Elizabeth Anderson (2017) argues that many corporate bosses exercise a form of imperial governance over their employees, controlling everything from their bathroom breaks to their lives outside of work. The issue is not the use of power per se, but the considerable power employers have over others and can use at any point. Gregory Robson and James R. Otteson (2025) detail why this “dominance dynamic” of employer power over employees is, in fact, worse, for reasons connected to the workplace analyses of Adam Smith. In this Commentary, we discuss Anderson’s proposed response to the dominance dynamic and suggest instead three solutions of our own.

*Editorial Note: While BEJR does not normally encourage commentaries aimed at the author’s or authors’ own work, in the present case we made an exception, given that the authors had a meaningful extension of their previously-published work.