Orlando Lazar

The politics of working time are experiencing a return to historical form, with proposals for a four-day working week, a right to disconnect, and other similar policies being taken more seriously than they have in decades. But in comparison, the normative side of this programme has been neglected. Justifications for individual policies aimed at working time sit uncomfortably with one another, and an extremely wide range of purported benefits have been canvassed. Here, I want to make a case that remains undeveloped in the literature: that the increase and protection of non-work time would reduce the domination of workers by their employers and should be supported on that basis. After surveying the existing normative literature, I argue that the promotion of non-domination gives us direct and indirect arguments for reducing working time, and for protecting the boundary between work and non-work time.

This article analyses the phenomenon of ‘micro-domination’, in which a series of dominated choices are individually inconsequential for a person’s freedom but collectively consequential. Where the choices concerned are objectively inconsequential, micro- domination poses a problem for ‘objective threshold’ accounts of domination which either prioritise particularly bad forms of domination or exclude powers that do not risk causing serious harm to their victims. Where the choices concerned are subjectively inconsequential to the victim, micro-domination poses a problem for the common republican strategy of creating arenas of contestation for victims of domination, which rely on victims objecting strongly enough to a dominating relationship to sound the alarm. This kind of invigilation may systematically fail victims of micro-domination. Throughout the article, I suggest some ways of better accounting for and responding to cases of micro-domination.

Universal basic income (UBI) is increasingly proposed as a simple answer to the problem of domination at work—one policy whose knock-on effects will transform the balance of power between workers and employers. I argue against such ‘UBI-first’ approaches. Compared to UBI proposals for other purposes, a UBI sufficient or near-sufficient for minimising domination at work would be especially demanding in two ways. First, the level of the grant would be more demanding compared to UBIs suitable for other purposes, in order for workers to be able to credibly threaten to leave their jobs. Secondly, the maintenance of the grant must also meet strict criteria. The demanding level of the grant must be effectively secured against reduction, allowing workers to plan on its long-term acceptability; and in order to avoid increased state domination it must assume the status of an entitlement rather than a gift that may be withdrawn, through stabilisation against political change or some other means. These difficulties render UBI-first approaches doubtful at best, and an unhelpful distraction from other, more fruitful strategies at worst.

The modern Republican canon provides a number of rival accounts of domination, mostly sharing a conception of domination as arbitrary power. A key disagreement focuses on the nature of arbitrariness. So – what does it mean for power to be arbitrary? One influential answer is what Frank Lovett calls a ‘procedural’ account: roughly, power is arbitrary when it is unconstrained by effective, common- knowledge rules. Despite their simplicity and initial appeal, in this paper I argue that we should reject such procedural accounts. After giving the best case for procedural arbitrariness and defending it against an intuitive objection, I proceed by examining a set of problem cases, examples of what Erving Goffman called ‘total institutions’– highly rule-bound, tightly controlled environments. Although it is possible for these institutions to be non-arbitrary in the procedural sense, I argue that we should nevertheless see them as prime examples of domination. Such environments produce a relevantly similar bundle of psychological effects – anxiety, adaptation, and so on – to other paradigm cases of domination. I conclude by stressing the relevance of an analysis of totalising tendencies to a variety of contemporary political problems, and the inadequacy of any conception of domination that cannot accommodate them.