A Right to Workplace Democracy? Response to Robert Mayer

Abstract

The disagreements between Professor Mayer and me turn to some extent on legitimate differences in interpreting and understanding my intentions and text, and to a larger extent on differences in the ways we interpret and understand certain important economic and political aspects of the world in which we live.I believe my argument is more consequentialist than he understands it to be. The question is: consequences for what ends, goals, or values? Simplifying my discussion somewhat. I was concerned with three general types of consequences: consequences for economic effectiveness, for property rights, and for rights to a democratic process.As to property rights, though I expressed skepticism about applying the standard moral argument for property rights to business firms, my preferred solution, as Professor Mayer points out, does not entail a violation of basic rights to property, or, for that matter, existing property rights in business firms. It could simply“entail a shift ownership from stockholders to employees”(p. 113).As to economic effectiveness, I argued that employee-owned firms could be as effective in achieving such intermediate goods as investment, growth, and employment (p.120ff.). I argued further that they could be as efficient as American corporations at present in minimizing“the ratio of valued inputs to valued outputs”both in the narrow sense ordinarily employed by economists, for whom the outputs are those valued by consumers, and in a broader sense that would include outputs“we as producers value”(p. 130).