Workplace Dictatorship Articles | Rethink Work

Your 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

Country: US

Source: MIT Technology Review

Half 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

Country: UK

Source: The Guardian

How 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

Country: US

Source: Mother Jones

This ‘Return to the Office’ Rhetoric needs to end — The worst thing about those calling for a return to the office is that it is masking a bigger problem which crept into the working world in recent years: unpaid, unofficially forced overtime [2022]

In: Predatory capitalism

Topics: Remote Working, Workplace Dictatorship

Source: Independent Blogs

The Problem With Work — There is no escaping economic precarity in a society like ours—unless one is born into wealth, that is, or exploits others for profit. And no amount of education or culturedness or any professional-class job will shield you from the rampant exploitation that is core to a society that subordinates everything to profit [2024]

In: Predatory capitalism

Topics: Worker Rights, Workplace Dictatorship

Source: Current Affairs

Of Course We Should All be Working Less — There’s a lot about work in our society that is undesirable and harmful. The fact that we have to earn a wage in order to have our basic human needs met — housing, food, water, electricity, transportation, education — is coercive. And if we’re not independently wealthy, we must work or starve [2023]

In: Working hours

Topics: Leisure, Workplace Dictatorship

Country: US

Source: Current Affairs

Expert who coined presenteeism term says employers who force staff back are dinosaurs – Cary Cooper says ‘micromanagers’ risk driving away talent and damaging wellbeing [2024]

In: Good life

Topics: Remote Working, Workplace Dictatorship

Country: UK

Source: The Guardian

What if work is making us sick? — While employment has become less physically dangerous, it seems to have become more psychologically harmful, as high demands and low control at work — known in the academic literature as “job strain” — is bad for mental and physical health [2022]

In: Good life

Topics: How to be Human, Workplace Dictatorship

Country: UK

Source: Financial Times

The 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

Country: US

Source: The Nation

Apple accused of silencing workers, spying on personal devices — new lawsuit says company was illegally monitoring its workers’ personal devices and iCloud accounts while also barring them from discussing their pay and working conditions [2024]

In: Predatory capitalism

Topics: Technofeudalism, Workplace Dictatorship

Country: US

Source: Reuters

Bring 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

Source: Independent Blogs

Microsoft 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

Source: The Register

Revolt of the Robots — We should keep fighting for better jobs and better working conditions. But the battle against workplace technology is an unequal one. The real economic struggle now is for the redistribution of wealth generated by labour and machines, through universal basic income, the revival of the commons and other such policies [2018]

In: Predatory capitalism

Topics: How to be Human, Workplace Dictatorship

Country: UK

Source: Independent Blogs

America’s New Corporate Tyranny: Private power is power, no less than government power. You can be immobilized, impoverished, humiliated, tormented, and perhaps driven to suicide by hostile businesses and banks in an otherwise functioning liberal democracy, just as surely as by a dictatorship [2021]

In: Democracy & Power

Topics: Workplace Dictatorship

Country: US

Source: Tablet Magazine

In Praise of the Worker-Owned Company — In publishing, as with far too many industries, democracy is all but absent in the workplace. The people who do the day-to-day work don’t get a vote on whether their company should be sold, or to whom. We tend to think of this as the natural order but it doesn’t need to be this way [2022]

In: Democracy & Power

Topics: Worker Ownership, Workplace Dictatorship

Country: US

Source: Literary Hub

We are still enslaved: we may not die from hunger, but we are certainly overworked and stressed out. Work has overtaken us and invaded our consciousness. And the physical hardships of working in the old mills have been replaced by new psychological hardships [2004]

In: Good life

Topics: Workism, Workplace Dictatorship

Source: The Guardian

Corporate dictatorships rule the lives of perhaps 80 percent of working Americans. These corporations, with little or no oversight, surveil and monitor their workforces. They fire workers for expressing leftist political opinions on social media or at public events during their off-hours. They terminate those who file complaints or publicly voice criticism about working conditions [2019]

In: Democracy & Power

Topics: Worker Rights, Workplace Dictatorship

Country: US

Source: Common Dreams

Why Young People Are Joining Unions Again – A workplace is, at the most fundamental level, a microcosm of the political system. There are those who hold power, the bosses, and those who don’t, the workers. When unions are powerful, workers have something akin to a voice in the direction of their workplace [2018]

In: Trade unions

Topics: Worker Rights, Workplace Dictatorship

Source: Common Dreams

Freedom From the Boss – The rules and rights associated with democracy only apply to people’s relationship to their government, not their employer. Citizens in a democracy remain subjects in the workplace — the place where most adults spend a large part of their waking hours [2017]

In: Democracy & Power

Topics: Worker Rights, Workplace Dictatorship

Source: Jacobin

On the Tyranny of Being Employed – Contemporary philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that while we may think of citizens in western liberal democracies as relatively ‘free’, most people are actually subject to ruthless authoritarian government — not from the state, but from their employer [2024]

In: Democracy & Power

Topics: Worker Rights, Workplace Dictatorship

Source: Philosophy Break

Work, Work, Work — So a Few Can Be Rich: Inside every workplace, management control mechanisms have been put in place, the result of which has been stress, injuries, depression, and a profound sense of alienation, the consequence of living under the control of others [2022]

In: Democracy & Power, Predatory capitalism

Topics: Mental Health, Workplace Dictatorship

Source: CounterPunch