Like all institutions, workplaces socialize those of us within them. They provide a kind of informal education, promoting the development of some skills, habits, and attitudes, and frustrating the development of others. This isn’t a new observation, and in some sense, the fact that we are a product of or work is obvious. But if all institutions socialize us, how we work is likely to do so more than most. For starters, full-time workers spend an enormous amount of their time at work: Between leaving education and reaching the (increasingly distant) age of retirement, we will spend more time working than engaged in any other single activity except sleep. For the majority of workers, our work is also where we interact most—and cooperate most—with other people, certainly people with whom we haven’t actively chosen to spend our time.
Elizabeth Anderson, in her study of the work ethic in political and economic thought, writes that “by far the most important product of our economic system is ourselves.” In this, she joins a long line of political and economic theorists who have taken seriously the idea that what we do at work follows us home and that the implicit lessons the workplace teaches us can’t help but affect political life more broadly. For a whole set of writers going back to at least John Stuart Mill, the prospect of democratic self-rule as such is undermined by our overwhelmingly undemocratic set of working arrangements. If a genuinely democratic society requires people to reason about important questions of the common good, to actively participate in collective decision-making among equals, and to challenge and resist attempts to strip them of that power, then—the argument goes—we’re collectively shooting ourselves in the foot by spending most of our time at work executing the plans of others, deferring to our superiors, and accepting that many of the pettiest and the most consequential decisions about how we work will be made by our bosses, without our participation.
Sometimes, this is part of an argument for workplace democracy. Perhaps we could take advantage of the socializing effects of the workplace as a sphere of cooperation and decision-making and win the right for all employees to meaningfully participate in decisions about their own work: “By practicing popular government on a limited scale,” Mill hopes, we could better “learn how to exercise it on a larger.” The empirical evidence for this democratic “spillover” effect is inconclusive, despite several attempts and some tentatively positive findings, but this is fairly unsurprising: There just aren’t many cooperative or democratic workplaces, and studying them is unlikely to give us a very clear picture of the changes that might come from the widespread democratization of work.
Putting the mooted benefits of workplace democracy to one side, these gloomier and more diagnostic questions about how our work might stifle the capacities upon which democratic life relies will be particularly important during periods of dramatic changes in people’s experience of work, where the implicit political lessons of the workplace may change as well. The adoption of wage labor itself prompted this kind of reflection: Early U.S. republicans, for instance, worried that personal dependence on an employer, rather than the relative independence of the small-scale farmer, “begets subservience and venality … and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” Even among its defenders, the kind of work produced by the technology of the industrial revolution raised these kinds of worries too. Adam Smith, no workplace democrat and no opponent of the division of labor, bemoaned the fact that unless “very particular pains” were taken to prevent it—pains that no employer had reason to take—the routinization and specialization of work would stifle the development of what he took to be the “intellectual, social, and martial virtues” that genuine participation in political life required. In less paternalistic and less mechanical tones, later writers took aim at the political curriculum of the Fordist assembly line as well. “If we were to apply the test of an enlarged capacity for democratic citizenship,” in the words of James C. Scott:
…it is obvious that the assembly line itself is a profoundly authoritarian environment where decisions are in the hands of the engineers, and the substitutable units of the workforce are expected to do the work assigned them more or less mechanically. It never quite works out that way, but that’s the imminent logic of the line. The line as a work process would have a negative “net democratic product.”
We’re currently in another time when people’s everyday experience of the workplace is changing. This is Armin Samii, an Uber Eats rider, describing his colleagues: “The people who are seasoned are much more chill than I am. They’re the ones who let it roll off them. And they’re like, you have the shitty system, but we’re in the system and like, we got to be at peace with it and just accept the hit.”
This is Faizal Dualeh, recounting his manager firing him from his job at an Amazon warehouse: “We didn’t fire you, the machine fired you because you are lower than the rate.”
Finally, this is Todd, a “picker” in a U.K. supermarket distribution center: “There’s a phrase at work they keep repeating … just trust the system. It’s, like, quite quasi-religious.”
Armin, Faizal, and Todd are all describing being managed by algorithm, where the normal functions of management—instruction, evaluation, discipline, hiring, and firing—are performed in whole or in part by complex software algorithms instead of human managers. The creeping dehumanization of management has advanced in various ways over the last two decades: sometimes in great injections of novelty, as in the case of digital platforms like Uber or Deliveroo, where quasi-independent drivers and riders are matched with customers through an app; sometimes more gradually, as we’ve seen in the transformation of more traditional jobs in the logistics sector—including warehouse work, haulage, and other kinds of delivery—with corporations like Amazon leading the way.
Now it seems like it’s coming everywhere else as well. It’s hard to tell quite how much and quite how quickly. A recent OECD study showed that 90% of U.S. firms and 74% of European firms are using software to partially or fully automate managerial functions, but much of this will be very partial for now: things like the automated collection of entry and exit times. It’s not happening evenly, and it seems to be happening in the U.S. first—55% of U.S. firms in that survey are using tools that monitor the content and tone of employees’ conversations, for instance—but it looks like the everyday experience of work is set to change quite dramatically over the next decade.
While much of the (often fevered) discussion about technology and the future of work focuses on robots or large language models taking our jobs and the need to train or retrain for the jobs that remain, at least as important is the question of what that shift means for that “imminent logic,” those implicit political lessons, of the workplace. Social scientists of various kinds are studying these new forms of work, governments are beginning to regulate it, and the organized labor movement is pressing various kinds of demands in the interests of workers. Political philosophers, too, have started to ask what’s at stake in terms of freedom, or dignity, or justice, in this transition. But when it comes to stifling or enabling the development of our democratic capacities, how worried should we be?
Orlando Lazar
Orlando Lazar is Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College London. His research focuses on work and the workplace, power and domination, and economic democracy. Recent work includes “Taking it Home With You: Work, Free Time, and Domination” (CRISPP, 2025) and “Micro-domination” (European Journal of Political Theory, 2023).
