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A Right to Workplace Democracy? Response to Robert Mayer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert Dahl
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Extract

The disagreements between Professor Mayer and me turn to some extent on legitimate differences in interpreting and understanding my intentions and text, and to a larger extent on differences in the ways we interpret and understand certain important economic and political aspects of the world in which we live.

I believe my argument is more consequentialist than he understands it to be. The question is: consequences for what ends, goals, or values? Simplifying my discussion somewhat. I was concerned with three general types of consequences: consequences for economic effectiveness, for property rights, and for rights to a democratic process.

As to property rights, though I expressed skepticism about applying the standard moral argument for property rights to business firms, my preferred solution, as Professor Mayer points out, does not entail a violation of basic rights to property, or, for that matter, existing property rights in business firms. It could simply“entail a shift ownership from stockholders to employees”(p. 113).

As to economic effectiveness, I argued that employee-owned firms could be as effective in achieving such intermediate goods as investment, growth, and employment (p.120ff.). I argued further that they could be as efficient as American corporations at present in minimizing“the ratio of valued inputs to valued outputs”both in the narrow sense ordinarily employed by economists, for whom the outputs are those valued by consumers, and in a broader sense that would include outputs“we as producers value”(p. 130).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , Spring 2001 , pp. 249 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2001

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References

1. My description of my justification as “one with a more Kantian flavor” (A Preface to Economic Democracy, p.111;Google Scholar cited hereafter with page number) may well have misled him and other readers about my intentions. However, omitting that unfortunate phrase would not alter the structure of my argument.

2. “Attractive as the goals of democracy and economic fairness are to us, we would be irrational if we were to neglect a third goal. We should also insist that our economic order be efficient, that it would tend to minimize the ratio of valued inputs to valued outputs. For if it were inefficient, then we would needlessly squander our scarce resources and so live more poorly than we need—which is irrational. If we could choose between an economic order that sustains democracy and justice and would also be efficient, or an economic order that could achieve a like degree of democracy and justice but would be highly inefficient, to choose the second rather the first a people would have to be much more foolish than I am assuming us to be”(p. 86).Google Scholar

3. The two questions may be inter-related. For a nuanced treatment, see Shapiro, Ian, Democratic Justice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 6Google Scholar, “Controlling Work,” p. 143 ffGoogle Scholar. He concludes that employee-owned firms are not the most feasible means for“controlling work.”His reasons for doubting the feasibility of employee ownership follow Hansman, Henry, The Ownership of Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar that workers typically find the costs of decision-making to be excessive.

4. See Alcaly, Roger E.,“Reinventing the Corporation,”The New York Review, 10 04 1997, pp. 38–45Google Scholar; and Petzinger, Thomas Jr., The New Pioneers, The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and the Marketplace, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).Google Scholar