We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
The Difficulty of Making Good Work Available to All.
- Authors
Brixel, Pascal
- Abstract
How might good work – skilled, autonomous work which affords workers opportunities for meaningful social cooperation in decent conditions – be made available to all? I evaluate five commonly advanced strategies: an unregulated labor market, egalitarian redistribution of resources, state regulation, collective bargaining, and workplace democracy. Each, I argue, has significant limitations. An unregulated labor market ignores workers' unduly weak bargaining power vis‐à‐vis employers. Egalitarian redistribution alone fails to solve this problem due to distinctive and endemic imperfections of labor markets. Direct state regulation is insufficiently context‐sensitive and insufficiently dynamic in the face of technological and other developments. Collective bargaining gives workers only indirect and sometimes costly influence over their working conditions. And workplace democracy leaves workers vulnerable to collective action problems induced by competition between firms. I argue, however, that these strategies can be complemented in a promising way by 'syndicalist economic democracy': direct worker participation in the government of the economy, largely specific to particular occupations or economic sectors but above the level of the individual workplace.
- Subjects
BARGAINING power; LABOR market; STATE regulation; EMPLOYEE participation in management; COLLECTIVE action; ECONOMIC sectors
- Publication
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2024, Vol 41, Issue 2, p267
- ISSN
0264-3758
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/japp.12685