Industrial Democracy" Reconsidered H

"Industrial Democracy" Reconsidered H. T. Wilson Abstract Industrial democracy has many variations and is taking many different forms in advanced industrial societies which honour representative democracy and the rule of law. In this sense it must be understood to constitute a complement or supplement to political democracy and the exercise of citizenship in particular, not a substitute for such institutions and practices. The historical record across many countries and cultures shows that the solution to the problem of what I have called political regression in Political Management: Redefining the Public Sphere is to resuscitate citizenship both in and through and outside of established mechanisms and proces- ses. Industrial democracy can only work fruitfully and effectively where such citizenly activity and possibility is alive and well in society as a whole. 1. Initial Statement of the Problem I very much appreciate this opportunity to contribute to a reader on the issue of industrial democracy, especially when it is being dedicated to Professor Günter Dlugos on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. A reader on a topic of this importance should not only provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on the relation between practice and theory in economic and political contexts. It should also serve to associate Professor Dlugos' name with an ongoing issue of great concern to all democratic countries, one which should be able to benefit from the concepts, frameworks and thinking of political thought and political science as well as economics and the social and cultural sciences. It is because my disciplinary background and training is similar to that of Professor Dlugos that I am pleased to be able to argue from the perspective of political thought that a careful rethinking of the theory and practice of industrial democracy is called for for a number of reasons. To some extent these reasons have been alluded to, and in some cases discussed in detail, in my recently published book "Political Management: Redefining the Public Sphere"1. My main thesis there was that representative democracy in and through political and legal institu- tion is in dire trouble not only in the so-called Third World but in advanced industrial societies themselves. In the first case, it is the cultural nature and historical evolution of these insistutions which addresses the serious difficulties 14 H. T. Wilson involved in attempting to transpose them to new nations. When the dependence of these political institutions on capitalism and the market system is remembered, the challenge posed by the desire and determination to install them elsewhere is only underscored2. In the second case, however, we must be no less concerned about the presence of political regression in advanced industrial societies. An increasing number of properly political functions are being carried out by non-elected officials and members of the judiciary. The kind of apathy and passivity which American political science in particular has associated with "politics" and the so-called "civic cultire" is now being formally institutionalized with the active assistance of the rule of law3. Though this problem is quite different from the frequent use of the rule of law in Third World countries as a device for legitimizing repression and violence, the fact that these two pillars of our political and legal system are occasionally at loggerheads can hardly be a source of comfort. Political regression is evident in delegations of authority within the government structure to bureaucrats, technocrats and regulators and within the legal system to judges and magistrates. In the first instance, it means reliance on administrative structure which is necessitated and justified by monetary or fiscal interventions by government, by the welfare or service state, by foreign and military and defense policy, and by the emergence of an international market with its own trade and business cycles. This structure is much more than the standard bureaucratic variant that Weber discussed, because there is no longer any felt need to even maintain the pretense of a separation between politics and administration. However impossible in practice it may be to make all exercises of administrative discretion accountable to politically elected representatives of the people, maintenance of the distinction as a standard of sorts still existed until recently as a benchmark for all administrative personnel4. Nowadays the advent of technocracy threatens this sense of limit by the very nature of its new pre-eminence. The claim is that political administration is unavoidable because of the technical complexity and need for speed that character- izes decision making in all democratic governments. The new situation is often cited in order to justify what amounts to a corollary breakdown of the distinction between crisis and non-crisis government with the rise of manifestly political administration. Here it is the view that political problems are capable of administrative solutions which informs the breakdown of accountability mechanisms under the new conditions and pressures5. In the event, even the rule of law maxim which says that authority can be delegated but not the respsonsibility for its exercise is lost sight of, save for the occasional plebiscites in which citizens more often that not vote negatively against the party in power. Representation must always be considered a necessary evil given the inability of citizens to "present" themselves on political issues, for whatever reasons6. This being the case, the representative system must be protected and defended in and through those aspects of the rule of law directly addressed to it. None of the "Industrial Democracy" Reconsidered 15 functions and activities mentioned above should be cited as justification for the regression and slippage evident in Western Europe and North America today. Apart from anything else, it gives us less to point to when we try to "persuade" Third World countries, not to even mention those in the Soviet and Chinese orbits, that democracy works and that the rule of law ought to be used to protect and defend representation rather than undermine it. The fact that we have never succeeded in reconciling the problem that Aristotle first encountered and raised in response to the collapse of the polls and its absorption into a larger territorial imperium gives added impetus to the need to hold firm on representative democracy in the face of efforts to either actively undermine it or take it for granted to a point which amounts to the same thing7. 2. Industrial Democracy in Comparative Perspective It is the temptation to give up on the effort to achieve and maintain as close an approximation to the above objective as we possibly can that present arguments in favour of regression, given the requirement of speed and the presence of complexity, only serve to underwrite. Particularly in light of both the theory of economic determinism and the practice of trade union socialism, there has been a very legitimate concern for trying to compensate for the problems of representative democracy by democratizing the workplace through a number of schemes, overlap- ping and interconnected, and different mainly with regard to matters of emphasis. My understanding of industrial democracy would find it only in countries where one or another form of political democracy based on representation and the rule of law exists, and where there has been a tradition of one or another form of capitalism and the market system. Thus I do not treat any of the provisions for "front groups" in the Soviet Union or Comicon countries as indicative of the presence of industrial democracy. The recent situation in Poland only underscores the point that these countries cannot afford industrial democracy because they cannot afford any form of democracy whatsoever. My point in locating industrial democracy in this fashion is to underscore its dependence on representative democracy and the rule of law, alongside the right to join trade unions and collectively bargain with management as the representatives of capital. Industrial democracy tries to build upon and extend democracy in advanced industrial societies through the politicization of the labour-management distinction, moderated by arbitration and mediation when collective bargaining fails. At the same time, collective bargaining is seen to constitute the pre-eminent basis for connecting individuals to the state, even by comparison with both the market and the ballot box as mechanisms of public power and control. This conflict model, designed with an eye to the eventual dismantling of the capitalist system in the United Kingdom, was proposed by Mr. Wedgwood Benn over a decade ago, 16 H. T. Wilson and constitutes an extreme case to be sure. Yet the idea that collective bargaining ought to possess a status equal to the marketplace and the exercise of citizenship through the ballot box has a readily understandable appeal for many. At the other extreme is the effort to delimit the conflict that this model can generate by providing for joint decision making and profit sharing. Trade unions effectively give up their right to criticize management whenever they are coopted voluntarily (or involuntarily, as in some Comicon countries) into this general form of industrial democracy, for the obvious reason that they have participated in the decision process, for better or for worse. The link between such participation in the form of co-determination, and profit sharing with employees, becomes problematic when external international economic conditions and related internal difficulties produce a situation in which labour shows losses rather than profits with management. This development is precisely what has caused the present strains and tensions in the practice of codetermination in West Germany. The point here is that political-economic models like co-determination really work only when there is a surplus, because it is far more difficult to get agreement on joint decision- making and suppression of a conflict model when the economic situation is poor than when there is economic growth and a surplus.

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