Professor Elizabeth Anderson on Workplace Democracy and Feminist Philosophy
currentaffairs.org
currentaffairs.org
I detect a strong "perpetual victim" complex from this interview. They interpret every aspect of our society in terms of who is supposedly being victimized by it. That's really the fundamental problem with the left these days. My advice to anyone who has this sort of perspective about things is stop seeing yourself as a victim. If you're an American, you actually have a pretty good life and you'd be better off concerning yourself with what you're going to make of the opportunities that you have.
> One example was by installing cubicles that made everyone lonely and didn’t improve any efficiency. ... Of course, now we see offices moving in the other direction, also without consulting workers about what they want and what enables them to actually work efficiently.
And that's it. That's at best a mild claim that talking with workers about what might make them more efficient ... might lead to more efficiency. Shocking, that.
It's surely not a major point of the professor's claims.
What is the "this way" you refer to in "this way ... That's how the rules of an organization get established." It seems you mean a small, flat organization where everyone gets a say in everything. But Anderson says:
> It doesn’t mean that workers are going to control everything. There is a role for expertise and managerial competence.
> If you look at worker-owned firms, they have a hierarchy of offices. The managers exist. Only there’s an accountability mechanism, so they can’t go overboard and turn their authority into raw power that’s used to abuse their underlings.
So when you write "this way", are you objecting to this sort of accountability mechanism at a larger scale? Or something else?
Concerning victimhood, I doubt your view is that people told to work 8 hour shifts without toilet breaks (“Well if you have to pee, you have to wear diapers or nappies.”), or spending unpaid personal time waiting for required bag searches, shouldn't see themselves as victims, right?
I think you mean that most Americans shouldn't consider themselves as victims, even though clearly some employers require their employees to follow illegal practices.
(Yes, they can quit. Quoting Anderson: "Well, what are the alternatives, really, for the vast majority of workers? Yes, you can join the very precarious gig economy and barely eke out a living. But for the vast majority of people that’s not a realistic option. They could barely survive.")
For example, when you write "If you're an American, you actually have a pretty good life.", I think you mean that in a general sense, and not true of every American.
In which case, we can still strive for a better life for more people, right?