Rethink Work

Changing how we think about work

Democracy & Power

There are currently 43 articles in this category    RSS

Articles about the dangerous power imbalance between employers and employees and the imperative need introduce democratic oversight of the workplace since paying for food and rent is not optional.

  • faviconCultivating a Leisurely Life in a Culture of Crowded Time: Rethinking the Work/Leisure Dichotomy — many people wish to replace this paradigm with something more liberating and meaningful, a lifestyle that is not dependent on the traditional temporal schemata of obligation (2007)
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Leisure, Research   
    Comments   
    Source: Scientific Journals    

  • faviconAmazon’s office mandate: The hidden power play behind workplace control — The power dynamics between employers and employees are not just about market transactions; they are steeped in a history of control and subordination enforced by government bodies and public policies. Amazon’s decision is a prominent example of the ongoing dominance of employer authority cloaked in efficiency and productivity rhetoric [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Source: Social Europe    

  • faviconElectronically monitoring your employees? It’s impacting their mental health — Results show 45% of those monitored report their workplaces have a negative impact on their mental health compared with 29% who are not monitored [2023]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconYour boss is watching — Monitoring technology is increasing the power imbalance between companies and workers. Protections lag far behind [2025]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Technofeudalism, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: MIT Technology Review    

  • faviconFreedom Under Capitalism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be — Libertarians argue that capitalism is superior to socialism because in capitalism anyone is free to do anything, including start a worker cooperative. In truth, capitalism constrains our options [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Worker Ownership, Worker Rights   
    Comments   
    Source: Jacobin    

  • faviconDemocratic Workplaces Make Economies Stronger — Employee-owners who have homes, families, and friends to consider are unlikely to vote to move their businesses out of their communities in response to tariffs or other economic shocks. Nor are they going to run around the globe looking for the cheapest labor force [2025]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Worker Ownership, Worker Rights   
    Comments   
    Country: CA   
    Source: Jacobin    

  • faviconHalf of UK professionals might quit if ordered back to the office full time, poll shows — Hybrid working, with time spend split between the office and another location such as home, is the working pattern for more than three-quarters (77%) of the workforce [2025]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Remote Working, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconPM Anthony Albanese flags support for working from home as figures reveal five days in office costs workers $5000 per year — saying he will champion the Australian worker’s right to WFH policies which he said help ease traffic congestion, benefit women and boost rural and regional areas [2025]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Country: AU   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconExtraordinary Labor Market Developments and the 2022-23 Disinflation — How remote work contributed to the unexpected economic recovery of the U.S. post-COVID, keeping unemployment low and managing inflation [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Remote Working, Research   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: National Bureau of Economic Research (US)    

  • faviconBillionaire backlash shows the power of basic income — Simply put, poverty and wealth are both about power – historical and contemporary – and how this plays out in people’s everyday lives. The idea behind basic income is to rebalance that power, redistributing it from those who have plenty to ensure that all have enough [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: UBI   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Al Jazeera    

  • faviconHow Musk, Trump, and Your Boss Learned to Hate Democracy — when you consider that businesses are run by dictators—that a firm is not a democracy—it makes sense why a series of rich guys at the top of the capitalist world think government can be run without following any laws [2025]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Mother Jones    

  • faviconThe Rise of the Worker Productivity Score — Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked. As these practices have spread, so has resistance to what labor advocates call one of the most significant expansions of employer power in generations [2022]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Source: NYT    

  • faviconThomas Piketty’s Radical Plan to Redistribute Wealth — To address inequality & improve democracy, he suggests taking a large measure of control over corporations away from their managers and shareholders and give it to employees, and create a system of egalitarian funding for political campaigns, the media and think tanks [2022]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Worker Ownership, Worker Rights   
    Comments   
    Source: NYT    

  • faviconWhy I was wrong to be optimistic about robots — Dehumanisation and intensification of work is not inevitable. But a different outcome will require different choices and a different distribution of power in the workplace [2021]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Productivity, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Source: Financial Times    

  • faviconIn their plaintive call for a return to the office, CEOs reveal how little they are needed — The case of remote work shows that the CEO class as a whole failed to pick up an innovation yielding massive benefits before it was forced on them by the pandemic, and have continued to resist and resent it ever since [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconThe People in the Shop; David Montgomery and the vitality of labor history — Many of the service-sector workers who have started to organize in recent years see their freedom at work and their sense of power to do it well threatened by the arbitrary power of their bosses [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Books, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: The Nation    

  • faviconThe humanizing power of worker-owned cooperatives — Applying principles from the Mondragon cooperative in Spain, Co-Op Cincy’s network reinforces that cooperatives are not just good for people and the planet, they are good for business [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: How to be Human, Worker Ownership   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconBring politics to work — When you hear “politics doesn’t belong in the workplace”, you’re being scammed. Most workplaces are dictatorships where you cannot exert your power over the thing that matters [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Source: Independent Blogs    

  • faviconEurope’s far-right parties are anti-worker — analysis shows that the far right voting patterns on proposed EU directives do not indicate a pro-worker stance on socioeconomic issues, let alone a leftwing one. Quite the contrary: on virtually all eight issues we examined, the far–right’s voting behaviour suggests a stance that is indifferent, if not outright hostile, to workers’ rights [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Research, Worker Rights   
    Comments   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconWorker Co-ops: A Pathway to Good Jobs for Immigrant Workers – As New York City struggles to accommodate an influx of people prohibited from employment, worker coops present a way to earn a livable income and build wealth [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Co-ops, Worker Ownership   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Labor Notes    

  • faviconLabor Organizing in the Age of Surveillance — Labor law’s approach to policing workplace surveillance is woefully inadequate, as new surveillance methods yield much more and much better information for employers aiming to nip workers’ concerted activity in the bud (PDF) [2018]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Research, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Scientific Journals    

  • faviconMicrosoft security tools questioned for treating employees as threats — The tendency to collect as much worker data as possible has become a broad area of concern – not only for employees and advocacy groups, but for regulators, legal scholars, and privacy professionals [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Technofeudalism, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Source: The Register    

  • faviconThe Spy Who Fired Me — In industry after industry, this data collection is part of an expensive, high-tech effort to squeeze every last drop of productivity from corporate workforces, an effort that pushes employees to their mental, emotional, and physical limits [2015]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Mental Health, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Source: Harper's Magazine    

  • faviconTech execs pushed for a return to the office – now they’re backtracking amid a workforce revolt, with only 3% of firms asking staff to return full-time. Despite reports suggesting that a full return to office is inevitable, frequent backlash from staff and statistics show that hybrid working practices appear to be here to stay [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Remote Working   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: ITPro    

  • faviconThe Invisible Work of America’s Domestic Workers — For decades, feminist activists have said that work in the home—often performed for no pay by wives, mothers, and daughters—has been misunderstood as separate from “real” labor. This feminized care has been relegated and detached from a labor movement focused on men [2024]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: How to be Human, Worker Rights   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Mother Jones