2009 has proved to be an increasingly busy year for me. I take my blogging duties seriously, however. In addition to commentary on impactful cases, bill tracking, and original reporting, I am going to add a semi-academic component to my writing this year as they catch my interest.
One that I want to write a lot about this year is the theory of employee-owned businesses. I researched this topic extensively for the thesis-like paper my law school required. I’m trying not to make any value judgments here, so consider yourself disclaimered. I find that the topic has new relevance as we voyage into the Obama years because there is a meme that labor is ascendant, that Wall Street is tarnished, and that labor relations will return to the way they were in, say, the 1950s.
I doubt very much that this is the case. While I’m sure that Obama’s administration will be more employee friendly, I’m not so sure that this will necessarily translate into large increases in unionization. I could be wrong. I’m not holding myself out as someone who has a Ph.D. in this. Having made that disclaimer, my read of the American workplace is that the WTO and NAFTA did more to prevent the return of high rates of unionization than 10 Taft-Hartleys did. This is simply because when you read the NLRA and look at its mechanics, it is geared for the type of jobs that are so easily offshored!
One could easily argue that there was as much rhetoric about trade reform as there was about labor reform, and that the former is actually more likely than the latter. I doubt that any huge reversal is coming about there.
So, will the workplace be forever more be a place where employees are at-will, change jobs many times in their careers, etc.? Will it return to a highly unionized, highly organized composition? Perhaps. But perhaps a not-so-new way of organizing companies will emerge. New because it has not produced (to my knowledge) a Fortune 500 corporation, old because the idea pre-dates the Declaration of Independence: employee-owned firms. Even partially owned firms.
My major limb-reaching position is this: Marxism is silly hugely because the idea that labor and capital are dualistically separated on the one hand and that labor organized will ever beat capital are both wrong. First, any lawyer has first-hand experience with an employee-owned firm. Second, history confirms the latter. History isn’t even clear that such a relationship is desirable, even for the ephemeral moments when it has won without becoming tyrranical.
This is not, by the way, to equate unionism with Marxism, or socialism with communism, etc. But taken together with this idée fixe that labor and capital are forever divided and the status quo and the status quo ante, I think you can see what I mean. In other words, it doesn’t have to be one way or the other. So much of 21st century life is about rejecting the idea we can only have Coke or New Coke. It’s about having Coke, Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, Lemon Coke, etc. all at once. Why not a variety of labor-capital relationships?
In Spain in particular, clever cooperatives have been able to produce giant profits, low entry barriers to ownership and virtually no job loss. I’ll be talking about how this might apply to the American workplace over the coming year, and how it might be a better solution than either a union shop or a non-union shop without excluding the possibility of either.
