Are Workers Dominated?

Tom O'Shea

doi:https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v16i1.631

Volume 16, Number 1
September 2019

ARTICLE

Are Workers Dominated?

Volume 16, Number 1, September 2019, Pages 1–24

https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v16i1.631

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Abstract

This article undertakes a republican analysis of power in the workplace and labor market in order to determine whether workers are dominated by employers. Civic republicans usually take domination to be subjection to an arbitrary power to interfere with choice. But when faced with labor disputes over what choices it is normal for workers to make for themselves, these accounts of domination struggle to determine whether employers possess the power to interfere. I propose an alternative capabilitarian conception of domination as the arbitrary power to determine access to capabilities necessary for relationships of equality between citizens. This approach allows us to diagnose domination in the workplace and the labor market but does not capture unfreedom arising from the wider socio-structural position of workers. Thus, I supplement this capabilitarian account of the domination of workers with a structural account of dominating power, which reveals a richer set of conditions under which employers dominate workers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

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