6.6: Threats to Individual Freedom--Government Versus Corporations

“The personal-data privacy war is long over, and you lost.”

—Ian Bogost ⁽¹⁾

“As a general rule, a police officer can’t arrest you because you wore a hat supporting a particular political candidate. But your boss could fire you for the very same reason.”

—Tom Spiggle ⁽²⁾

Citizens of a republic need to be guarded against encroachments of liberty. Two significant threats to liberty stand out that have a track record of undermining freedom and the power to enforce tyrannical policies: governments and corporations.

The Threat from Government

The Mochida Family Being Relocated Against Their Will to a Detention Center in 1942

Based on historical evidence, governments will limit freedom of speech and the press; they will aggressively incarcerate people; they will inflict cruel and unusual punishments; they will seize property without due process or fair compensation. In all likelihood, governments will continue to do these things in the future, especially in times of war or other types of civil unrest or threat.

While it is clear that the federal government has historically committed some very serious civil-liberties violations, state and local governments pose the more likely threat to individual liberties. State and local governments largely enforce criminal law, regulate things like marches and demonstrations, make decisions regarding property use and eminent domain, control schools, and enforce moral legislation. Obviously, citizens can turn to the courts to right specific wrongs. They can also elect new leaders and insist that they change oppressive laws. In a democratic system—even an attenuated one—the government is the citizens' servant. As such, people can ask the government to help answer these types of questions: Should parents be able to deny their children life-saving modern medicine because they have objections to it? Should people be able to flout public health guidelines, even though doing so endangers everyone else and makes the need for those guidelines last longer? To what extent should the government decide who can marry?

The Threat from Corporations

Unlike civil liberties, individual liberty is enormously threatened by corporate power. Corporations, particularly those that are large and cross state and country boundaries. If you want the factory to stay in the United States, you'd better be willing to take a pay or benefits cut. If the company office moves from a high-tax state to a low-tax state, you’ll have to uproot your family and move if you want to stay employed. This kind of corporate power is taken for granted in the United States because workers are often in a poor bargaining position.

Fifty years ago, one-third of workers belonged to a union; now only 7 percent of private-sector workers belong to a union. ⁽³⁾ The United States also doesn’t structurally empower workers as some other countries do. Take Germany’s Mitbestimmungsrecht—or codetermination—requirement, which dates back to the 1920s and says that “depending on the size of a German limited company, a third or even half of the members of its supervisory board are voted in by its employees.” ⁽⁴⁾ This kind of workers' power has helped support German wages, working conditions, and the vitality of Germany’s manufacturing sector.

Large American corporations are in a political situation where they can limit their workers' or customers' liberties, and the federal government has often encouraged this development. Consider these examples:

Privacy—Privacy is not a liberty enumerated in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has relied on privacy arguments to protect intimate family planning decisions. ⁽⁵⁾ Shoshanna Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism—“a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” ⁽⁶⁾ In other words, your labor is worth something to corporations—they must pay for it if they want to produce value—but almost all of the information about you is freely available to corporations, who buy and sell it between themselves, aggregate it, and compile it to expand their profits. For example, the National Rifle Association (NRA) rails against gun licensing because they don’t want the government to have a list of gun owners, but fails to consider that corporate America knows exactly who owns which guns. Under surveillance capitalism, we traded privacy for convenience and connection. The European Union implemented a uniform General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 to give Europeans better privacy protections, but nothing similar has passed in the United States.

Free speech—Americans cherish the ability to speak freely about the issues of the day. But those protections stop at the office or factory door. Attorney Tom Spiggle states that “Despite what many employees think, your rights to freedom of speech are fairly limited at work, and it’s often perfectly legal for an employer to take action against a worker for something they said or wrote.” ⁽⁷⁾ Employees can talk about harassment or fraud or other illegal activities that they see in the workplace, and they can talk about wages and working conditions, but employers can prevent them from talking about politics. As employment lawyer Daniel Schwartz puts it, “Companies have a right to manage their workplaces as they want. They can prefer one point of view over another if they want.” ⁽⁸⁾

Neo-feudalism—Almost all people below retirement age are dependent on worker wages. Indeed, most people are only one or two paychecks away from financial ruin.⁽⁹⁾ In addition, most working-age people are dependent on their job—or their spouse or parent’s job—for health insurance. America’s economy is characterized by regional booms and busts. Journalist Chris Hedges’ coined the memorable phrase, sacrifice zones to describe an America’s brand of exploitative capitalism—places where the project of endless exploitation of natural resources and human labor manifests itself in the form of agricultural fields where laborers endure near slave-like conditions to produce cheap food for American tables, fulfillment centers crammed with low-wage workers and robots process cheap goods for American front porches, and abandoned industrial centers where jobs disappeared over the horizon to places with lower wages and fewer regulations. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Amazon Workers Protesting Working Conditions and Corporate Surveillance in Shakopee, Minnesota

Neo-feudalism refers to the idea that society resembles the feudalism that existed in the Medieval period in which most ordinary people had very limited freedom and the economic, political, and legal structures were dictated by the aristocracy. In the modern world, aristocracy has been replaced by the wealthy corporate elite. Ordinary people in U.S. don’t like to think of themselves as serfs, but consider how controlled people are by corporations and financial institutions. Debt—student debt, home mortgages, car loans, credit card balances, and medical bills—combined with the wage-labor imperative, the reality of sacrifice zones, and the desperation to avoid having one’s family fall into the lower classes keeps citizens in line. People are too busy and too dependent to engage in something like a general strike. Individuals are too afraid to step too far out of line for fear of losing their jobs or livelihood. In addition, propaganda is used by corporate media to convince people that the current state of affairs is normal and unchangeable.

References

1. Ian Bogost, “Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism,” The Atlantic. August 23, 2018.
2. Tom Spiggle, “Your Free Speech Rights (Mostly) Don’t Apply at Work,” Forbes. September 28, 2018.
3. Quoctrung Bui, “50 Years of Shrinking Union Membership in One Map,” Planet Money on NPR. February 23, 2015.
4. Horst Eidenmüller, “Corporate Co-Determination German-Style as a Model for the UK?” Oxford University School of Law. July 18, 2016.
5. Griswold v. Connecticut(1965)
6. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Kindle Edition. Public Affairs, 2019. Page 2 of 664.
7. Tom Spiggle, “Your Free Speech Rights (Mostly) Don’t Apply at Work,” Forbes. September 28, 2018.
8. Chris Isidore, “Free Speech on the Job, and What That Means,” CNN Business. August 8, 2017.
9. Quentin Fottrell, “Millions of Americans are One Paycheck Away From the Street,” Marketwatch. January 20, 2018.
10. Chris Hedges, “United States Riddled with Impoverished ‘Sacrifice Zones,’” CCPA Monitor. July/August, 2013.
11. Daniel J. H. Greenwood, “Neofeudalism: The Surprising Foundations of Corporate Constitutional Rights,” University of Illinois Law Review. 2017. Page 166.
12. John W. Whitehead, “The Age of Neo-Feudalism: A Government of the Rich, by the Rich and for the Corporations,” Huffington Post. March 30, 2013.

Media Attributions

• Mochida Family © Dorothea Lange is licensed under a Public Domain license
• Amazon Protest © Fibonacci Blue is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license