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Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (The University Center for Human Values Series, 44)?
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7 reviews of this product found across Reddit:
Its called private government I believe (see this book). Turn over large functions of the government and social programs to companies and suddenly your rights are gone.
<em>Private Government</em> by Elizabeth Anderson was a pretty good contemporary read, though it's more of a criticism of the lack of workplace democracy than advocacy for workplace democracy itself.
AHHH. These days I often forget about CU! Matt Stoller has also opened my eyes to a similar type of silencing no one seems to want to deal with as well!
This book and a lot of Anderson's work, now that I know about it, has really cemented my view that those on the free speech side are just unable to view the world through any useful range.
Do you happen to listen to This American Life? A little while back they had a story on a small time Republican who unwillingly ran up against the NRA machine.. fucking terrifying: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/637/words-you-cant-say
Also, the most recent episode documents how much of a game people like Rubin's TPUSA are promoting radicalization of campuses and thought of youth. They treat it as a battle to win against progressive thoughts. Fucking crazy. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/645/my-effing-first-amendment.
What about private governments?
https://www.amazon.com/Private-Government-Employers-University-Center/dp/0691176515
Some excerpts from Elizabeth Anderson's <em>Private Government</em>:
> [...] Aggregate statistics are hard to come by, because complaints about employer abuse and oppressive working conditions are so diverse, and crossindustry surveys on qualitative issues are expensive and rare. Moreover, academic research on labor is marginalized and underfunded, as workers themselves are. Here are some indications.
>Among restaurant workers, 90 percent report being subject to sexual harassment.^^19 Between 2007 and 2012, the Department of Labor conducted more than 1,500 investigations of garment factories in Southern California, discovering labor violations, including “sweatshoplike conditions,” 93 percent of the time.^^20 A recent study of workers in the poultry industry found that the “vast majority” were not allowed adequate bathroom breaks. Many are forced to wear diapers. Employers threaten to fire workers who complain, indicating that their free speech as well as their basic physiological needs and dignity are infringed by their employer. ^^21 This is just one part of a long and continuing struggle by workers in the United States to gain the right to use the bathroom at work— a right workers in other rich countries have long taken for granted.^^22
>A recent study, based on a survey of managers and employees, estimates that about seven million workers have been pressured by their bosses to favor some political candidate or issue, by threats of job loss, wage cuts, or plant closure.^^23 OSHA relies on employers to report the millions of cases of worker injuries and thousands of deaths suffered by workers each year. [...] a Government Accounting Office study found that 67 percent of occupational health practitioners observed “worker fear of disciplinary action for reporting an injury or illness.”^^24 Both workers’ safety and their freedom of speech are thereby compromised by dictatorship at work. The same report also finds that more than onethird of occupational health practitioners were pressured by employers to underdiagnose and undertreat worker injuries so as to avoid reporting requirements (as minor injuries do not have to be reported to OSHA).^^25
>Employers unilaterally determine work schedules, with no employee input for half of all early career employees. The results— including unpredictable schedules (41 percent of workers), fluctuating and short-notice on-call and split-shift work (where employees are sent home and called back the same day)— wreak havoc with the private lives of workers: they can’t arrange child care, can’t clear their schedules to take college classes or take on a second job needed to cover necessary expenses, and are left with unpaid junk time on their hands in the middle of the day, often hours from home, and with no opportunity to spend it with friends and family.^^26
>Walmart, which employs nearly 1 percent of the U.S. labor force (1.4 million workers), is notorious for assigning unreliable schedules to workers. Yet, it is telling that OURWalmart, a non-union workers’ organization dedicated to improving working conditions at Walmart, stands for Organization United for Respect: members are concerned not simply with wages and hours, but with being treated respectfully. A leading complaint of Walmart workers is rude and abusive managers, who scream at and harass them to get them to work harder. This abusiveness may be due to the fact that lower-level managers themselves are assigned work goals without any consideration of what it takes to meet them, and are constantly harassed by upper management for not working hard enough.^^27
>This doesn’t even describe the very bottom of America’s wage labor system. That is occupied by immigrants, both with visas for low-wage work and undocumented. Often the former are forced by their employers to stay past their visa expiration, because those same employers have confiscated their passports and threatened them with arrest or worse. One U.S. State Department investigation found that “30 percent of migrant laborers surveyed in one California community were victims of labor trafficking and 55 percent were victims of labor abuse.”^^28 Given that there are many million migrant and/or undocumented workers in the United States, it is reasonable to suppose that the number of victims range from the hundreds of thousands to a few million. Abuses include fraud, being forced to work without pay, rape and sexual harassment, beatings, torture, confinement to the workplace and to squalid housing for which extortionate rent is charged, exhausting hours, isolation, religious compulsion, and psychological manipulation and intimidation.^^29 Affected industries include “hotel services, hospitality, sales crews, agriculture, manufacturing, janitorial services, construction, health and elder care, and domestic service.” ^^30 Oh, and also restaurants.^^31 This list of industries, which collectively employ tens of millions of workers, is telling. Cutting across diverse sectors of the economy, it indicates not only where vulnerable immigrants, but where U.S. citizens working in the same places, are liable to suffer serious assaults in their autonomy, standing, and esteem.
> [...] Wage theft is pervasive among low-wage construction, restaurant, garment, nursing home, agriculture, and poultry workers, and affects many middleclass workers as well.^^36 One estimate from a business- funded think tank indicated an annual wage theft tab at $19 billion in 2004. Another estimate puts the tab at $50 billion in 2014, affecting two thirds of workers in low-wage industries, costing them nearly 15 percent of their total earnings. This is more than three times the amount of all other thefts in the United States.^^38
BuT iNEquAliTY UndEr cApITaLiSm ISn'T a pRObLeM
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