Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
This article develops and advances a liberal ideal of equality for evaluating the lawful scope of employer control over employees. It argues that, in addition to attending to discrimination and bargaining power asymmetries, we should ensure that our laws treat workers as the moral equals of their bosses more broadly – as people with equally weighty claims to exercising agency over their own values and lives. To illustrate, the article explains that employer control over workplace expression can preclude colleagues from communicating with each another as moral equals and can compromise employees’ abilities to exercise agency over their own characters. It then discusses how our agential interests in workplace expression can guide legal reform.

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Sabine Tsuruda, Working as Equal Moral Agents, Legal Theory, volume 26 issue 4. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 7 May 2021.

First posted 2021-05-10 09:30:03