"Freedom"...
"In any case, it’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions—you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism. Whatever rights workers have are guaranteed by the limited public authority that still exists.
When enormous, private, tyrannical institutions are granted the same rights as—or more rights than—human beings, freedom becomes something of a joke. The solution isn’t to undermine freedom—it’s to undermine the private tyrannies."
Noam Chomsky
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I've found that in all of my situations there's been a fairly solid hierarchy.
One job was for a church. Pastor and assoc. pastor, a choir director, a couple of office workers. I was an office worker. I was told what to do by the pastor and assoc. pastor. Often worked with the choir director, but he made the decisions. A lot of my job was doing what the federal government or the CPA, interpreting the federal government, told me to do. How I scheduled tasks at work often was up to me; often there was only one way that worked because of the church calendar, monthly calendar, annual holidays, and federal reporting calendar. So I was free to follow the one workable schedule.
Grad school had the school system, the campus, and my department all telling me what to do. I had freedom. But very limited. In some ways, working for the church gave me more freedom. However, I was more free to schedule my time. Within the confines of the course schedule, the academic calendar, and departmental and division time-to-degree guidelines. Oh, and federal law.
I worked for a small start-up. CEO (the owner), CFO (her partner), the sales manager, shipping clerk, and me. I was told what to do. Again, I could schedule things my way, but often that was out of a set of limited choices imposed by the calendar, federal and state and local laws, and how a CPA interpreted those laws. When I was told to do something, however, I did it.
I'm still looking for what I'd call a large tyrannical corporation that squashed my freedom. I see small organizations, a university, calendars, and the federal government.
I was a freelance translator. I was free. Oddly, when I worked for organizations I was both more and less free, because the strain of getting work, doing the work, and getting payment for the work was too much. The company reduced my income per job, but let me free to do the work. Net result: more money when working for a company, and that meant more "freedom from want."
Now I teach. I do what the federal government tells me, what the state government, my school district, campus principal, my supervisor/administrator tell me. I have state standards to follow, a school calendar, regimented school day, district and state testing calendars. I have to have so many kinds of grades per reporting period, grading guidelines, must test by a certain time and reteach by a certain time to retest. I have a "team" that I collaborate with to implement this, but often all the choices are overdetermined and therefore bad. There are 504s and IEPs I must follow. There are 160 kids and their parents who are convinced I'm counter help at Burger King and my mantra is, "Have it your way!" And if a kid misunderstands me at some point, I have to answer to charges of "racism" for treating a white kid with a IEP one way and a Latino kid without one a different way while not being supposed to tell the Latino kid or his parents that the white kid has an IEP (which means he's SpEd and has some disability) or explain why "denigrate" isn't a racist word in spite of the kid's and parent's perceptions. ("But why did you use *that* word instead of a different one, huh? You know what you want to call my boy, you just don't want to admit it."
Some jobs had additional tyrannies. Working for the church, if my private life has irregularities that bleed into my public life, I could be fired on the spot. I wasn't. Same goes for teaching.
Oddly, the only place where my private life mattered was in grad school, where I dared to take too many classes and study "stuff" my advisor and his peers in my department disapproved of: Chomskian-style linguistics. Then again, it's the same if you're a formal theoretical linguist: If you don't do Chomsky, you have all the freedom in the world because you just don't get a job. There--no tyranny at all.
In a way, I long for private tyrannies. They're private. It's the public ones you really have to live in terror of. Much of the private tyranny of corporations, in fact, *was* public tyranny. There's also a very real sense in the way private tyrannies work: The more freedom you have in a private tyranny, the higher placed you are and the more your private life is scrutinized. If you're an assembly-line worker, nobody much cares about a lot of your private life, but your work time is regimented not so much by the corporation but by the exigencies of assembly line work (which exists outside of "private corporations" and productivity/profitability (also not a purely capitalist or corporatist idea).
