Reaction to Anderson's Private Government

By Anonymous

 I'm not sure about my classmates, but in Anderson's work I trembled a few times. I found her conclusions and lenses of looking at the way people spend much of their lives to be awfully scary. 

There is a sense in current times that we have it much less bad than earlier times. In high school I remember learning about the horrors of the late 1800s and early 1900s due to the effects of the industrial revolution. We learned about magnates Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, and the horrendous factories where losing limbs, death, workplace-caused sickness, and fear of losing your job at any moment were commonplace. We learned about the circumstances that were so untenable that they gave rise to entire new ideas for governance like socialism and communism, intended to give power to workers and get rid of the unjust, massive inequality between the owners of capital and the workers. 

We speak as if we've progressed today. Today we have anti-discrimination laws, OSHA, and diversity trainings. Accordingly, we focus on low wages, high unemployment, and lack of upward mobility as our major issues. Much less often do we focus on working conditions. 

Like Anderson said, for her typical reader it is easy to ignore the circumstances of workplaces. Tenured professors with some of the best working conditions in America and college students who are mostly bound to be at the top of corporate hierarchies, own capital, and possess high market value that gives them the choice to choose a company that treats them well. But such circumstances are far from the usual American story. 

But, I'd argue this doesn't only affect low wage workers--it just harms them more, gives them less reward, and has a more obvious, sometimes violent or physical impact. However, I think there is a lot of wrong occuring for most workers that aren't self-employed or in the rare group of people, like Professors, that Anderson mentions. This wrongdoing can affect a highly-paid consultant at Goldman Sachs, too. We just overlook this because the consultant is being paid so highly. In our capitalist system, no one worries about people who are getting paid highly. While the harm might be less because the consultant has easier ability to exit to other jobs, is getting paid more, and likely is being given far more benefits, the underlying reasons for the injustice still exist--lack of freedom. Our future-consultant-classmates will also not have say in the activity that occupies over 50% of their working day, in the activity that they spend most of their energy on during the workweek. They may be being paid well, but in return they are working under a communist dictatorship for 50% (or more, especially when highly paid consultants report to work 60-100 hour weeks) of their time. 

If it were framed this way, would our classmates still take the job? Is the other 50% or less of their time with financial freedom worth it? Maybe it is for some. Maybe some even enjoy their work. But for those that don't, it seems that they may be working with the goal of a freedom (financial) by giving up lots of another freedom. At the end of the day, it is hard to know if the tradeoff is worth it. People give most of their best energy each week to a dictator in exchange for money. 

Americans look with bad taste on "cram schools" in China, as well as the "communist" dictatorship that China arguably is. But I'd argue that many workers, even high paid ones, are undergoing similar or worse conditions to cram school. I'd also argue that most of us are under the same authority of a communist dictatorship during a huge portion of our lives. The political freedoms that we have outside of work allows us to walk away satisfied. But should we be satisfied?


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