Preliminary Draft, Do Not Citation or Circulation An End of History for Union Democracy: The Inevitability of Corporatism and the Unrealized Participatory Workplace Jedidiah J. Kroncke FGV Sao Paulo School of Law Early in 2015, the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) celebrated one in a series of hard-won victories in its struggle within the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) to promote union democracy—in this case preserving the right for IBT members to directly elect their national representatives. 1 As the largest union in the United States, the TDU’s struggles have often served to symbolize long-standing tensions within the U.S. labor movement between member participation and institutional bureaucracy. The fact that in 2015 such a fundamental issue of internal union democracy could be a point of continued and prolonged contention reflects the often- uneasy place of democratic norms within the U.S. workplace. This tension between democratic and, what will be termed, corporatist norms has not only been a historical constant within the U.S. labor movement but also finds parallels in labor movements across the globe. Moreover, the few global bright spots in promoting democratic norms within the modern workplace find themselves submerged within a larger secular trend towards greater excision of democratic norms from the labor regulatory schemes. As such, the foundational norms of economic democracy that gave rise to labor unionism following 20 th century industrializations have not been translated into the more participatory workplaces, an ideal that was once hopefully imagined by labor activists and scholars. Instead, norms of economic democracy have been undercut by reinvigorated promotion of technocratic conceptions of managerial expertise from the enterprise to the transnational level—the same conceptions which have also placed more generalized pressure on participatory norms in 1 th Alexandra Bradbury, Teamsters Secure their Right to Vote, In Time for 2016 Election , LABOR NOTES (Jan. 28 , 2015). 1 Preliminary Draft, Do Not Citation or Circulation practices of political democracies.2 While the modern citizen is often assumed in their life as a consumer to effectively filter and process complex data in a world of growing financialization, in their life as a producer they are assumed to have little capacity to contribute meaningfully to workplace decision-making. As a result, there has been little disturbance of the conceptualization of capital’s contribution to the workplace through the lens of ownership and labor’s contribution through the lens of commodity exchange. The extensivity of this trend has induced what Guy Mundluk recently diagnosed as a near global state of anomie among labor scholars. 3 This anomie reflects the continued rebuffing of hopes that the 20 th century rise of collective bargaining, alongside the growth of welfare state arrangements, would progressively assuage the dislocations of labor commodification that Polanyi identified at the heart of the industrial capitalism. 4 For this paper, the modern vitality of the welfare state will be set aside to focus on exploring why, in comparative frame, the promise of economic democracy through the formation of labor unions has continued to leave labor movements either recurrently calling for revitalization through internal re-democratization or a retreat, from often quite radical ideologies, into corporatist forms of social bargaining that place little to no value on economic democracy. This paper will argue that these two adaptations, 1) faltering revitalization or 2) growing corporatism, reflect the inescapable fact that union democracy, in its internal and external instantiations, relies on processes of social capital formation that are fundamentally at odds with the logics of capital formation which discipline the modern workplace. Following the global proliferation of what David Harvey called flexible accumulation, 5 and accelerated by the denationalization of financial capital, no human-centric process of social capital formation can match the current logistical speed and scope of capital mobility. 6 While in specific contexts over limited time horizons—most often involving intense mobilization around political democratization or in small homogenous nations—episodic labor movements can transcend this mismatch, but the 2 Compare ANTHONY DOWN , AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF DEMOCRACY (1957) and BRYAN CAPLAN , THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL VOTER (2007). 3 Guy Mundlak, Workplace Democracy: Reclaiming the Effort to Foster Public-Private Isomorphism , 15 THEOR . INQ . LAW 149, 153 (2014). 4 KARL POLANYI , THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION (1944). 5 DAVID HARVEY , THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY (1989). 6 Sanford Jacoby, Finance and Labor: Perspectives on Risk, Inequality, and Democracy , 30 COMP . LAB . L. & POL ’Y J. 17 (2008). 2 Preliminary Draft, Do Not Citation or Circulation levels of social capital they generate eventually dissipate or are ground away by the steady-state operation of the mobility mismatch with financial capital. The process of social capital formation and reduction explains both the unrealized promise of systems of collective bargaining laying the groundwork for more participatory workplace regulation as well as the devolution of many union traditions into corporatism—identified over a century ago by Robert Michels as an example of his iron law of oligopoly. 7 While labor union activists and supportive intellectuals often decry this devolution, the comparative scholarship on labor unions has revealed that, whatever successes are achieved by episodic upswings in union democracy, those collective bargaining systems that have been best able to serve the collective interests of their workers are often of the hyper-corporatist variety. This paper will explore this general principle by comparing the mid-to-late 20 th century trajectories of unions with quite different institutional and legal arrangements, those of the United States, Brazil and China. Herein, the durability of Brazilian union corporatism and the emergence of corporatist Chinese unions, even after a century of quite divergent political development, raises questions as to the extent to which the labor union model is still an ultimately progressive one today. It further questions the continued search to promote union democracy, especially of the decentralized and privately-ordered variety in the U.S., as a Sisyphean effort. Such questioning occurs in light of the fact that, especially for spatially large and socially diverse nations, the very success of these corporatist regimes depends on repressing internal democratic norms in order to strengthen their broader form of social bargaining. In contrast to past claims about ends of history, this apparent end of history for union democracy is far from celebratory, nevertheless it is hard at this point in labor history to ignore. The irony of this end of history is that labor unions have been historically (as they were in Brazil and continue to be today in China), crucial vectors for political democratization. 8 The solidarity generating potential of unions fed the social movements necessary to provoke systemic social change during multiple waves of 20 th century democratizations, but post-democratization either turned to embrace corporatism or faded from social influence. Although the type of participatory workplace in which norms of economic democracy have a future might require 7 ROBERT MICHELS , POLITICAL PARTIES (1911). 8 Jedidiah Kroncke, Property Rights, Labor Rights & Democratization: Lessons from China and Experimental Authoritarians , 45 N.Y.U. J. Int'l L. & Pol. 1 (2013). 3 Preliminary Draft, Do Not Citation or Circulation similar social mobilizations to institutionalize, such is at best tangential to the possibility of union democracy itself. To develop this general argument, this paper progresses in four parts. Part I will provide background on debates about union democracy and their relationship with norms of economic democracy and labor union corporatism. Part II will present the tenuous place of union democracy in the United States, the largest exemplar of private, enterprise level collective bargaining that depends heavily on complementary social movements. Moreover, such dependence has left the U.S. labor movement following an unsuccessful pattern of recurrently failed calls for democratic revitalization after resorting to the use of electoral politics as a de facto form of corporatist bargaining. Part III discusses the modern Brazilian experience, possessing perhaps the most successful large-scale corporatist union regime. A central actor in Brazilian transition to democracy, the Brazilian labor party and its allied unions have since pursued ever-increasing marginalization of internal democracy and erected a hyper-corporatist arrangement with few, if any, links to democratic norms. Part IV relates the contentious role of the labor union form in contemporary China, where the communist presumption of alignment between Party and worker interests left the state union structure scrambling after its 1978 liberalization to experiment with union corporatism as both a solution to labor unrest and as a preemptive strike against labor mobilization fueling political democratization. Part V concludes by considering a harsh choice presented by the preceding analysis: is the entrenched and sclerotic nature of corporatist unions, even as they act to repress new ideas and more radical social movements, the best, if imperfect, shield against