Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice
In several parts of the world today, workers’ freedom to join trade unions and to act collectively in defence of their rights and interests is again under threat. Right wing populist and neoliberal governments may differ in some respects but they are more or less united in their hostility towards trade unions and their wish to restrict the unions’ capacity to resist legal and policy reforms that worsen working conditions and lower living standards for the many. In countries including the UK and the USA, the right to strike is already so limited and collective bargaining so marginalised, that workplace democracy may be thought of as a thing of the past. And yet further steps are being taken to tie the unions’ hands and to neuter any industrial action that they succeed, against all odds, in organising.
At the same time, signs are growing of a quite widely shared recognition that the fate of workplace democracy is intimately bound up with the fate of our democracies more broadly understood. Flourishing democracies depend on flourishing intermediary institutions, such as trade unions, political parties and religious bodies, bridging the gap between state and citizen and allowing for participation in debate and decision-making. Increasingly this is emphasised by authors across the arts and social sciences, including in recent volumes on Technopopulism, Labor and Democracy and the use of data, algorithms and tech in the recruitment, management and monitoring of workers.
In our new book, Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice, we argue that the time is indeed ripe to restate the principles of workplace democracy and industrial citizenship. Considering developments within political economy, employment relations and labour law since the postwar decades, we trace the rise of globalization, deindustrialization and the progressive insulation of working relations from democratic governance. What these developments amount to, we argue, is an urgent need for political intervention to tame the new world of ‘gigging’ and other forms of precarious work and to put a stop to the kinds of commercialization of work relations that threaten to make even higher-paid posts insecure. This is a daunting task, one that will require far-reaching institution-building designed to fill legal concepts such as ‘employment’ with political substance. A crucial first step would involve the broadening and strengthening of workers’ freedom of association, reconceived to fit with changing social and economic circumstances. A policy priority would be to institute decentralized forms of collective action in and supported by an overarching labour constitution, understood in a Hayekian sense as mechanisms of discovery: discovery of interests, action potential, and procedural and substantive rules that are effective on the ground and more easily enforceable for being rooted in workers’ sense of justice, as related to their lived experience at work and beyond.
~ Ruth Dukes (Professor of Labour Law, University of Glasgow, School of Law) and Wolfgang Streeck (Emeritus Director, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne)
