to avoid a company’s loss of productive labor time. These cases should trouble even the most sanguine advocate of modern working conditions.
There are, however, over 330 million firms in the world, if you include sole proprietorships, and the working conditions in firms do vary considerably. So whether one can build a decisive case against a whole system of political economy based on, say, dozens of cases of even severe workplace abuse is an open question (see Gregory Robson, “How to Object to the Profit System (and How Not To),” Journal of Business Ethics, 2023). Even so, we argue that workers’ conditions today could possibly be even worse than Anderson realizes in Private Government.
Some firms do behave dictatorially towards employees. They mistreat workers, degrade them, and insist they do dull, dirty, or dangerous jobs. They take advantage of employees who have minimal bargaining power to insist on better conditions, shorter hours, or just getting more respect. Anderson says that “the modern workplace” is comprised of “communist dictatorships” (pp. 38–39) in which employees are “timid and cringing before” their employers (p. 5). At their worst, members of firms—like government officials, Hollywood actors, and people in numerous other institutions—are willing and able to dehumanize and degrade others.
A central theme of our article is that the extreme division of labor in modern economies disrupts, and sometimes debilitates, how workers form their moral and social sentiments. In An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth Nations (hereafter “WN”; eds. Campbell, R. H. & Skinner, A. S., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1976 [1776]), Adam Smith considers a worker
whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. (WN, p. 782)
Such a man, observes Smith, “naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become” (ibid.). The sad result is “torpor of his mind” (ibid.) and “mental mutilation, deformity, and wretchedness” (WN, p. 787).
In fact, the workers in a pin factory that requires constant monotonous labor lose something more than their time and physical effort. When they spend scores of hours each week bending, straightening, or pursuing other tasks to make pins, they could lose part of themselves, too. They can suffer, one might say, a form of whole-person degradation. To this Anderson (2017) adds that bosses who constantly direct employees damage their dignity. We argue (Otteson and Robson 2024: n.p.) that
[m]eaningful workplace freedom is a form of autonomy (from the Greek “auto-nomos” for self-legislating or -ruling); while workers can be free in various ways, they will not be meaningfully free if their bosses stand ready to intervene and redirect their wills (read: partly rule them) at every turn.
It is important to take seriously Smith’s insistence that, as workers, we are educated by others’ experiences. We also adopt, and eventually internalize, the broad personality and features of our coworkers (Otteson and Robson 2024). When workers are doing the same simple task for hours on end, for instance, or are persistently proximate to toxic inputs—overly demanding bosses, say, or co-workers whose minds have been debilitated by monotonous labor in tough conditions—this imposes large psychological costs on workers. Workers are human persons worthy of dignity, respect, and fair treatment, but one wouldn’t always know it from walking on a modern factory floor, notable recent improvements in factory conditions notwithstanding.
How, then, can concerning workplace conditions today, in factories and beyond, be remedied or mitigated? Smith proposes education, especially reading, writing, and accounting. He thinks these will limit, eliminate, and maybe even preempt the effects of the extreme division of labor. We insist, however, that if Smith is right about how workplaces shape workers’ sentiments, and if Anderson is right that cases of workplace abuse abound, then far more aggressive institutional responses might be in order than contemporary scholars realize. What hangs on our capacity to remedy these problems is nothing less than the chance to restore to workers the deep respect and workplace discretion—in short, the dignity—that workers deserve.