Democracy in the workplace

The TUC has recently been arguing for new initiatives on industrial democracy. What is the significance of this?

Very often when people have a conversation about workers’ voice, they end up going back to the Bullock Report or In Place of Strife, documents written more than thirty years ago. Today, we are actually in a very different environment, not just in terms of union membership, union density, industrial relations and so on, but in that we are also trying to crack a different problem. Today we know that the shareholder supremacy model of corporate governance is completely bust. The counter-argument to the Bullock Report’s proposals for greater worker representation was that shareholders own the company and are therefore the best stewards of its long-term interests. But this argument has been left completely exposed by the massive shift in the profile of share ownership, the length of tenure of any one share holding, and, most vividly of all, by the 2008 crash.

Our job therefore is to ask different questions. First and foremost, if the old shareholder-interest model is bust, and if we agree that it’s bust, what should take its place? Of course, one of the reasons that it’s bust is its complete denial and waste of worker talent, intelligence and contribution to a firm. But there is also a bigger challenge about the kind of economy that we live in: the root cause of the financial crash was the growing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very few free-floating, promiscuous, global masters of the universe. I am in agreement with the increasingly large number of economists who argue that the worse inequality gets, the greater is the chance that we’ll get another crash - only next time it will be bigger and quicker.

What ‘traction’ is there in the movement, and in society today, for these ideas? Are we as a movement incorrigibly adversarial, or are people prepared to take this on - the idea of ‘let’s help run this thing or shape this thing’?

Well, I think that there are clearly key constituencies that we need to influence and bring on board - first and foremost the trade union movement. This debate on worker representation is ultimately about tackling inequality and the flaws of the old economic model, and about thinking of ways to build a very different model. My discussions with union leaders on these issues have sparked an interest which would not have been as great if they had merely been positioned as being about social partnership European-style. So it’s a very new dimension to the debate. Some people on the left see these sorts of proposals as being a threat to trade unionism and collective bargaining, while some on the right see it as fanciful and assume that we ought to stick to bread and butter stuff and do what we do best. Then there were people like Jack Jones, who was a genuinely intelligent and far-sighted thinker, and created a different sort of tradition for the left - one which James Larkin junior would have described as ‘intelligent trade unionism’. I think our task is to think bigger and come up with some quite ambitious thinking, not just about how our day to day work as trade unionists could be transformed, but what contribution we could make to transforming the country.

That makes a great deal of sense to us in terms of our own understanding of Jack Jones’s importance.

I’m a big admirer of Jack. He was a very creative thinker. And telling the story in terms of his vision can appeal to people who might otherwise be instinctively suspicious. The left has had to reflect on its own history and realise that there is more to these issues than many people realised the last time they were at the centre of debates. Worker representation is not a threat to traditional collective bargaining. Or, more to the point, a euro-style social partnership does not necessarily lead, as some feared, to...