Private Government

How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It)

By: Elizabeth Anderson

Narrated by: Lauren Pedersen

Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can't see it

One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.

©2017 Princeton University Press (P)2023 Tantor

Disappointing 

Heard the author on a podcast, I listen to, The discussion was lively, thought-provoking, and very engaging, and I assumed the book would be the same. 

Bad assumption. I only made it three hours through the book before I gave up. It seems to be written and delivered in a relatively dispassionate and sanitized third person manner. Sometimes it takes on a more narrative format, but the reader talks about the author and how magnificent her lectures are multiple times, which is an extremely gratuitous thing to do when the author is writing about herself… and three hours into it I still haven’t heard any of these lectures, and there’s only two hours to go.

Starts off by telling you that it will address critiques of the work and refute them as part of the academic and scholarly process. When it gets to some very basic critiques of the work it seems to be cherry picking weak arguments to discuss in the first place, and it seems to also cherry pick the way it responds to those arguments, the whole thing seems like a waste of time.

Normally, I wouldn’t be this harsh on a review, but I’ve listened to 115 books on audible and I’m used to them being pretty good. On this one I not only lost my interest, but it appeared to be less analysis than a puff piece on the author, and a restating of historical facts with very little analysis, passion, or real authentic energy behind it.

I am totally biased here, I’m sure the author worked very hard to write this. I think my bias is coming from the fact that I was so engaged and interested by the podcast, that the bar was set very high, and this book just didn’t deliver for me.

Reader doesn’t liven it up either, feels like a NPR host reading an encyclopedia.