The Dignity of Workers
REVIEW ESSAY
Democracy at Work:
Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice
by Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck
Polity, 2023, 180 pages
In Democracy at Work, labor law professor Ruth Dukes and sociologist Wolfgang Streeck describe how the dehumanizing and demanding conditions of an Amazon “fulfillment center” maximize the isolation of workers and impede the formation of any kind of community in the warehouse. Handheld devices, in addition to monitoring every minute of activity (including breaks) against target speeds, “direct workers to take routes through the warehouse designed to minimize opportunities to interact with co-workers.” The newest warehouses require workers to stand still in small, phone-booth-like boxes as conveyor belts deliver packages to be sorted; each “workstation is set up so that the worker cannot talk to, or even make eye contact with, any co-worker.” Off-duty workers are banned from break rooms. Legal strategy undergirds these physical design choices; whenever possible, Amazon employs “manipulation of the workers’ legal status” to classify workers as independent contractors to whom they owe little, rather than employees. Full-time employee status—the coveted “blue badge”—is dangled as a potential reward for good work.
Modern, neoliberal analysis of such a workplace tends to focus on two questions: is it freely chosen, and does it deliver? So long as each individual worker has decided that laboring in such conditions for the offered wage is superior to alternative options, the job opportunity purportedly maximizes his or her own welfare. And so long as organizing work in this manner delivers the greatest efficiency to the corporation and highest return on investment to its shareholders, the system purportedly maximizes consumer welfare, and thus the society’s as well.
The inadequacy of that analysis is increasingly apparent to a growing number of people, but critiques tend either to take the form of instinctual moral disgust, or else to criticize neoliberal economics from within its own framework, attempting to identify the “market failures” that might possibly lead a market to deliver something other than a wonderful result. In Democracy at Work, by contrast, Dukes and Streeck offer valuable legal, historical, and sociological lenses to help readers understand how the evolution of social concepts has given rise to the modern labor market’s pathologies, and what alternatives might be available.
Democracy at Work is an unapologetically theoretical work, written by academics, for academics, and in dense academic style. As the authors say quite openly in the preface, the book is not “a collection of recipes, a catalogue from which to pick ‘solutions’ to ‘problems,’ such as how to set up an effective collective bargaining regime. . . . [i]ndeed . . . our main concern in the book is with concepts.” As is so often true for each of us, the book’s strengths are also its weaknesses—in this case, its conceptual nature and academic posture. This review therefore discusses both the valuable intellectual narrative Dukes and Streeck offer, which ultimately sketches the contours of better possibilities in the future, and also the limitations of this sort of academic work.
Contract and Status
The fundamental tension of democratic capitalism, for Dukes and Streeck, is that a capitalist order must both be peaceably held together via the legal imposition of shared values—such that the social order is seen as legitimate—and be profitable. Contracting for work proceeds between parties of inherently unequal power, which makes the law indispensable for achieving that balance. Labor law’s particular task is to “impose a stable and predicable order on a conflictual relationship of power and exploitation, to institutionalize such order as one of justice [between classes].”
Labor law is thus the thin line between democratic order and chaos, the unique office of which is to regulate “society’s paramount conflict line, its breaking zone, its most critical cleavage, where peaceful exchange and cooperation are forged, or fail to be forged.” This law both shapes and arises out of the larger “labor constitution”—the whole of how a society understands the nature of worker-employer relationships, legally but also socially and morally. What follows for fully three-quarters of Democracy at Work is an intellectual history of the evolving understandings of the worker-employer relationship in various eras.
The conceptual clarity that Democracy at Work attempts to bring to this narrative begins and ends with the twin notions of contract and status. Contract, of course, refers to those economic or workplace rights and obligations freely undertaken by the parties concerned. Status refers to those rights and obligations that inhere in a person prior to and aside from their choice. Dukes and Streeck plot the evolution of the worker-employer relationship along these two axes. According to this rubric (which follows a long tradition in labor thought, as the authors are keen to unfold for us), various conceptions of the worker-employer relationship emerge.
Prior to the advent of modern capitalism, status dominated the equation. The feudal framework of master and servant conceived of duties and rights as resting on one’s station. The master-servant paradigm resulted in
pre-modern (meaning pre-twentieth-century) labour law [which] specified the obligations and rights of those able to avail themselves as “masters” of the labour power of “servants”, in a manner that was heavily weighted in favour of the former to the disadvantage of the latter. Indeed, as late as the eighteenth century, service for some was not so very different to serfdom or slavery, involving a duty to serve one’s master at any time, day or night—a “state of subjection” that could endure for a year or several years.
Interested parties took intellectual and social refuge from the ensuing injustices by appealing to the notion of contract, going to “great lengths to differentiate the position of servants from that of serfs or slaves, emphasizing precisely the exercise by the former of (formal) freedom of contract.” Thus could a worker “freely” adopt the subjugated status of indentured servant, for example—it being, after all, technically his choice. And thus also, the authors point out, the moral absurdity of a case like that of Charlotte Howe, an American slave brought to work in England as a domestic servant, whom Lord Mansfield deemed unable to receive poor relief because such relief required the beneficiary to have been hired—which Howe had not been, lacking, as she did, a contract proving otherwise.
It is not surprising, then, why workers of all stations would find the notion of contract emancipatory. Contracts had the potential to set parameters on previously unconstrained obligations of service, to define the outer boundaries of what could and could not be demanded. One can see why, where “early twentieth-century efforts at organizing domestic servants were partially or temporarily successful, the primary desire expressed by the workers was precisely for a ‘contract.’”
But this swiftly proved unsatisfactory as well. In the face of the unequal power between those entering such contracts, the master-service paradigm survived reasonably well. Plato taught that written laws could never account for all eventualities, and thus judges would always be needed to interpret them. Dukes and Streeck argue much the same about contracts. Contracts are, after all, “by their nature incomplete,” and “when called upon to ‘fill the gaps’ in contracts of employment, courts often read into them obligations derived from the old master-servant model: general duties of obedience and loyalty by the worker to the employer.” The ongoing influence of this model is reflected even today “in the very notion of a contract of service, which is widely used as a synonym for the contract of employment.” The notion of contract did not sufficiently liberate industrial-era workers—in fact, having mutated like an evolutionarily successful virus, it often lent legitimacy to the ongoing influence of the master-servant dynamic.
The pendulum needed to swing back—which brings us to the New Deal and the postwar period. Some renewed sense of status was needed to limit the “freedom” of contact, to reassert that workers inherently possessed some dignity, beyond and outside of what contracts specified. Only this time, it would need to be a political status, rather than a social‑historical one. Enter the high point of Democracy at Work’s story: the postwar concept of “industrial citizenship.” Industrial citizenship recognized “the worker as a bearer of rights on the one hand and of industry and the economy as spheres of public interest and democratic governance on the other.” It was a public status, “established in the democratic struggle to regulate work relations between capital and labour, the most important arena of conflict and cooperation in a capitalist society.”
In what Michael Lind has called the postwar “settlements” between business and labor (at least in the United States), some measure of industrial peace was to be found in this arrangement. Just as the consent of the governed was the ticket price for a viable political democracy, so workers’ right to have their voice heard and to participate in decision-making (via trade unions, for example) was “the price that capital had to pay to ensure economic cooperation and social stability.”
The Neoliberal Assault on Workplace Community
This peace could not hold forever. For one thing, the arrangement represented by “industrial democracy” had a largely practical justification: social and industrial stability seemed to require it. But what if a new arrangement could be found that did not require industrial democracy? For that matter, what if the industrial democracy framework could be construed as actively causing harm, thus undermining its own justification? Dukes and Streeck suggest this became an increasingly compelling argument to make, as powerful unions took advantage of a Keynesian full-employment policy environment to extract concessions beyond what capital could tolerate, and as industrial democracy seemed to be increasingly riddled by “rigidities, confinements and restraints of the work regime” that rendered nations ever less competitive. And for another thing, the notion of “industrial citizenship” implied a coherent workplace one could be a “citizen” of. What if such a workplace was no longer necessary for employers to provide?
Thus we arrive, at last, at the final chapter of the historical review that accounts for almost all of Dukes and Streeck’s book: the neoliberal revolution. The revolution—Democracy at Work’s primary villain—promised to swing the pendulum back again toward the emancipatory potential of a contract-based model, unshackling business to compete in a globalized world, and offering workers freedom from the assembly-line Fordism that supposedly characterized the postwar period.
What happened instead was the fissuring of the workplace: the deliberate creation of a “a gap . . . between employing organizations and those who work for them.” Employers came under pressure—and found the freedom—to “shed parts of their workforce and to contract for work other than through the creation of employment relations,” and increasingly came to use “the manipulation of contractual terms” to separate and segment workers from their employers and from one another. As the workplace was deconstructed, the traditional worker-employer relationship fractured into a “bricolage of statuses based in contract rather than the other way around—with both the creativity of human resource professionals and contract lawyers and new technologies” to create ever-shifting combinations between “status” and “contract” as best suited the employer.
This dismantling of the workplace as a site of potential community and coherence was aided and abetted by globalization and financialization, which negated employers’ need to accommodate the demands of local labor. Thus the segmentation of business functions and workforce roles has advanced so dramatically that it is very often unclear whether a worker is an employee or self-employed—an ambiguity that inures to the benefit of employers—or indeed, unclear who the relevant employing organization even is at all. If a third-party firm engages a janitor as an “independent contractor” and sends her to a corporate office that never directly pays her and has no employer-employee obligations to her, but which sets her hours and determines where she spends those hours, it becomes difficult to say: who does she work for? What is her workplace community? Ruth and Streeck press the point with examples.
Case studies of precarious workers illuminate the savage atomization and manipulation of workers that Dukes and Streeck attribute to labor law’s descent into the realm of unfettered contract. The most dramatic is the case of Amazon warehouse workers. Democracy at Work’s detailed description of the realities inside Amazon warehouses is the single most effective, and affecting, element of the book. The combination of precarity and atomization the book describes shreds the possibility for shared experiences, social bonding, and solidarity in the warehouse. This is, of course, precisely Dukes and Streeck’s point, and it is a strong one. The fissuring and fracturing of the workplace affords employers extreme freedom of movement and efficiency maximization; the greatest threat to that freedom and maximization would therefore be the reconstituting of a sense of workplace community. Thus must eye contact while sorting packages and casual conversation in the breakroom be policed. They are dangerous.
Shared norms and expectations can grow from social connectedness at work; these can grow into widely held societal expectations if allowed, and thus eventually into law. Occupational communities are where Dukes and Streeck find hope for some renewed sense of status to constrain our hyper-contractual moment—an updated and reclaimed sense of industrial democracy, better suited to our more complex and dynamic economy. It is policy’s job to make sure such communities can form; it is Duke and Streeck’s apparent hope that a better understanding of how and why they are currently fractured may help policymakers achieve that. They are, of course, entirely correct on both counts.
We, the Ordinary People of the Faculty Lounge
The policy recommendations Democracy at Work offers are, in the main, worthy. The damages done by unfettered, globalized flows of capital, goods, and labor must be stemmed; the right to organize, and supremely the right to strike, must be protected; the financial sector must be brought to heel by democratic governance—good and right conclusions all. In the aggregate, the reader is left feeling like a reasonable parable has been told, a sensible moral has been delivered; all that is left is a hearty “go, therefore, and do likewise.”
The reader is also left with the clear sense that policy is not the authors’ strong suit. Recommendations are scattered, thinly explained, and sometimes simply random. The first comes well after the hundredth page; others, like a financial transaction tax and democratic ownership of the banking system, are dropped for the very first time in the second-to-last paragraph of the book, having not been foreshadowed or previously justified in any way. (Not that either is a bad idea, mind you.) This is not a book to guide policymakers; it is a book to sharpen thought about why policy is needed. When the book reaches outside its natural academic habitat, it falters.
The academic posture of the book is limiting in other ways, too. As a matter of style, it is given to density, occasional ambiguity about whether the authors are asserting a point of view or merely reporting some other academic’s argument, and a kind of recursive repetitiveness without which the book might have been considerably shorter. It may be an enlightening read, but it is not a light one.
More substantively, one gets the sense that the vision of Democracy at Work is constrained by its own status as a distinguished academic product. For a book about workplace democracy, the authentic voice of working people themselves seldom breaks through. It is, in fairness, a book about concepts, but its own argument feels undercut by the constant treatment of workers as objects to be spoken and theorized about, not persons who might be spoken to and theorized with.
Workers’ own views are, in fact, often treated as suspect. The authors largely dismiss those workers who say they enjoy the freedoms afforded by, for instance, independent contractor gig work. They pay lip service to the sincerity of these views and the appeal of such work arrangements, but ultimately paint such workers as deluded about what’s good for them. The Uber driver who conceives of himself as an entrepreneur, for example, is understood to have been manipulated by the fundamental human desire to feel pride in one’s work, blinded to his own exploitation by the emotional difficulty of acknowledging it. The Marxist notion of false consciousness looms large in the background. Perhaps the authors are right about this, perhaps not. But an argument on behalf of workers that ignores or dismisses their own diversity of views is inherently self-limiting.
But nowhere are the limitations of an academic vantage point more striking than in the one place where passionate “worker” voices break through most clearly. In addition to Amazon workers, Uber drivers, and care workers, the authors offer a fourth “neoliberalism is bad” case study: college professors. It is the book’s single weakest point. The authors seem as concerned with the degradation of professorial social status as with the genuine dehumanization of warehouse workers. The authors rail against the efforts “to redefine the modern status of the university professor as an employee of a bureaucratic organization engaged in service provision,” and lament that in some countries “professors today are employees much like any other” rather than bearers of vocational callings.
Dukes and Streeck are not wrong, nor are they the first, to point out that universities increasingly rely on poorly paid adjuncts who have few employment protections, whose presence places downward pressure on the wages and power of more senior faculty, and who probably deserve better. But the point would land better coming from less interested parties. Instead, in a remarkably tone-deaf choice, the book explicitly compares the plight of adjuncts to that of the warehouse workers whose abuse it so vividly describes just a few pages earlier. Despite acknowledging the severe incomparability of the wages, physical working conditions, and types of work that applies to both cases, Dukes and Streeck argue that “[j]ust as in the case of Amazon workers . . . the contracts of academics in this category are drafted so as to render them insecure or precarious,” and that they are therefore similarly vulnerable to promises of employment and threats of termination. “If you can only publish this number of articles in journals with that impact factor, and secure a research grant of so many figures, you too might be awarded a blue badge.”
A charitable reader can concede that, strictly speaking, the authors may be right about Jeff Bezos and university presidents employing similar employment strategies, and that both strategies are symptomatic of the same neoliberal sickness. But it seems not to have occurred to them that few workers turn to university teaching as their most desperate final recourse against economic disaster, that few professors have their bathroom breaks electronically surveilled, or that advocating the tempering of higher education’s outsized cultural power might be more in keeping with their argument than bemoaning the loss of elevated professorial status. Workers of all kinds deserve protection; adjuncts are no exception. But this particular comparison is jarring at best.
Meaningful Work
Perhaps the strongest and most useful argumentative move Dukes and Streeck make is to flatly reject functionalist arguments for workplace democracy: that it will increase productivity and innovation, maintain industrial peace leading to greater long-term profitability, and so on. This rejection is a striking decision. Advocates for workplace democracy often rely on such arguments; in full disclosure, I have made such arguments myself (and stand by them; worker board representation, for example, really would leave both workers and corporations better off).
But the authors’ insight is that reliance on a utilitarian justification of workplace democracy seeks to fight neoliberalism on its own terms, and therefore creates an enormous vulnerability. Even if these functionalist arguments were true, what if they stopped being so, or were overstated? “[C]ompanies will not hesitate to turn their back on consensual styles of management and corporate governance if it suits them, even in the short term.” The freedom to do exactly that is enabled by the confluence of globalization, financialization, and a status-less conception of the worker, as “seeking to access the current glut of investment capital, companies might easily choose to shed workers, in one way or another, rather than treat them well, especially if their technology allows them to replace established and well-represented workforces with less demanding ‘outsiders.’”
It is a decent description of the current state of American capitalism, and functionalist arguments alone will not save us. Appeals beyond shareholder primacy—to the national interest, for example—must be made. But ultimately, it is a moral argument, an argument about normative first principles.
[T]he need for a just normative order is not invalidated if it cannot be derived from the need to make a profit; rather, it precedes that need and both conditions and contains it. Justice, as defined by a society’s normative order, precedes efficiency, as defined by market competition, and it follows that the quest of the employer for efficiency must be bounded by the quest of workers for justice. If there is no technological constraint to organize work in a non-despotic way, then a normative constraint must take its place. . . .
The source of such normative constraints is, in the end, the fundamental humanity of the worker. Labor is, as Polyani said, a “fictional commodity,” and Dukes and Streeck argue that it is the ultimate concern of labor law, and the “labor constitution” which labor law both proceeds from and forms, to “ensure that the peculiar nature of labour—nothing other than humanity itself—is respected, even where it is traded as a commodity and subjected to managerial control.”
Here, then, the strengths and weaknesses of Democracy at Work’s academic efforts converge. The force of its argument’s ultimately moral foundation is remarkably stirring for a work of academic analysis. It is a succinct and powerful distillation of the same insight that is driving so much of today’s useful turmoil in political and policy thinking in the Unites States, from Marco Rubio’s speeches on why the dignity of work should trump market efficiency to Joe Biden’s mash-ups of blue-collar blueprints with the saving of America’s soul.
But on the level of academic argument, the question of where this foundational moral claim on behalf of human dignity draws its own legitimacy is left unanswered. One can accept it as axiomatic, as Dukes and Streeck seem to. But if one wishes to dive deeper regarding the nature of the human person, and why it is dignified, and why that dignity merits protection, and why communities might be the mechanism best suited to protect that dignity in the workplace, one must turn to other texts. Thus far can the labor law and sociology professors take you, and no further.