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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 3926644" data-attributes="member: 56035"><a href="https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-private-governments-that-subjugate-u-s-workers/" target="_blank">The ‘Private Governments’ That Subjugate U.S. Workers</a>The corporations that in effect rule the lives of American workers constitute what University of Michigan philosophy professor <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/philosophy/people/faculty/elizabeth-anderson.html" target="_blank">Elizabeth Anderson</a> refers to as “private governments.” These “workplace governments,” she writes, are “dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don’t merely govern workers: they dominate them.” These corporations have the legal authority, she writes, “to regulate workers’ off-hour lives as well—their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise. Because most employers exercise this off-hours authority irregularly, and without warning, most workers are unaware of how sweeping it is.”“If the U.S. government imposed such regulations on us, we would rightly protest that our constitutional rights were being violated,” Anderson writes in her book “<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10938.html" target="_blank">Private Government</a>: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It).” “But American workers have no such rights against their bosses. Even speaking out against such constraints can get them fired. So most keep silent.”“Employers’ authority over workers,” Anderson writes, “outside of collective bargaining and a few other contexts, such as university professors’ tenure, is sweeping, arbitrary, and unaccountable—not subject to notice, process, or appeal. The state has established the constitution of the government of the workplace; it is a form of private government.” These corporations, by law, can “impose a far more minute, exacting, and sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any domain outside of prisons and the military.”</blockquote>

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