Freedom, Authority, and the Organization of Work

Most workers today labor under the authority of an employer. In this chapter, I examine three philosophical views on the reasons that may justify this hierarchy of authority and the conditions that may instantiate or serve those reasons. On the first view, workplace hierarchy is justified insofar as it promotes efficient production—whether because efficiency yields a higher economic output that serves independent aims, including a fiduciary duty to create wealth, or because it transforms subjection to the natural person occupying the office of boss into subjection to the office itself, making the resulting hierarchy unobjectionable. The second view focuses on whether workers, in exercising their freedom of occupation, voluntarily consent to working within a firm’s hierarchy. On the third view, workplace hierarchy is tolerable only if it is constrained to uphold the relational equality of employers and employees, whose authority relation some variants compare to the authority relation of state to subject, and to prevent workers from being dominated by their employers.