What is Reddit's opinion of 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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It's an extremely stupid and myopic (or malicious) argument. Corey Robin has written a bit on this, referencing the book Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson > 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.

This book (chapter 2) is instructive:

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson > 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.

Here's a book you should read, buddy. https://www.amazon.com.au/Private-Government-Employers-Lives-about/dp/0691192243/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=private+government%5D&qid=1632303610&sr=8-1

> It's the equivalent of mandating that diabetics take insulin... Seriously.

That's a horribly slippery slope right there. You need to have very good reasons and a rigorous process to justify taking away someone's autonomy and self determination. Allowing it to be done will nilly by someone's decision at the top is allowing creeping authoritarianism.

yes, that is force. You are forced to get a job, otherwise your starve. You are forced to specialise in a particular style of job. The industry is talking about mandating vaccines: therefore, anyone in that industry will be forced to get one. Here's a book for you https://www.amazon.com.au/Private-Government-Employers-Lives-about/dp/0691192243

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about 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.

Yeah, choose that or starve; not a choice. Here's a good book for you: https://www.amazon.com.au/Private-Government-Employers-Lives-about/dp/0691192243

>When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick".

— Mikhail Bakunin

Workplace democracy

It is the idea that the people who perform the necessary labor of society should have a say in what is produced, when, where, how, and under what conditions the labor takes place. Modern (Western) strains of socialism are not seeking to collectivize farms and make the government the sole employer. They are seeking to democratize a decidedly authoritarian institution: the workplace.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson >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.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner >During the first half of the nineteenth century, American law adopted the definition of wage labor as the product of a voluntary agreement between autonomous individuals. The freedom of free labor arose from the noncoerced nature of the contract itself, not whether the laborer enjoyed economic autonomy. This legal transformation both reflected and reinforced the shift in economic power toward entrepreneurs and investors, while in some ways limiting the actual liberty of wage earners. Court-ordered specific performance of a labor contract fell into abeyance, no longer deemed compatible with the autonomy of the free laborer; but by the same token, the legal doctrine of "employment at will" also relieved employers of any obligation to retain laborers longer than economically necessary. If the right to quit helped define the difference between the free laborer and the slave, along with it came lack of recourse against being fired. While labor itself was not legally enforceable, the labor contract was held to clothe employers with full authority over the workplace. Thus, work rules that seemed extremely arbitrary to employees had the force of law behind them, and any who refused to follow reasonable commands could legally be dismissed without payment of wages due. Judges invoked the definition of the laborer as an autonomous individual to impede workers, via conspiracy laws, from organizing collectively to seek higher wages, and to prevent them from obtaining compensation from employers for injuries on the job (as free individuals, they were presumed to have knowingly assumed the risks of employment). "Free labor" did not, in other words, contradict severe inequalities of power within either the workplace or labor market.

Laboring for wages is frequently undesirable, and capitalistic/hierarchical arrangements completely sever the relationship between laborer and product by means of surplus value extraction.

“Work” exists in any system. Things like Bullshit Jobs are particular to capitalism, though of course there’s the old bureaucratic mess of Stalin’s Soviet Union command economy. But again, “socialism” these days is not the product of a post-monarchical, revolutionary, and more importantly, institutionalized, ideology.

Chomsky on having a job

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson > 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.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner >Although nineteenth-century liberalism defined the labor market as inhabiting a private sphere that existed outside the legitimate purview of government, in fact changes in the law and its enforcement helped to institutionalize the wage relationship and legitimize it as an authentic expression of freedom. During the first half of the nineteenth century, American law adopted the definition of wage labor as the product of a voluntary agreement between autonomous individuals. The freedom of free labor arose from the noncoerced nature of the contract itself, not whether the laborer enjoyed economic autonomy. This legal transformation both reflected and reinforced the shift in economic power toward entrepreneurs and investors, while in some ways limiting the actual liberty of wage earners. Court-ordered specific performance of a labor contract fell into abeyance, no longer deemed compatible with the autonomy of the free laborer; but by the same token, the legal doctrine of "employment at will" also relieved employers of any obligation to retain laborers longer than economically necessary. If the right to quit helped define the difference between the free laborer and the slave, along with it came lack of recourse against being fired. While labor itself was not legally enforceable, the labor contract was held to clothe employers with full authority over the workplace. Thus, work rules that seemed extremely arbitrary to employees had the force of law behind them, and any who refused to follow reasonable commands could legally be dismissed without payment of wages due. Judges invoked the definition of the laborer as an autonomous individual to impede workers, via conspiracy laws, from organizing collectively to seek higher wages, and to prevent them from obtaining compensation from employers for injuries on the job (as free individuals, they were presumed to have knowingly assumed the risks of employment). "Free labor" did not, in other words, contradict severe inequalities of power within either the workplace or labor market.

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner >Although nineteenth-century liberalism defined the labor market as inhabiting a private sphere that existed outside the legitimate purview of government, in fact changes in the law and its enforcement helped to institutionalize the wage relationship and legitimize it as an authentic expression of freedom. During the first half of the nineteenth century, American law adopted the definition of wage labor as the product of a voluntary agreement between autonomous individuals. The freedom of free labor arose from the noncoerced nature of the contract itself, not whether the laborer enjoyed economic autonomy. This legal transformation both reflected and reinforced the shift in economic power toward entrepreneurs and investors, while in some ways limiting the actual liberty of wage earners. Court-ordered specific performance of a labor contract fell into abeyance, no longer deemed compatible with the autonomy of the free laborer; but by the same token, the legal doctrine of "employment at will" also relieved employers of any obligation to retain laborers longer than economically necessary. If the right to quit helped define the difference between the free laborer and the slave, along with it came lack of recourse against being fired. While labor itself was not legally enforceable, the labor contract was held to clothe employers with full authority over the workplace. Thus, work rules that seemed extremely arbitrary to employees had the force of law behind them, and any who refused to follow reasonable commands could legally be dismissed without payment of wages due. Judges invoked the definition of the laborer as an autonomous individual to impede workers, via conspiracy laws, from organizing collectively to seek higher wages, and to prevent them from obtaining compensation from employers for injuries on the job (as free individuals, they were presumed to have knowingly assumed the risks of employment). "Free labor" did not, in other words, contradict severe inequalities of power within either the workplace or labor market.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) by Elizabeth Anderson > 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.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about 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.