Of course, imagining the possibility that healthy relationships between employer and employee could exist involves an ability to imagine more generally that people can enter into mutually respectful relations even from positions that are unequal in social status and economic resources. This deserves further comment. Much social and political theory, as applied to the employment relation, has dealt with a restricted set of envisioned possibilities. Employer-employee relationships might be considered to be arm’s length, structured only by impersonal market contracts. Or they might be considered to be hierarchical relations of domination and submission, as I discuss above. Or, alternatively, they might be envisioned as mutually respectful relations among equals, achieved in democratic consensus, as in the ideal of the Habermasian rationalized lifeworld or many people’s visions of worker-owned cooperatives and the like. The idea that employment relations could be unequal and yet still respectful and fair has often been rejected as naive or paternalistic. Slaveholders and mill owners, after all, used “unequal-but-just” rationalizations. Old arguments about “happy slaves” and girls “naturally suited” for mind-numb-ing work should rightly caution us against a too easy acceptance of unequal relations.