Democracy at Work. Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice

This is an important book. It is about the social and political significance of industrial justice and industrial democracy to the governance of working life and societies more broadly. The authors bring fresh, lively insights through case studies assembled from empirical studies about Amazon workers, gig workers, care workers and University professors. Democracy at Work engages thoughtfully with the politics, complexities and inadequacies of the contemporary world of work through the lens of industrial sociology and with a deep concern for the health of democracy.

The confident and convincing interdisciplinary perspective on offer is testament to the benefits of the long-standing collaboration from which the work has grown. Dukes and Streeck have a shared intellectual grounding in the labour law and industrial relations of 1920s Germany. This informs their commitment to an analysis that is at once future-facing, is historically aware and that recognises labour law to be inseparable from political economy. The factors that labour law seeks to regulate are indeed deeply historical and culturally embedded. Yet recent interest in the topic of democracy at work has claimed a degree of novelty in political philosophy made possible by overlooking the contributions of the classical industrial sociologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, for example, Elizabeth Anderson (2017) Private Government. How Employers Rule our Lives (and why we don’t talk about it), Princeton University Press; and Alex Gourevitch (2018) The Right to Strike: A Radical View. American Political Science Review, 112(4):905–917). By way of contrast, Dukes and Streeck have unequivocally committed to a socially embedded approach that proceeds from their belief in the utility of the hinterland of labour law scholarship.

In Democracy at Work, Dukes and Streeck assemble a picture of industrial democracy as a condition of industrial justice. It is a picture that links much of the contemporary injustice in post-industrial societies such as the UK to a fundamental disregard for democracy. This is exemplified by the way in which labour law can serve to suppress democracy at work. Yet labour law can also be seen as a measure of the health of democracy in post-industrial societies. Since labour law is so multidimensional in its reach and impact, its effects are wide-ranging. For example, labour law is fundamental to social relations, to the constitution of communities denoted by migration policies, to the provision and availability of care, to the realisation of values of quality and freedom in everyday life and to the very constitution of democracy itself.

Dukes and Streeck advocate for democracy at work in aid of a goal that lies beyond that of ‘good’ labour law: a goal of industrial justice. In their view, industrial justice cannot be attained through sanitised public debate and deliberation and the meeting of legal standards is a hollow substitute for what ought to be a deep respect for the inherently conflictual nature of capitalist class relations. Industrial justice depends upon sustaining a dynamic tension between labour, capital and state that is not afraid of conflict. The substantive chapters of Democracy at Work cover justice, productivity and power at work; the rise and fall of industrial citizenship; the potential for liberalisation to be understood as emancipation. It concludes with consideration of the promise and possibility of post-industrial justice.

The central characters in the narrative account of industrial citizenship provided by Dukes and Streeck are conceptual: those of contract, status, identity, solidarity and constitution. These are keystone heritage characters of industrial sociology, drawn carefully from the works of Hugo Sinzheimer and Philip Selznick among others. Yet Dukes and Streeck do not resurrect them uncritically. Rather, Democracy at Work considers what can be gleaned, discarded or adapted. Arguably, the highlights of this approach are evident in observations about the relationships between these characters of industrial sociology past. In particular, the relationship of status to contract and of contract to status is given new energy by empirically evidenced assertions in which both are shown to be conceptually unsatisfactory.

Democracy at Work matures long-standing critiques of labour law as being unfit for purpose and in crisis. As Dukes and Streeck explain, the original purpose of labour law is to protect workers from unfair and unequal treatment at the hands of employers, ensuring decent work and a decent standard of living. Often, the promise of dignity is shaped by the belief that the contractual paradigm of labour law is inherently exploitative. Yet their turn to explore the experience and views of workers through case studies tells a different story. It is a well-rehearsed criticism of contract that its promise of liberty, consent and equity is illusory and most harmful to workers with the least power to bargain their way to decent terms and conditions. Yet status is rarely confronted as a fictious illusion through which the rationality of law leaves in its wake a trail of unmet promises. Hence Dukes and Streeck make an important intellectual contribution to our understanding of the role of status in post-industrial capitalism by using their case study accounts to such powerful effect. They show how workers can find dignity in contract, indeed can see freedom to contract as an inherently dignified liberty.

In the context of the actually existing reality of industrial democracy, norms expressed in labour law are infrequently the product of openly public deliberation and hence have little genuine legitimacy as an expression of public will. This means that for many workers, perhaps most particularly those most at risk of exploitation (broadly defined and expressed, for example, in low pay and insecurity), status is, at best, perceived as imposed. At worst, status is experienced as a form of violation. Empirical studies reveal that workers can and do push back against status as an unwanted paternalism of the state: a paternalism that has often failed them. For them, there is greater dignity in reliance on their own individual agency as opposed to their faith in that which is imposed.

Deliveroo riders’ recent encounter with the Supreme Court (Independent Workers Union of Great Britain v CAC [2023] UKSC 43) provides further testimony on the political economy of status. The judgment of the Supreme Court shows that when they seek the support of labour law in order to bargaining collectively with their employer, the occupational identity of the riders is stronger than their claim for status recognition. As Dukes and Streeck also illuminate in their case study of gig workers, issues of status also shape welfare provision and severely restrict workers’ choice to exit from oppressive relations of employment. This effectively abandons huge swathes of workers, many of whom are racialised and otherwise marginalised. We need look no further than the economic realities of people who work but are too poor to afford the essentials for themselves and their families as evidence of how failures of both status and contract are experienced physically and materially: mapped onto workers’ bodies and evidenced in rising rates of disability and health inequality due to an engrained deterioration in the quality of work.

Claims of status and resultant entitlement to statutory protection have failed occupational groups that could be thought of as those most in need of paternalistic protection under conditions of economic liberalisation. Status is an important analytic concept, an inextricable part of the role of the state in the structuring of capital, and a fundamental tool of post-industrial injustice. Repeated and explicit rejection in law of claims from occupational groups for equality of recognition, reward and economic entitlement, has inevitably pushed them towards viewing contract as a site in which they are recognised to have as agency and thereby have the potential for liberal emancipation. In the example of care workers, the ‘institutionalised humiliation’ of an occupational group (LJB Hayes (2017) Stories of Care: A Labour of Law, Palgrave) is revealed in their struggles to use law to achieve equal pay, to be protected from deteriorating terms and conditions as a consequence of privatisation, to be entitled to statutory wage protection and much more. The rejection of care workers in the crafting of legislation and in the courts has been humiliating—their occupational reality is one in which they have few equal pay rights, they lack minimum wage protection, they have no occupational sick pay on which they can rely. Care workers’ failure to achieve ‘status’ unmasks the fact of status as a sham, a fake and an unenforceable mirage of paternalism which does not include them under its wing. What emerges from this re-working of status and contract is an account which foregrounds human agency rather than human objectification as a sociological force to be reckoned with in a post-industrial context.

Dukes and Streeck distinctively engage with questions of liberalisation and emancipation through their inclusion of a case study of University professors. On its face it may seem counter-intuitive to build an analytical perspective from comparing relatively well-paid University professors with low-waged groups such as Amazon workers, gig workers and care workers; not least also because of classificatory demarcations of intellectual and manual labour. Yet this multi-layered analysis carefully teases out the central roles of gender and race in the legal and social status of workers across the case study occupations. It reveals too how marketisation and economic liberalism have shaped workers’ internal understandings of their talent, contributions and capacities, in multifaceted ways that must not be oversimplified, yet are considerably strengthened through comparison. Indeed, care workers and University professors share similarities of ‘vocation’ through which their labour can be marketised, yet they retain a sense of intimate connection to the state through their delivery of publicly necessary functions in the service of the state.

Another gem of Democracy at Work is its distinctive embrace of the humanity and dignity of labour as a sociological force. In essence, this is a theoretical and empirical explanation of human dignity in labour as being much more than a normative ideal. Dignity is a driver through which workers build occupational identity and solidarity. Workers will create their own routes to dignity and their own narratives of dignity as they make meaning from their work. Dukes and Streeck revive awareness of the relevance to labour law of human qualities of agency and resistance and the human spirit to reclaim, reinvent and reimagine.

Sinzheimer and Selznick focussed attention on occupational communities as bound by shared social norms and relations of solidarity due to their bonds of knowledge and wisdom. Dukes and Streeck foreground occupational communities as sites from which solidarity, and hence democracy at work, can be kindled under conditions of post-industrial capitalism. Work-related social communities exist—even in precarious, disrupted and attenuated work—and they remain a source of pride, agency and positive association. The social functions of occupational community offer normative potential for collective identity, shared interests and bargaining over the future. Occupational communities may provide a form of subculture from which union organisation might build.

Democracy at Work powerfully illustrates the utility of understanding that labour law does not only regulate class conflict, it evolves with it and through it. A precious element of that conflict lies in the struggle for legal change as a matter of social progress, it is about more than wages, or social security, or even the scope of the welfare state (although it is all of this). Labour law is profoundly political, not least because it sets out a framework for the functioning of a ‘second tier of government’ in democratic capitalism. This second tier is closest to everyday interests and experience because it bears primary responsibility for effecting a redistribution of incomes and other matters that lie at the heart of compromise and dynamic agreement between labour and capital. This second tier provides the first, ‘parliamentary tier’ with legitimacy and stability. Here Democracy at Work weaves an analysis of labour law for democracy—illustrating how labour law can support this second-tier democracy and how its erosion puts the health of parliamentary democracy in peril. Industrial sociology and a historically informed political economy of labour law reveal the need for free collective bargaining plus parliamentary democracy as countervailing and necessary ingredients for post-industrial capitalist societies to thrive.