Imagine you were born into a society in which the majority of people lived under the following conditions:
1) They wake up early to report for labor; failure to report on time results in censure.
2) They cannot leave the Labor Compound until a supervisor or a judgmental cadre of fellow laborers says so, usually after having labored at Labor Compound for the duration of the day and part of the night.
3) They sleep 8 hours of a 24-hour day, work for Labor Compound 8 hours/day, and dedicate 2-3 hours/day to exercising limited freedom to do what they choose.
4) They are tagged with tracking censors which collect data on where they go, whom they interact with, and what they do during all hours at the Labor Compound. This data is reported to supervisors who use it to further manipulate the conditions of labor in the Compound.
5) Their Labor Compound supervisors enforce strict policies dictating the emotional state of their laborers. Laborers who fail to demonstrate happiness with their labor on the Compound are censured.
6) Their Labor Compound supervisors rig computers in the Labor Compound to censor content on the Internet to limit access for laborers.
7) They are subject to drug testing by their Labor Compound supervisors, even if they've never been suspected of, accused of, or prosecuted for illegal drug use.
8) Their access to healthcare is determined by their Labor Compound.
9) Their obligations to the Labor Compounds determine whether and under what conditions they can have children.
10) They can be dismissed from the Labor Compound for any reason, at the will of Compound supervisors.
These being the case, we haven't even gotten to the sad part. The sad part is that if I asked you whether these policies were more prevalent in China or North Korea, you'd think seriously about the question. The sad part is that if I asked you if these were appropriate living conditions for someone who values individual freedom and democracy, you'd say absolutely not.
What's even sadder is that if I told you these conditions were imposed and enforced by a government, you'd be outraged; but if I told you these conditions were imposed and enforced by an employer, you'd shrug your shoulders.
You might pause and consider the fact that, regardless of who's imposing these conditions, these conditions are the reality for a vast majority of Americans. Land of the free, home of the brave, is it?
You're probably thinking: wait a minute, I'm an employee 'at will' (if you're thinking like an attorney); I have the choice to work or not to work under such conditions. This is different from a scenario in which the government mandates that I do these things, against my will, and by the force of law, and of sovereign power.
You're right in this respect. These are indeed two very different scenarios (even though, in practice, they produce very comparable realities). The thing about choice, however, is it's not (ironically) a yes or no issue. Choice is a matter of competing forces that exist on a spectrum. For example, I could put a gun to your head and tell you that I'll 'give you a choice': either drink this lethal cocktail or I'll blow your brains out. It's true, I've given you a choice; but it's not the choice you really want. The choice you want is under what conditions to survive, not under what conditions to perish. This isn't a choice between chocolate or raspberry ice cream.
I'm not even trying to suggest that working for an employer is like having a gun to your head. I promise I'm not trying to suggest that. But what I do want to get across is that 'at will' employment is a misleading concept. We do have choices about which employer to work for; but we don't have the choice to simply perish without a way of supporting ourselves and our families. And when employers, large, medium, and small, across different sectors of work, largely enforce the same kinds of restrictive office policies and employment conditions, our choices really don't mean as much as it sounds like when we say to ourselves 'yeah, but at least I have a choice.' Maybe it's more like shit-flavored ice cream or urine-flavored ice cream for most Americans.
After all, it's not exactly news that most of us really don't like our jobs. There are plenty of people out there--probably your bosses and your trust-fund buddies and your grandpa--who will tell you that this generation (whichever one it is) has gone soft, and people aren't supposed to like their work, and that's just life, etc. These are the people who are invested in you doing hard work for them, giving up your freedom for them, because maybe they already gave up most of their lives to spend their 50s with marginally more freedom to boss your sorry ass around. I would suggest: the hell with that attitude. You probably started working as a teenager. You're going to die around age 78. You probably won't retire before age 67. What are you doing with your life?
Don't get me wrong. Many of us--a privileged few--really love our jobs. I love my job. If I couldn't do my job, I don't know what I'd do with myself, retirement or not. To me there are few things more satisfying than doing excellent work that you can be proud of. Honestly. But in my case I know that the hard work I do is something I have a direct stake in, that I believe in, that allows me to sleep soundly (less than 8 hours). This is to say I have nothing against hard work nor ambition. Far from it. But I don't work in a Labor Compound. I don't have to be somewhere all the time because someone demands it. I set my own deadlines. And perhaps most importantly, I'm no one's boss. I don't rely upon the oppression or exploitation of someone else in order to succeed in what I do.
Before this gets too self-righteous, I want to clarify: I don't think everyone should or even requires the work conditions that I have to be satisfied. What I do think, however, is that the work conditions for too many people are not satisfying enough.
We trudge on with this Enlightenment idea that our government is the primary threat to our freedom. I think this is incredibly naive. This is a new world in which the government and the private sector are barely extricable, and in which the drivers of legislation are not individuals and individual rights, but employers and corporate rights. It's time to ask who really governs you, day to day; who really restricts your freedom as a human being to flourish in the pursuit of happiness? We've been fighting our government on the traditional front while our employers, collectively, have swept around and surrounded us from every other angle. Saying that we 'have a choice' in avoiding oppressive labor conditions would be like saying we 'have a choice' to defect from society, break the mandatory social contract, and live separately in utopian communes to escape government regulation. Neither of these is any more realistic than the other.
I needn't go through a litany of points on this issue, like how much corporate and special-interest lobbying drown out the voice of individuals in the democratic (say that with a straight face) process, how much consumer culture is tailored to give us something to do (buy) because we have so little time and energy in our daily lives to actually contemplate what it is we truly love to do when we're not working. I should remark that it's a damn shame that we invest so much of our thinking into our jobs that all that's left to do at the end of the day is 'zone out' with some reality TV nonsense or some grocery shopping (I can have one of 153234 choices of snack cracker! Thanks income!). But otherwise I'm not going to get into all that here.
Despite all of this, we do have some choice in the matter. We can employ our government to give us greater rights as employees. And we can start answering the question of what to do to earn a living not by chasing after a high income for low freedom, but by directing our talents and efforts toward industries that treat employees better, that allow for more freedom and flexibility in and beyond the workplace, and that exist to produce things of concrete value for the world (rather than to further a labor-consumption hamster wheel). Of course, none of this will be enough to combat the asinine orthodoxy of endless commercial growth for the sake of endless growth itself. But it's a start.
