Brad: Voice in State Government and Private Government

By

Anderson's responses to her commenters are well-articulated and enable her to strengthen the points she makes in her lectures. I find her response to Cowen's argument particularly interesting. I appreciate that she points to the severity of the issues of private government. She argues: "Both workers' safety and their freedom of speech are thereby compromised by dictatorship at work" (136). She illuminates this point with several examples of corporations that demonstrate employers' arbitrary control over their employees. By doing so, she reveals the fallaciousness of Cowen's argument that private government may not be so bad given its benefits. 

I feel compelled, however, to push on Anderson's argument on two fronts. First, in arguing against Cowen's assertion that "the market decides best" (138), Anderson states: "I believe that existing market orderings are distorted by the state's prior allocation of unaccountable power to employers over employees" (138). As she argues in her lectures, Anderson finds that the state plays a pivotal role in the development of problematic employer-employee relations. She alludes to employment-at-will, an employment practice/contract that the state has cemented through its labor laws. It becomes clear then that the state should be a target of efforts to bring more freedom to those oppressed by private government in the workplace. 

Anderson also emphasizes the power of voice: "I argue that the first three alone are not sufficient--workers need some voice within the workplace to protect against employer abuses of power" (133). Here, I must pose a question to Anderson: is securing "some voice" for employees in the workplace sufficient in promoting the freedom and equality of workers? Given that the state has distorted employer-employee relations, shouldn't securing voice for employees in the context of the state also be a priority? If employees are able to express their voice to demand changes in the law (i.e. advocating the weakening of employment-at-will laws), the problems of private government would certainly be alleviated. I argue that Anderson overlooks this important aspect in her lectures and responses. 

Second, Anderson states: "So I don't object to government--authority--in the workplace...I object, not to limited government, but to private government" (133). It appears that Anderson distinguishes these two concepts using the notion of voice. She argues that in a private government, workers "have no voice other than what their employers care to give them...and are vulnerable to abuses of power" (133) due to this lack of voice. In a limited government, in which a hierarchy must exist for the government to sustain itself, workers likely have some voice. I contend that whether workers have voice in a government is too narrow of a metric to assess whether a government is private or limited. If a certain government enables workers to voice their concerns but does not actually act upon these concerns, would we be right in saying that this government is not private? While being able to voice concerns is certainly an improvement over not being able to do so, it does not mean that a private government is not in place. Anderson seems to overlook this nuance in attempting to distinguish limited government from private government. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Livia: Táíwò and Economic Success in the Global South

By
  Reconsidering Reparations by Professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò illuminates the large extent to which racism and colonialism played in creating the current global economic structure, in which the global north dominates the global south. Additionally, this book highlights how current policies implemented by global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank have further strengthened and reaffirmed this positioning. Taking into account this global historical perspective, we can better understand how “consequences flow from some other parts of the world to other parts, often across national borders, and in ways that complicate geographically and politically narrow ways of thinking about reparations” (24). Thus, some sort of international obligation of social justice must be exist. Táíwò’s emphasis on the role that slavery and colonialism played in establishing the current economic order makes me think about the signal which this sends to the Global South in the development of their p...
Read more

Carlos: Response to Henry's Conclusion

By
I've spent way too long trying to argue against Henry's point because it just seems wrong to conclude with "there is no current social framework by which we might call their lasting effects socially unjust–at least under the political conception of justice". Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I felt I had to agree with Henry's argument regardless of how strange it felt to do so. Still, I did have a few ideas as I was thinking of how to refute Henry's conclusion: -------------------------------------------- 1) With the hypothetical situation Henry provides, if we were to fully extend its logic to our current world, I think Prof. Hurley would have also created a division between the A and B group that would have maintained even into Tuesday. I think were that division were to have taken place, even after Prof. Hurley disbanded the government, the division would have remained and the hierarchy of power would continue into the rest of the week. It seems fa...
Read more

Smith, Locke, Harris, and Justice

By
 On page 79, Smith writes, "the violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons," and thus it is a virtue that, unlike beneficence, warrants resentment if we fail to fulfill it. Upon reading this, I immediately thought, well how are you defining justice?  It became very clear in the following pages that Smith's conception of justice is nearly identical to Locke's Law of Nature. On page 80, he writes, "Among equals each individual is naturally, and antecedent to the institution of civil government , regarded as having a right both to defend himself from injuries, and to exact a certain degree of punishment for those which have been done to them." He continues to say that justice is only those transgressions which spectators would have the right to, and would be compelled to, punish whoever commits them. After this, he explains that no one has a right to advance their own happiness at the expense of someone else's...
Read more