A good idea, although I believe that communities might be a more coherent way of re-democratizing our society in the face of global corporate power.  Many people in white-collar jobs probably don't have much interaction with the harms of globalization and corporate perfidy at their workplace, but probably more so in their communities. 

Organizing at work also places a high value on the jobs that people have, when many jobs are being eliminated or SHOULD be eliminated.  Think about health insurance company salespeople or claims handlers.  Would binding together unite them against our interests in favor of a better health care system or simply bind them to our bad system.  Hard to tell.

Either way, just some small contentions.  Clearly, democracy cannot stop in the work place.  Our rights as workers need to be expanded. 

In that spirit,  the time has come to fight for democracy for workers. What I mean by this is a legally defined role for all workers in the decision making process at the place of employment.  Every workplace should have a legally protected workers organization--let's called it a workers council for the moment--just as every city should have and, of course,  does have a city council.

A great idea. I've long argued that it's time to end feudalism in the workplace and institute some democratic institutions to give employees a real voice--and real power--in setting policy for the company. Sweat equity should be legally recognized as confering ownership, not just financial equity.

I've called myself a socialist for roughly a quarter of a century now, and I've had the same idea all this time - not that anyone's been listening.

It occurred to me when I was young that in many ways, our democracy in the US was not substantially greater than what was absent in the Soviet Union, if our lives are run by unelected corporate rulers more than by the public officials we elect.

But now I take the idea I share with Mr. Joyce a big step further than he does.  It seems to me it won't be enough to try to enforce worker influence on institutions that are owned by others, that profit others but not so substantially the workers themselves.  Such institutions can't just be run democratically - they must be owned democratically, and not just by workers, but by the public at large.

And it has occurred to me that the US has a way to do this, a way that is not just legal and consistent with our broader principles of government, but which is given in our Constitution.  That way is eminent domain.

E.g., why should the current US government give tax breaks to big oil - ostensibly to allow them to afford to build new refineries, after they've conspired for years to reduce their refining capacity?  Doing so just makes the problem worse.  Why not use that same money instead to just buy them out, making them public institutions?  All that will change operationally for such institutions with such buyouts is that those billions of dollars of profit becomes public revenue; they will still be in the same markets they were in before, selling to the same customers, employing the same people (if not more).  But then, if the public wants new refineries, the public will have money to pay for them, just like the oil companies already had (and didn't want to use for that purpose). No muss, no fuss.

And big oil is just one example - the potential list of companies and industries is long - very long. 

Too-large private economic institutions with too much non-democratic power are surely one of the huge core problems of our day, if not the core problem.  And indeed, their power should be democratically directed; but so directing it seems to me to require, even as a first step, transitioning such institutions from private to public.  I doubt they will welcome being forced to be democratic with first being made public - I would not welcome it, as in my own view it violates basic principles in our system of government - if we're going to preserve the notion of private property that is already enforced by law, we should respect that notion.  The simpler way is to make them public first, and then to make them democratic.

Truly, democracy must be about more than largely meaningless elections once a year, or once every four years, and then concerning only a small portion of the institutions that affect us.  If that's all there is to democracy, it's not worth the trouble.  So at least, I agree with Mr. Joyce that there must be more to democracy. 

"Workers' Councils" sounds German. It implies that states -- like German Laender -- would deal with the chartering of corporations in a way that international and interstate competition, not to mention federal regulation, would not undo.
 
Basically, we are back to square one, trying to base workers' rights on legal formalism that, now more than ever, the GOP Law Lords will thwart.

Let me suggest fixing a huge institutional deficit we have, a foundation of republican democracy that is just not there any more, to wit, the "well regulated militia". Today, we have the military institutions of the British Empire plus a lot of privately owned guns. The "Third Amendment" might as well not be there, for all the popular or even elite understanding of it.

But, if we had what Gary HART calls a "national militia", we could quickly restore (a) a universal franchise as well as (b) the natural forms of local political and economic organization that would act as a check and balance on all three of (i) corporate power, (ii) police power, and (iii) the growing burden of debt-driven indenture.

There are good, strictly military-political reasons for having a militia-reserve, rather than long-term hire, military today. But, the political-economic rationale is also compelling.

And, of course, I cannot imagine "a republic, if you can keep it" based on the military institutions of the British monarchy. This is something the Theocons, Neocons, and PlainOldCons are comfortable with. But, I think that it was tragic that in a spate of "anti-war pragamtism" and "selective pacifism" the left bought into this notion, first, with "ending the draft" and, now, with reducing all politics to legal pleadings.

That is not how we got here, and not how we can restore the republic or any sort of democracy. 

The corporations exist for the benefit of their CEOs and other top managers.  10% of corporate profits goes to the compensation of the five highest executives in corporations.  Only in rare and unusual situation do stockholders have any power; they make recommendations to the board.  Employees are a cost input to be minimized.

Although corporations have some Constitutional rights gratis of the Supreme Court, their dedication to the bottom-line make them sociopaths, and in the long run suicides because they destroy their own demand.  Corporations are artificial entities that could not exist except for the state.  It is only the state that can force corporations to serve the public interest or common good.  In the US, the state is supposed to serve the people.

Work councils would give the people some democracy in the place where they spend most of their lives.  They might also foster a more cooperative accomodation between managers and the souls they control.  But the globalization race to the bottom is against you.  In Germany, which have workers councils and seats on the board, these rights are being cutback as Germany Americanizes itself.

I think workers should do whatever is necessary  and legally acceptable to protect their rights in the workplace.  Period.  By "legally acceptable" I mean to say that workers should do everything they can to change laws that are not favorable to them at this time.

But I am more interested in your statement that the expansion of democracy has traditionally followed the expansion of the franchise.  This is apparently true to me.  The question is now how does democracy continue to expand when there is no one else to directly include in the voting process.  

For me, the answer is to reform the electoral process in order to ensure that those elected genuinely and effectively represent the interests of the people.  Second, we need to reform the law-making process with our legislatures to ensure democratic inclusivity.

So, in that spirit, I have high hope for affecting our public laws  and creating a more perfect democracy.  Until that is accomplished, I think affecting private rights of business owners should not be our first priority.

Outside of all that, I must admist that I find the proposal rather extreme.  There are untold numbers of small and medium sized businesses in this country that continue to be run by families and other private individuals.  Forcing those businesses to subject executive decisions to a workers' council is simply repellant.

Daniel, I truly hope people understand the point you're making.

I make the point in another way: technology devalues labor. 

I heard Jim Cramer on CNBC last night talking about investing in semiconductors for wireless technology.  The companies producing the end-user products use chips produced in Israel, Cramer says, in plants that employ no people (his claim, not mine) - they are automated factories, as are many industrial plants these days.

There is no way to empower workers in such situations - there are no workers to empower.  The task is shifting in this age of productivity enhancing and fully productive technology - where machines compete against workers and would-be workers, from empowering workers to empowering the public interest at large, and there's one way to do that in my view - transitioning ownership of too-large private institutions, of which Intel is just another example, from private to public, so that those who would have in the past lived on the fruits of their labor can live in the future on the fruits of ownership - public ownership.

A true ownership society will in my view necessarily have to go through a phase of using eminent domain, in order to transition the bulk of ownership from the hands of the wealthy few into the hands of the many.

The Intels of the world should exist, and will exist; I'm a fan of Intel and long have been.  Capitalism tends toward monopoly; in any free and fair competition there is eventually just one winner.  And in a capitalist competition, the fight is often to the death - the losers are often not left standing; they often don't live to fight another day.  But a company with as much economic impact as a winner as an Intel, i.e., with effectively no competition for whatever reason, should not remain privately held, in my view: they should be a public trust, as they effect everyone - the whole world is their customer., and they wouldn't have had a place to fight without the context of a free and prosperous society in the first place - they don't deserve to own the stadium just because they've won the game.  And democracy that misses this point isn't democracy at all. 

Corporations are artificial entities that could not exist except for the state.  It is only the state that can force corporations to serve the public interest or common good.  In the US, the state is supposed to serve the people

That statement is right, but your first paragraph is an ignorant polemic.  It is very easy to demonize corporations when the first corporation that comes to mind is Wal-Mart or Nike or McDonalds.

We have to be able to account for the smaller corporations that are not those demons.  As I said in a post above, there are untold numbers of small and medium sized privately held firms in the US that beneficially employ millions of people.

So, my point is simply that we shouldn't be so quick to generalize.

The founders found a standing army during peacetime (like now) repugnant and dangerous.  I think they meant the Second Amendment to be read the NRA way.

I agree with you, Reece.  I own a small company myself (small is the operative term).

There is and should be in my view no need to affect truly private and small-scale companies.  But all companies are not the same.

C-corporations, as I've already noted, are supposed to be public institutions already.  In theory, anyone can own them.  But this is not democracy - it's plutocracy, since in order to own them, you need money, and your voice as an owner is proportional to your share of ownership.

In a democracy, dollars do not have equal votes - people do.

My proposal, to use eminent domain to transition large privately-held economic institutions (which are already considered public, in market terminology) from plutocratic (not to mention oligarchic) ownership to truly democratic ownership, doesn't affect small private companies at all, nor does it change the nature of the large ones of the sort that concern me.  It just buys out the few wealthy shareholders, so that profits can benefit not just them, but the public interest at large.

And again, it doesn't violate our well-established basic principles regarding private ownership.  It just seeks to redress the inevitable inequality in that ownership, by legally transitioning it to public ownership when the inequality begins to work against the public interest. 

There is the legal concept of standing that comes into play here.  In a mature plutocracy, very few have standing - standing belongs to owners, generally, and only to owners.  So, progressively, elections for public issues concerning public institutions concern less and less of the things that actually concern the lives of citizens.  Even by now, I would suggest, there is not enough left to public institutions that voting on their issues even make much of a difference.  But changing that is not simply a matter of voting reform - it's a matter of reversing the trend of ownership (and thus legal standing) away from small or public, and thus relatively well distributed, toward broadly and more or less equally, to grossly and indecently narrowly and unequally.  Necessarily, that reversal must involve buying back some of that which the wealthy few have managed to hoard for themselves and their own narrow interests.

There will be coercion involved in my proposal, but coercion of the least minimal effect that I can imagine.  And it cannot be missed that plutocratic institutions coerce their markets, which is to say the citizens of those societies within which they operate - as a matter of course.  By its nature, eminent domain is coercion in that the property holder is obliged to sell property in question to the public, but our Constitution requires that they be compensated, and I think such compensation is appropriate.  What is not appropriate is for them to continue to use such property against the interests of the public, as an alternative.

It would be good for us to consider FDR's approach to funding the Interstate Highway system that Eisenhower later built.  He considered it of fundamental importance that frontal property along the routes of the highways be acquired via eminent domain.  He expected that property would mushroom in value by virtue of the new trade avenues being constructed at public expense, and he reasoned that it should be the public that profits from that expense, not the lucky private owners.  So he proposed that this property be acquired a fair rates, but necessarily acquired, and later sold back to private interests, but at a public profit, not a private one.

Contrast the FDR approach with the Bush approach, e.g., to rebuilding after the hurricanes.  Who is benefitting now? 

A recommended read on this topic is Marjorie Kelly's The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. 

Forget the title.  She's no Marxist.  Kelly used to be in corporate philanthropy before concluding that harmful consequences of corporate unaccountability have systemic causes.  

Corporate law holds corporate decisionmakers responsible for maximizing shareholder returns.  Wages and benefits to workers literally are treated on corporate balance sheets as costs--to be minimized, of course, in the service of higher profits.  Communities affected by corporate decisions typically have no role in decisionmaking and even if they did the laws elevating shareholder wealth maximization over all other interests would render that voice largely moot. 

Kelly notes that state incorporation laws, enacted in many cases in the 19th century, often require corporations to serve the public interest as a condition of having their charter application accepted.  But this provision in practice has been almost totally ignored for many decades.  

She's hitting on the right issues.  It's probably inevitable that in a global economy with relatively open trade the pace of economic change is going to be faster and this means far less employment stability for those in trade-sensitive sectors especially, but also people who live in communities highly vulnerable to having a few huge employers move.  

(This is also a pro-capitalist reason why we need single payer health insurance so as to reduce the attachment of workers to the jobs they currently hold by making the costs of that greater flux far less onerous and inhumane than they are now.  It baffles me that corporate America does not embrace this point of view and make it happen politically.  But I digress.)

It would seem to me as though part of the response has to be a better balancing between the interests of shareholders vs. employees, the community, and future generations.  Logically, that in turn would seem to require either that the legal interests of shareholders are reduced in importance, that the interests of workers/community/future generations are increased, or some combination of the two.  And of course there is no America-only solution to these problems.  These are issues which are global in scope.

The theory/assumption that workers will do better when businesses do better has been shown to be false, by the data contrasting wage trends for non-CEO and upper management  vs. either corporate profits or productivity, as cited by one of the earlier posters in this thread.   

Whether workers' fortunes rise with those of their employers--which is the line that people who call themselves good capitalists offer--is all about whether they have any power or not.  And right now communities, workers and future generations are either getting creamed or are unusually vulnerable because management of large corporations holds most of the economic and political chits.    

Kelly's book also identifies various strategies that are being used to address these issues and gives information on how to get involved.  Food for thought IMO.

Why is it democratic for the government to interfere with the interests of shareholders who probably greatly outnumber the number of workers?

Because the founders wrote:  "We the People" not "We the Shareholders".  Shareholders can be anywhere and need have no loyalty whatever to the people of this country.  Many of them are now Chinese.

Why is it democratic for the government to interfere with the interests of shareholders who probably greatly outnumber the number of workers?

It's perfectly fine for government to specify when corporations are chartered that they must allow for worker representation. A corporation is not just an "agglomeration of individuals." It requires a charter granted by us, and these charters grant rights and privileges far beyond those of individual citizens. So it is a democratic government's perfect right to demand anything in return that we so choose.  

Why is it democratic for the government to interfere with the interests of shareholders who probably greatly outnumber the number of workers?

Two words.  Limited liability.  

Why is it democratic for owners of corporations to walk away from their debts while retaining their wealth?

Yes, yes I understand the benefits of limited liability but the fact remains that owners of corporations are allowed to walk away from their failed businesses without having to pay their debts.  The average worker, thanks to bankruptcy reform, not so much. 

Just to clarify, I'm not referring to CEO, COO and Board Members. I'm talking about supervisors, managers, VP's, and the many other titles given to management. They likely don't own a significant portion of the stock but still have differnent priorities in terms of cost cutting, staffing, etc. They want to make their numbers look good to the real owners but have little at stake beside keeping their job and gettting a promotion. I just don't see how, given the goal of a business, it can work like a democracy. And collective ownership outside of being a stockholder would require socialist revolution. Things would have to get a lot worse for that to happen.

The trouble is corporations are only people too.

Wow a democratic conversation about democracy.  That’s cool.  Thanks again to Josh for creating this place.  In that spirit I appreciate the responses to my post.  I’d like to respond to a few of the points that have been made. 
What I don’t want to get it to here are some of the points on various ownership issues.  I leave that for a different time. 
Here I am talking about worker representation,  presuming that not much happens with the ownership of private enterprise as we now know it.  It’s not that I think that can’t or won’t or shouldn’t change,  just that I’m arbitrarily treating it as a discrete question for purposes of this discussion. 
Partly that’s because I’m arguing that public and private sector workers should have representation.  I am also not distinguishing between good corporations and bad ones or for that matter between big ones and small ones.  Regarding good versus bad,  one thing that’s holding unions back is the presumption,  aggressively promoted by unions themselves,  that “bad” employers deserve unions,  but “good” employers” don’t.  This creates a dynamic where the union must justify its representation rights by proving the employer is “bad.”  To me,  that is sooo twentieth century. 
Sure some employers are better than others.  The analogy is a little off,  but some slave owners were better than others.  Doesn’t matter.  The whole system had to go.  Some voters have college degrees.  Some don’t.  Doesn’t matter.  We all get to vote.  Let’s stick with cities for a moment as a reference point.  Some are intrinsically better off than others—they have a better climate,  or they have more natural resources like streams or underground springs or even oil.  Doesn’t matter.  The idea of democracy is that they all get to have a city council.  By the way,  it also doesn’t matter if they are big or small—although the specific nature of how the city council is made up and elected may change to accommodate size. 
Now a word on Daniel Gree’s points about technology and “people.”  Not for the first time,  I don’t get his point.  Seems to me that technological change is kind of a constant.  Indeed the point of democracy in part has to do with organizing society so that people get in various ways to participate in managing change of all kinds including technological change.  Electrification and telephones are good examples of new technologies that governments got involved in managing or regulating if you will.  Does new technology dislocate workers?  Sure.  Does new technology also locate workers.  You betcha.  Why even as we speak,  I bet there are people who used to work for General Motors who now work for Microsoft.  Farmers become factory workers,  factory workers become service workers.  Sometimes there are more jobs in Michigan,  sometimes in Las Vegas.  Etc. Etc.  Etc.  So what?  My argument is that whether you are working in a growth industry or a shrinking industry,  a growth company or a dying company,  a growing city government, a shrinking state government or a stable federal agency,  in the 21<sup>st</sup&gt century—society will be better off if the workers there have some say in how that place of employment operates. 
Ditto for Daniel Gree’s concerns over that wild and crazy variable known as “people.”  Near as I can tell people are involved in any and all human enterprise.  People are involved in slave economies,  feudal societies,  democracies,  theocracies ,  privately held corporations,  publicly held corporations,  unions,  churches… blah, blah,  How does that argue against the belief that empowering the people at the workplace is a good idea? 
This relates to another expressed concern from Sumbohodi: “an ‘employee council’ that makes bad decisions puts itself out of business.” (Interestingly enough,  my impression is that the track record for employee owned businesses, isn’t that good.  Leaving aside that I’m not talking about employee ownership here,  in most cases I’m familiar with,  employees came to own the business because it already failing.) Sure they could.  Where is it written that the leading virtue of democracy is that it excludes any possibility of failure?  I don’t get the point. Does the fact that thousands of corproations have failed mean we shouldn't have them any more? 
Some loose ends.  Re: workplace feudalism. Another way to frame this conversation is this:  Maybe you can make a case that the prisoners don’t g