As I mentioned in the prior post, at NYU’s Democracy Project we believe the challenges facing democracy today must be thought about in broad terms. This essay, from Cindy Estlund and Alan Bogg, offers a perspective on how labor relations should be seen from a democratic perspective. Cynthia Estlund is the Crystal Eastman Professor at New York University School of Law. Alan Bogg is Professor of Labour Law at the University of Bristol and a Barrister at Old Square Chambers.
Here’s an excerpt:
Can a society call itself democratic if its citizens spend much of their waking life subject to the dictatorial control of bosses? Today the question may provoke puzzlement: Why not, as long as the electoral system is in ship shape? But for much of the twentieth century, a critical mass of citizens on both sides of the Atlantic would have answered “no.”
Twentieth-century democratic thinkers were intensely focused on the causes of totalitarianism. Some worried that workplace dictatorships cultivated undemocratic habits and attitudes that would spill into the polity and soften the ground for authoritarian political movements. Others worried that workers’ frustration with dictatorial bosses fostered radical support for socialist or communist alternatives to both capitalism and liberal democracy.
The versions of “industrial democracy” and “industrial citizenship” that took hold in North America and Europe helped to shore up both capitalism and political democracy. Workers won the right to form independent trade unions, to bargain collectively with employers, and to exercise economic leverage through strikes. In some European countries, this was supplemented by enterprise-based works councils and codetermination on company boards….
Workers still want and need a stronger voice in their working lives. But they will not get that by simply refurbishing the labor institutions fashioned in the 1930s. They need a mix of solutions, including sectoral collective bargaining, worker centers, enterprise-based representation structures, and tripartite labor standards boards. Democratic processes will yield different answers in different jurisdictions, sectors, and occupations, and that will require political creativity and coalition-building (as well as some devolution of labor lawmaking authority to subnational units of government).
For decent and workable solutions to emerge, however, workers must be armed with some basic legal entitlements to expression and association free from governmental and employer interference. Workers should have rights to contest employer power and stand up for their interests both in the polity and at work, and both individually and collectively, whether informally, through traditional unions, or otherwise.
Those contestation rights cannot be absolute or unbounded, of course. But neither should they be confined to polite disagreement. Workers’ right to contest employer power, including through disruptive means like strikes, is among the basic elements of the old model of industrial democracy that should be vigorously defended, even as many institutional particulars of the model lose traction.
Devising a decent, democratic, and sustainable variety of capitalism will require reinventing “industrial democracy” and “industrial citizenship” for a post-industrial era. Much like the twentieth-century invention of those concepts and institutions, their reinvention will have to come from workers and their own associations. A just and stable democratic society requires equitable mechanisms for workers to pursue their collective interests at work. Lacking those mechanisms, workers may come together around causes and leaders far less supportive of democratic values than unions have been.
