Mind the Economy/ Justice 138

Why work has become a space without democracy

In the workplace we accept forms of authority that we would never tolerate in public space. Why work remains a democratic exception and what consequences this has for our freedom

by Vittorio Pelligra

1 February 2026

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7' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

7' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

We spend most of our adult lives in places where someone else makes decisions for us. We cannot vote, we cannot have our say, we cannot actively participate. Places where choices that directly affect our income, our life time, our ability to plan for the future are made without us being able to influence them, contest them or even discuss them on an equal footing. These places are the companies and organisations, public and private, for which we work and to which we devote much of our time and energy of our lives. A paradoxical situation. Luigi Zingales pointed this out some time ago when he wrote about corporate governance: "The term 'governance' implies the exercise of authority. But in a free market economy, why do we need some form of authority? Is not the market responsible for the efficient allocation of all resources without the intervention of any authority? Indeed, Coase taught us that the use of the market has costs and that firms alleviate those costs by replacing the price mechanism with the exercise of authority' ('Corporate governance', in R.S. Kroszner, L. Putterman, The Economic Nature of the Firm: A Reader, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 69-76).

Work as a democratic exception

Free market and captive labour. A contradiction has become so familiar as to be almost invisible. We strongly defend civil rights in the public space, but are willing to suspend them as soon as we cross the threshold of the office, the warehouse, the factory. We accept that decisions with far-reaching consequences on our daily lives - schedules, workloads, evaluations, sanctions, employment stability - are taken unilaterally by others and almost never in our best interests. If it were the state acting in this way, we would speak without hesitation of abuse of power. At work, however, we call it organisation, hierarchy, flexibility, efficiency.

Albert Hirschman taught us that when an institution is malfunctioning, we can react in three ways: exit, voice, loyalty. We can leave, withdrawing from the relationship that is not working; we can make our voice heard, protesting and demanding change; or we can stay, continuing to cooperate in the hope that things will improve or simply adapting to the state of affairs. In the abstract, these three options should balance each other out: leaving signals the failure of the institution, voicing allows its correction from within, loyalty allows the conflict to endure over time. In the workplace, however, this balance breaks down. Exit often coincides with precariousness, voice can cost the job, loyalty becomes a survival strategy. When exit and voice are systematically weakened, loyalty stops being a choice and becomes submission. It is in this seemingly ordinary, and for this very reason rarely questioned, space that labour stops appearing as a mere economic fact and reveals itself as a space in which power takes shape and produces politically relevant inequalities.

From market to domain

For years we have portrayed work as an exchange between equals: time and skills in exchange for wages. A voluntary transaction, regulated by the market and therefore, it is said, inherently free. But this representation ignores an elementary fact: work is not just an exchange, it is a power relationship. Entering into an employment relationship means accepting that someone else can give orders, evaluate our performance, sanction our behaviour, decide on our permanence or exclusion. Not for an instant, but on an ongoing basis. The lexicon of the market, focused on the initial act of consent, obscures what happens afterwards. Once the contract is signed, the worker does not become free as before. He enters into a regime of subordination that not only concerns the organisation of tasks, but often extends far beyond: unpredictable hours, informal availability, digital control, behavioural prescriptions, limits to freedom of expression. Power does not always manifest itself in brutal form; more often it operates as latent possibility, as implicit threat, as internalised asymmetry. It is here that Hirschman's categories reveal their full critical scope.Exit is not a safety valve if it entails loss of income, status, protections, biographical continuity. Voice is not a right if it exposes one to direct or indirect retaliation. And loyalty is not a virtue if it arises from a lack of alternatives. Under these conditions, what appears as consent is often just adaptation.

Traditionally, we have discussed labour justice almost exclusively in terms of wages, redistribution and opportunities, leaving the question of power in the shade. A significant part of contemporary political philosophy, on the other hand, invites us to take the relational dimension of work seriously, questioning not only the outcomes, but the forms of authority that structure everyday working life.

Private Governments

Elizabeth Anderson's contribution marks, in this debate, a decisive shift in the focus of justice: it is not enough to ask who gets what, it is necessary to ask who commands whom, with what powers, within what limits and in what capacity. The starting point is a deliberately essential but theoretically disruptive definition. Anderson calls government any institutionalised relationship in which some have the authority to give orders to others and to sanction them in the event of non-compliance. In this sense, he notes, "Most workers are subject to the control of their employers in ways that are largely immune to the forms of accountability we demand from political power" (Private Government, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 37-38).

Work thus emerges not as a simple space for productive cooperation, but as an ordinary place for the exercise of power, largely removed from the criteria of democratic accountability that we consider inalienable in the public space. It is this structural asymmetry of authority, even more than economic inequality in the strict sense, that constitutes the core of labour injustice. A decisive element of Anderson's analysis is to show that employer power operates not only through explicit orders, but through a set of implicit rules, expectations and threats that guide behaviour even before conflict emerges. In the workplace, he writes, employers 'do not merely direct the activities of workers, but also regulate their behaviour, attitudes and even the way they express themselves' (p. 44). Private government does not only serve to coordinate production: it regulates people. This power is all the more effective the more it remains invisible and normalised. Most interference does not take the form of direct command, but that of an ever-present possibility. The worker knows that disagreeing, slowing down or exposing himself can have consequences; and it is this awareness that produces self-censorship and conformism. In this sense, domination operates ex ante. Modern labour produces not only goods and services, but also prudent subjects, oriented to avoid the risk of loss.

The examples are far from exceptional: dismissals for critical opinions expressed on social media, codes of conduct that extend to private life, fragmented and last-minute schedules that make it impossible to schedule childcare or even a doctor's appointment. In all these cases, Anderson notes, 'workers live under a form of private governance that we would find unacceptable if it were exercised by the state' (p. 52). When exit is costly and voice discouraged, power becomes arbitrary. 'In the absence of an effective possibility of exit or voice,' Anderson further writes, 'workers are exposed to concrete forms of domination' (p. 61). It is therefore not a matter of personal preference or subjective choice, but of freedom in a fully political sense.

In more recent works, Anderson shows how this structure of domination is further reinforced by a transformation of the work ethic. In Hijacked (Cambridge University Press, 2023) she reconstructs how an ethic born to defend the dignity of workers has been progressively turned against them. "The work ethic has been hijacked to demand ever greater sacrifices from workers while freeing employers from corresponding obligations of justice" (p. 18). The result is a moral narrative that presents obedience as a virtue and interprets labour suffering as a test of character.

In this framework, loyalty takes on a deeply ambiguous meaning. It is no longer loyalty that sustains the institution over time, but that which covers up injustice, preventing it from being recognised as such. Dedication, flexibility, resilience, engagement become unilateral obligations; silence and resignation signals professional maturity. "Workers are morally driven to endure injustice rather than challenge it" (p. 42).

Injustice at work does not only derive from wrong rules or abusive employers, but from an institutional and cultural set-up that makes adaptation to subordination rational, prudent and even morally appreciable. The problem, then, is not why workers accept unjust conditions, but why they often lack the symbolic, institutional and material resources to do otherwise. Hence the radical critique of the idea that the possibility of leaving the labour relationship is sufficient to guarantee freedom. To those economists convinced that where individuals are free to exit a relationship, there can be no authority, Anderson responds in a deliberately provocative manner: 'It is like saying that Mussolini was not a dictator because Italians were allowed to emigrate. Although the right to emigrate may lead rulers to voluntarily limit their power, it hardly dissolves it' (p. 70). Freedom does not coincide with the possibility of escape, especially when escape entails huge costs.

Jobs and real freedom

What then does justice require, if we take work seriously as a space for the asymmetrical exercise of power? It is not enough to redistribute ex post what is produced under unequal conditions. We need to intervene upstream, on the structure of relations. We need rights at work understood as civil rights: protection against arbitrariness, clear limits to interference in private life, procedural guarantees. Collective voice must be strengthened, because the individual voice, isolated, is almost always too costly. Exit must be made truly viable, through institutions that reduce dependence on the individual employer: welfare, social insurance, continuous training. But above all, a change of outlook is needed. As long as we continue to think of work only as a purely economic fact, we will continue to tolerate forms of subordination that would be unacceptable in any other sphere of life. As long as we separate political citizenship from productive life, we will accept without too much scandal a one-sided democracy.

A democracy that tolerates the exercise of domination in the workplace is in fact an unfinished democracy: free in voting, subordinate in everyday life. As long as work remains a space removed from the language of justice and political responsibility, we will continue to confuse adaptation with consent and necessity with freedom. And we will continue to question the fragility of our democracies without recognising that part of its roots lie in the crisis of work as it is experienced and perceived today, especially by the younger generations. No longer as a space of recognition, flourishing and social integration, but as a place of precariousness, meaninglessness and subordination.