For nearly 250 years — ever since the Declaration of Independence boldly declared that “all men” are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — the concept of freedom has been deeply inscribed into the American psyche, defining the national mythos and frequently invoked by political figures spanning the ideological spectrum. The nation was “conceived in liberty,” Abraham Lincon orated in 1863, and it “stand[s] for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection,” FDR thundered in 1936. Americans are “joined in a common enterprise to write the story of freedom,” insisted President Regan in 1983, standing as a “beacon to the world inspiring people to demand their own freedom,” eulogized President Obama in 2010. That the constitutional framers — aristocrats deeply sensitive to class interests — carefully concentrated political power among the elite and designed a system that functions as more of an oligarchy than republic has done little to dilute or dislodge the conviction that the United States is a nation firmly predicated on libertarian ideals.

Such rhetoric — apolitical, almost religiously inflected — has diffused into the public consciousness, and Americans continue to widely regard liberty as the bedrock of our society. Yet the conception of “freedom” prevailing in the American imagination is deeply myopic, as it fails to grapple with the existence of a despotic institution that shapes virtually every aspect of American life: the employment relationship.

A capitalist economy demands that those of us insufficiently privileged to own productive property submit to employment. As the institution of employment took shape during the industrial revolution, social critics and worker activists did not fail to appreciate its despotic nature. Many discerned little in the emerging arrangement — requiring one to commodify his capacity to labor and sell it to owners of capital — substantively distinguishing it from the regime of chattel slavery it had supposedly supplanted. In fact, just a few years after Grant and Lee shook hands in an Appomattox courthouse, the New York Times described industrial employment as “a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed in the South.” Fredrick Douglass similarly observed that wage labor is “only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery.” Even Abraham Lincoln recognized the subjugating nature of the employment relationship, regarding it as superior to slavery only insofar as  the wage earner could in theory escape the condition and someday establish himself as an independent producer.

The employment relationship has evolved since the 19th century, of course, as generations of vicious labor struggles secured a number of essential — though eroding — legal protections. Even so, contemporary employment continues to plunge the employee into a realm of domination and hierarchy. The arrangement affords employers an extraordinary degree of authority over employee lives, eclipsing even the intrusiveness of totalitarian states. Stripped of dignity and autonomy, employees are impelled to blindly abide by the dictates of their superiors, even where arbitrary or irrational. The employer — not subject to constitutional constraints — is empowered to closely surveil employees’ activities, dictate when employees may arrive, leave, rest, eat, and use the bathroom, and decree what employees may wear, do, and say. In fact, where so inclined, the employer may even discipline employees based on their political affiliation, intimate relationships, or other personal activities.

The employment relation subverts our liberty in even deeper ways. The systematic extraction of surplus value on which it rests has generated soaring inequality and staggering concentrations of wealth, which the ruling class deploys to capture and corrupt the political system and distort public policy. As large corporations amass trillions of dollars in social resources, management decisions regarding allocation, investment, and production — insulated from democratic input — have sweeping social implications, capable of upending lives, devastating communities, and remaking society. All told, many of the most consequential policies shaping our political economy are fashioned not by politically accountable lawmakers or regulators but unelected corporate executive and investors.

Such sweeping authority over human lives and socioeconomic conditions is deeply antithetical to any meaningful conception of liberty. American society will not be free until we displace the employment relationship with mechanisms of democratic control over economic production.

The concept of economic self-determination has deep roots in the labor movement — the Knights of Labor’s animating ideology denounced “wage slavery” and committed to transcending it with worker owned enterprises. The idea serves as more of an orienting principle than a specific policy prescription. Expanding the scope and scale of collective bargaining would be a step in the right direction, as unions are democratically structured institutions that amplify employee voice in workplace governance. Creating representative institutions to govern corporate decisionmaking or providing for worker participation in electing corporate boards would go further still — this model has been successfully implemented, on a relatively limited scale, in some European countries. An even more comprehensively democratic approach would be establishing worker cooperative or self-directed enterprises, in which workers own the firm and elect the board of directors or otherwise participate directly in governance. The idea is far from revolutionary — thousands of such entities exist around the world, including hundreds in the United States.

Though it has become deeply embedded in our social fabric and economic structures, the labor movement should not lose touch with its original conception of the employment relationship as despotic, nor cease envisaging its ultimate dismantling. No matter what technological developments and social changes the intervening generations may have occasioned, it remains as true today as during the industrial revolution that constructing a free society demands expelling tyranny from the economy.