Economic globalization, characterized by the spread of capital and the emergence of a world market, has transformed both production and consumption. It has brought ever more global supply chains, the outsourcing of labor to low-wage countries, increasingly free trade, and the proliferation of marketing and advertising across borders. We have witnessed growing power on the side of capital coupled with a diminishing power of labor, as evidenced in part in widening inequalities in income and wealth both within national states and more globally (despite a decrease in absolute poverty). Forms of labor exploitation persist and are widespread, whether as child labor, sweatshop labor, forced labor and trafficking, or the use and abuse of undocumented laborers and guest workers. At the same time, important institutions of global governance have come to prominence, providing loans to governments and facilitating and regulating trade, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). These institutions, which were initially set up by developed countries and most often act in their interest, establish policies and make decisions with wide impacts. However, those affected by their functioning, especially developing countries and the global poor, as well as labor more generally, most often lack the right to participate in their decisions or even in the deliberative processes that lead up to them.
If we believe that democracy signifies at its root the right to share in determining the direction of the communities of which one is a part or in institutions that deeply affect one’s life chances, then we need to address the democratic deficit in these communities and organizations, whether they be at the national or transnational level. We have noted the deficit in global governance institutions, but I suggest that similar problems of lack of access to decision making apply within political communities and, I will argue, within a range of economic organizations, including corporate firms. The All-Affected Principle (AAP) is particularly well suited to address the democratic deficits arising from globalization, inasmuch as the laws, rules, and policies of powerful actors – whether they be governments or other institutions – have profound effects on distantly situated people or groups, beyond their import for their members alone. Thus traditional democratic understandings of citizens or members as those who have an exclusive right to participate in decision making or to be represented do not give sufficient weight to the rights and needs of others who may be deeply affected by their decisions. The All-Affected Principle calls on us to structure democratic decision making such that all those who are affected by a collective decision, policy, or law in institutional or communal contexts of political, economic, or social life should have a say in making it. In this chapter, I will briefly lay out my understanding of this principle and its scope, as well as of the original criterion for the scope democracy, which I have denominated the Common Activities Principle. I believe that both principles have important implications for dealing with contemporary forms of the democratic deficit. I will then sketch some of the applications to the case of labor, developing the import for management in firms, and finally for a broader range of labor rights under capitalism.
Two Criteria for Democratic Participation and Input
In previous work, I have proposed two criteria for determining the appropriate scope for democratic decision making, that is, where it ought to pertain and who should have rights to take part and be represented.1 Each applies to many existing contexts but both also have some radical implications for democratic transformation. Briefly, the first criterion poses a requirement for democratic decision making about what can be called common (or joint) activities, where these refer broadly to institutions or communities organized around shared goals. In such contexts, we can normally identify members, and indeed, equal members of the institution or community in question. The main exemplar has been taken to be citizens of states (or more local communities), but I argue that similar considerations apply to a host of other self-understood communities or institutions, including cross-border ones, regional associations of states, and economic institutions like corporate firms, as well as social organizations like voluntary associations. The argument for democratic rights of participation and deliberation in such contexts does not depend on the coerciveness of law, as in many theoretical approaches, and it proposes an alternative to standard autonomy views as well.
Without going into it at length, I have argued that democratic rights of participation follow from the recognition that opportunities to engage in common activities are important conditions for people as social beings, and that if one is not to dominate others within these contexts, all should have equal rights to codetermine these activities. In my elaborated view, I appeal to what I call a principle of equal positive freedom (as a principle of justice), which presupposes opportunities for the exercise of free choice but goes beyond these to require (prima facie) equal rights of access to a fuller set of conditions for self-transformation over time, or for self-development (of individuals or groups). These necessary conditions involve freedom from constraining ones like domination or exploitation and access to a range of enabling conditions so that choices can be effective, including material means of life activity, security, and forms of social recognition. In my view, these conditions are specified in human rights, including both civil and political ones, and economic and social rights, and these rights themselves can be distinguished into basic and nonbasic (though still essential) ones, where the basic are conditions for any human life activity whatever and the nonbasic are conditions for its further flourishing over time.2
This common activities criterion calls for extending democracy beyond national states to a wide range of other communal or institutional contexts defined by shared goals, whether they be subnational or across borders, and political or economic or social. Thus, I do not take the basic justification for democracy in this sense to involve an appeal to the All-Affected Principle or even to the All-Subjected Principle (ASP), since in my view the crucial factor involves institutions oriented to shared goals. An important dimension of these institutional contexts is that we can identify members, and indeed, something like an equality of membership. The importance of this equal membership has been recognized in the case of political equality, but I argue that it should be extended more broadly to relevantly similar economic and social institutions as well. The All-Affected Principle unfortunately lacks a notion of equality, except if it were to extend globally as in Robert Goodin’s interpretation where it requires enfranchising all-affected interests.3 However, although this latter approach might apply to truly global concerns like climate change, if applied to all issues it would pose new problems, including insufficient attention to local communities and their specific concerns, along with permitting only the most minuscule contribution on the part of any given individual to a decision when taken at this global scale, with billions of potential participants.
The All-Affected Principle has other drawbacks if employed as a general argument for democracy. The list of those affected, including through the unintended consequences of decisions, is vast and cannot be fully known in advance, and it extends to indeterminate numbers of future generations. Moreover, inevitably people are differentially affected by policies and decisions, which would yield not only unequal rights of participation, but also shifting communities or other groupings for the purpose of making various decisions, as is explicitly proposed by Archon Fung.4 However, determining in advance the relevant set of those specifically affected so as to authorize their participation in the decision making would be cumbersome, if possible at all, and would seem to require a constant reconstitution of the relevant set of deciders in order to match those potentially affected. This raises the question of who would decide on those affected in each case, with the theoretical possibility of an infinite regress of decisions about who makes the decisions and how they are to be made, and in practice presenting an opening for the replication of existing power relationships, as well as for deep disagreements. Moreover, not only would this method eliminate the equality of citizenship (or other memberships), but it would likely undermine people’s equality across the various groups in which they could conceivably be a part.
Despite these drawbacks if taken as the sole principle for justifying democracy and determining its scope, we can observe that in a sense the All-Affected Principle is implicated in the Common Activities Principle as well. If the latter proposes that members of an existing community or institution should have rights of codetermination about its direction, that is, something like self-rule, then it is also the case that they, being primarily affected by the ongoing processes of that community, are the ones who should determine it, or democratically decide about those plans and processes. From this perspective, the common activities criterion can be viewed as a specification of the All-Affected Principle to contexts of communities of fundamentally equal members (e.g. those recognized as citizens or members of nation-states). This may also explain the appeal that the principle has for us in which it seems to serve as a general justification for democracy and its scope.
However, appealing to the All-Affected idea as the main justification for democracy in such contexts would diminish the role of collective agency that I believe is most characteristic of them – that is, in ongoing communities or institutions, it is the process of projecting shared goals and planning ways of meeting them that is decisive. Of course, we are indeed setting these goals for ourselves – that is, those who will be affected by the decisions. There is here a commensurability between the “we” who decide (either directly or through representatives) and the “us” who will be affected. Insofar as we recognize each other, however tacitly, as equal members in this community with overlapping shared goals and who depend on each other for their realization, we do not have to determine specifically who would be affected each time, and we regard ourselves as equally so, even though the specific decisions in fact may impact us somewhat differently. To use the All-Affected Principle as the essential one would also give our common activities an excessively individualistic reading, deriving as it does largely from consequentialist accounts in ethics, and would call on us to aggregate those specifically affected into a group with rights to participate in the decision. I believe that conceiving matters this way would lose the primary sense of our comembership in an ongoing collective activity, in which we jointly construct our ways of being together, and do so (normatively at least) through democratic procedures. Of course, since our being together also means that we are affected by each other and by the decisions we make, we would certainly do well to attend to how our choices will impact or affect us, avoiding those that diminish the life chances of some of our members. But our projecting goals for future activity and making decisions about this activity is what is most decisive in these communal or institutional contexts, and is also responsive to our own individual functioning as intentional and goal-projecting agents.
Although it is thus not a first principle for democracy in my view, the All-Affected Principle does have a crucial place in democratic theory and necessarily supplements the common activities criterion. It does so in several ways. For one thing, the principle serves as a heuristic by which to evaluate the democratic adequacy of the scope of existing communities and institutions and can in turn serve as a corrective, by pointing toward more inclusive understandings of the communal or institutional bodies that ought to have powers of decision. Indeed, the impacts of decisions on people currently excluded from membership may well lead these excluded others themselves to demand inclusion in the relevant communities or in their decision-making processes. Besides this, the very boundaries of economic institutions like transnational corporate firms may themselves be unclear, or, even if clear, often involve extensive interaction and close cooperation with other firms, as in global supply chains or in the case of subsidiaries. Likewise, the informal communities brought into being with contemporary internet technologies may themselves be not only cross-border but also amorphous in their boundaries, without clearly defined notions of membership. If these transnational contexts involve decision making, appeal to the All-Affected Principle can help to set reasonable boundaries for who should be able to participate in these decisions or policy making.
Besides these various uses as a heuristic and corrective guide for the reach of democratic norms, the application of the All-Affected Principle can also lead to calls for new institutional design to give affected outsiders concrete opportunities for democratic input into relevant decisions. In fact, I propose that the main function of the All-Affected Principle is to address just these sorts of exogenous impacts of decisions. It demarcates the affected others, and argues for the need to give them democratic input to these decisions, if not fully equal participation rights. The cases here range from calls for powerful collective actors to simply take into account the effects of their decisions on others in their own decision processes, to the need to hear from these affected outsiders directly through such means as democratic forums, to more stringent requirements of granting these others full participation rights proportional to their affectedness, and in some cases, to according them fully equal participation rights.
I suggest that, in practice, the contemporary power of the All-Affected Principle resides particularly in giving us a way to address the increasingly dispersed, or even global, impacts of decisions, which I pointed to at the outset. The principle is thus central to dealing with these exogenous effects, where existing powerful states, global governance institutions, and transnational corporations increasingly set policy that impacts populations around the world. Inasmuch as these decisions, policies, rules, and laws affect the basic life chances of people who are not members of the institutions or communities in question, these affected outsiders should have rights of what I have called democratic input into the decisions in question.5 As noted, this democratic input may sometimes consist in full participatory rights or representation, but in other cases it may suffice to enable opportunities to affect the deliberation processes of these institutions without granting fully equal participatory rights. It may also be necessary to design entirely new institutions to remedy the defects of the existing institutions of global governance, or even to create new democratic assemblies at regional or global levels.
However, given the extraordinarily wide scope of those potentially affected by decisions and policies of these powerful actors, we need to find some way to delimit and to specify the set of those who should be given opportunities to provide democratic input into these decisions. I have argued elsewhere that we need an understanding of those we could regard as “importantly affected.” I have further suggested that this set should be taken to include those people seriously impacted in their ability to fulfill or realize their human rights, and in the first place their basic human rights.6 The principle can accordingly be formulated as follows: Whenever people are prospectively seriously affected in their possibilities for fulfilling their basic human rights by a given decision or contemplated policy, these people have rights of democratic input into the decisions in question. It is insufficient, in my view, for decision makers to simply imagine the effects of their decisions on distant others, as is often recommended by stakeholder theory. Instead, they need to hear from these affected others concerning their interests and needs. Indeed, in some cases where others can be expected to be more affected than the decision makers, these affected others would need to have full rights of participation or representation in the decisions in question. I have delineated some of the implications of this requirement for global governance institutions in other work,7 but it also has important implications for labor and labor rights, which I will sketch in the following parts of the chapter.
We can observe that such democratic rights for those affected are required by the very principle of equal positive freedom that I have proposed supports equal rights of democratic participation in the case of common activities. Insofar as people are impacted in the possibilities of human rights fulfillment, where this is clearly an important condition for their self-transformation or self-development over time, they require (some shared) access to determining the course of these conditions. I have elsewhere argued that human rights claims are not in the first instance to be understood as holding against the state, as on traditional interpretations. Instead they fundamentally hold as claims on others to set up and support institutional forms to help realize them, and these institutions would have to be responsive to people’s own understanding of their basic needs and enable ways of hearing from them as to the effective means of meeting these needs or fulfilling their rights. Although the democratic rights that are entailed here are, at a level of generality, equal across persons, the specific ways that rules or policies affect particular groups or individuals necessarily give rise to differentiated rights of access into the various decisions and institutional contexts in question, since these touch people’s lives in multifarious ways. I suggest that these sorts of differentiated effects and their correlative of differentiated rights of input are not pernicious when the All-Affected Principle is interpreted to apply to participation based on the external impacts of decisions, whereas to my mind it would tend to undercut political equality and the equality of membership in institutions if it were taken as the general and exclusive basis for democratic participation.
If we reflect on the way that the All-Affected Principle, like the common activities one, follows from the principle of equal positive freedom in the approach here, we can see that the norm of democracy is closely related to that of justice. However, it is certainly not coextensive with justice, which implies other requirements that go beyond the scope of either democratic principle. Among these implications of the principle of justice is the critique of domination and exploitation, including in forms of structural injustice. This in turn suggests that for a full account of labor rights, or for such desiderata as the regulation of market externalities, or of the economy more broadly to make it more responsive to people’s fundamental interests or rights, we need to appeal to considerations of justice, and not only to the democratic considerations posited in the All-Affected Principle. While one could conceivably construe that latter principle such that nondomination and overcoming structural injustice would be a special case of it – since domination or exploitation violates the principle to the degree that it does not give scope to the collective will of those affected by exploitative or dominating forms of activity – to my mind, this would take the principle beyond its proper home in democratic theory. Instead, many social and political harms are best addressed with reference to principles of justice, rather than by relying only on democratic norms. Needless to say, these various principles also interact in practice in ways important to the account here. For example, increases in justice and equality in social and economic life can conduce to a better and more effective democratic politics. Indeed, meeting economic human rights to a decent standard of living is itself a prerequisite to viable democratic processes in the political sphere.
Application of Democratic Criteria to Labor
We can now move to the outlines of a democratic approach to dealing with the difficult impacts of economic globalization and of capitalist economic organization on labor. In my view, the application of the All-Affected Principle globally, along with the common activities criterion, requires a radical rethinking of work and labor, and more fundamentally, the relation of democracy to economic life, although we will only be able to consider these issues schematically here. In this part, I will take up the core requirement of self-management at work, or what has been called workplace democracy, and in the subsequent part explore some of the other applications of the All-Affected Principle to labor and labor rights. In both parts, the reflections and proposals will be largely normative, and admittedly difficult to envision concretely and to apply in practice. Nonetheless, I believe that it is important to clarify these normative democratic dimensions so they can be of some help in guiding practical transformation going forward.
The need for self-management has been a core thesis in my previous writing, given the requirement of overcoming domination and exploitation at work, along with the constructive democratic implications of the norm of equal positive freedom, or equal rights to the conditions required for free activity.8 I will briefly note the arguments for self-management in this part and then discuss some of the problems arising from the need for worker-managed firms to implement the All-Affected Principle in their own policies and plans. In the third part of this chapter, where I take up some other implications of the All-Affected Principle for giving labor more of a say in global economic contexts, I will build on previous work concerning the democratic deficit in global governance institutions. I have advanced proposals for adding regular human rights impact assessments to the environmental and technological ones currently in use, and the inclusion of INGOs advocating for the global poor and of representatives of labor within the deliberations and decision processes of existing global governance institutions.9 Other proposals have concerned the need for the development of regional forms of democracy, and for the reduction of the democratic deficit and of bureaucracy within existing regional associations, notably the EU.10 I have also argued for more democratic forms of decision making within civil society organizations and even within social movements themselves (some of which have already moved to implement democratic forms of solidarity). It is clear, however, that these changes, though helpful, will not suffice to deal with the degradation of labor under the conditions of globalization or to rectify labor’s lack of input and control in regard to the extensive range of corporate and governmental decisions that affect it. Deeper transformations are needed to address the democratic deficit in regard to labor, taking guidance from both criteria for democracy stated above.
Turning now to the requirement of self-management in firms and to rights of democratic management where full worker control cannot be achieved, we can consider how these requirements follow from both criteria of democracy, but most especially from the Common Activities Principle. Among the various stakeholders in a firm’s activities – including suppliers, consumers, the surrounding community, etc. – employees are distinctive in being part of the firm itself. As members of it, taking it as a common activity, they properly have rights of codetermination over the firm’s planning and policies. Seen in this light, their situation has many parallels with membership in a political community, understood as entailing equal rights of participation. Admittedly, this understanding of firms elides the customary distinction between the political as public and the economy as private. But corporate firms operate under a charter or other legal recognition granted by the public to corporations,11 and under the aegis of publicly instituted property rights, and I suggest that these firms can also be viewed as quasi-public in the mode of their institutional functioning. Conceiving them within the frame of common activities defined by shared goals regards them as more than merely profit-seeking institutions, looking to the ways they function as productive group agents, though ones that involve institutionalized roles and practices through which they operate and make decisions. In this view, the steering of these firms normatively properly belongs to all the members who collectively should be enabled to decide their course rather than being restricted to a small group of directors and managers, as at present.
The democratic requirement most certainly does not imply that all those who work in a firm need to make all decisions, but rather that the managers need to be accountable to the workers and, in the strong case, should be chosen by them. Ideally, all who work in the corporate firm should be given ownership and management rights, though they may delegate responsibilities to managers, that is, authorize managers to assume them. The democratic rights for members can be vested in them after some initial waiting period, thereby avoiding counterarguments, e.g. concerning “scabs” potentially having voting rights, or even having to give them to workers who turn out to be ill-suited to the job at hand. We can also acknowledge that democratic management is a desideratum that can be implemented to various degrees short of full self-management. In such cases, it comes closer to what has been called participative management, although the latter has tended to be understood in theories of management and business ethics to include only a weak set of requirements.12
The All-Affected Principle supports rights of democratic participation similar to that implied by the common activities criterion, since clearly workers are very deeply affected by a firm’s policies and plans, almost always considerably more so than other stakeholders, both in terms of intensity and consistency of these effects. However, I think the common activities criterion remains the dominant criterion here, inasmuch as it casts workers as members equally with managers and, in the strong case, generates full rights of participation rather than only democratic input into decisions.
The All-Affected Principle has important consequences for the other stakeholders of a firm (including distantly situated ones). It supports the introduction of forms of democratic input for these stakeholders, and in cases where they are directly and forcefully affected, requires even fuller forms of participation and representation. Although it is true that distant others increasingly contribute to a firm’s production or activity more generally, e.g. by way of global supply chains, nonetheless it is still possible to distinguish members from importantly affected nonmembers. Those who labor in the firm can be identified as members, whereas other stakeholders are affected or impacted by it, but do not constitute the firm itself in the relevant sense.
The normative requirement for firms to consider the impacts of their policies on distant stakeholders would apply to worker-controlled as to existing hierarchical firms. To a modest degree, the need to take stakeholders into account is already recognized by current theories of business ethics, whether in terms of the notion of corporate social responsibility or in terms of stakeholder theory itself. However, this taking into account is usually envisioned as simply a matter of managers imagining the impacts on these stakeholders. A somewhat stronger requirement would be the introduction of human rights impact assessments to supplement the existing technology or environmental impact assessments. Yet, this too falls short of actually hearing from those impacted others beyond the firm. To accomplish that, it might be possible to include representatives of distant stakeholders within the firm’s decision-making processes.
However, much of the required democratic input would undoubtedly need to take place within institutions above the level of the firm, assumed to exercise some democratic sway over them. Ideally, workers or their associations would elect the members of these high-level supervisory bodies. In the nearer term, they are more likely to take the form of regulatory institutions within elected democratic governments. Even these would require eliminating the power of lobbyists and others who advocate for narrow corporate interests, if the concerns of affected workers are be taken seriously. It would also require more generally removing the power of money from politics – a difficult prospect indeed. The influence of wealth and corporate power in contemporary politics clearly undermines political equality and its elimination is a prerequisite for gaining real equality for labor and other currently marginalized groups.
The proposal here for self-managing firms is of course incomplete as it stands. They would be likely have to operate within a market framework, though not necessarily a market in labor of the sort we have at present. Further, as theorists like David Schweickart and others have argued, transitioning to a system of self-managing firms would require new sources of loans, including from governments, for starting up new firms.13 New firms could be encouraged to have a Green mandate, and their introduction could also help to deal with the problems posed by ever-growing degrees of automation in manufacturing, if funding were made available for these purposes. Needless to say, an economy of self-managing firms raises new questions, especially concerning the possible disinclination of such firms to take on new workers as equal members. Nonetheless, the importance of eliminating existing domination and exploitation within the work process and of introducing greater degrees of participatory decision making in those contexts provides motivation for addressing these new issues. It can be noted finally that participation at work would likely have a salutary effect on politics, both in terms of providing opportunities to practice participation14 and because of the empowerment of workers that it entails, an empowerment sorely lacking at present.
The All-Affected Principle and Contemporary Labor Rights
The reach and application of the All-Affected Principle for labor extends beyond the workplace. Its use points to the fact that labor is most often not adequately represented in decisions and policy making that affect its onerousness or the dangers it poses to workers’ health and safety. And the principle can ground labor rights to collectively bargain with owners in existing contexts of contemporary capitalism. We can consider in this final part some further applications of the principle, by way of a list, and take note of how these would enhance the situation of labor and serve to extend and deepen labor rights.
1. The International Labor Organization (ILO), a unit of the UN, is tasked with improving labor conditions and helping to generate work opportunities around the world. It promulgates international labor standards, e.g. regarding child labor, forced labor, etc. However, it is primarily representative of governments, along with employers, and labor (in equal measure). One major problem is that the ILO has no real power to regulate the use of labor to accord with these standards, despite its declarations of them. In view of the impact such standards would have for people’s work activity, a prospective change would be to at least make the ILO more fully representative of labor, as the group most closely affected by standards or their absence. It would also be essential to endow this more fully representative body with effective powers not only to regulate work so as to eliminate child labor and forced labor, but also to protect collective bargaining. In the long term, the organization could also support and facilitate democratic management within firms. Granted, this is more of a wish list for the ILO (or a similar organization) rather than an immediately realizable scenario, but movements towards this sort of transformation would be important.
2. A related change would involve gaining input from workers and distantly affected people in institutions of global governance like the WTO, which deeply affect their life chances. Such a change would aim to at least counterbalance the power within them of wealthy states and corporate interests and include a new focus on meeting workers’ needs. An even deeper structural transformation would involve replacing some of these institutions by new ones explicitly representative of labor internationally and fully responsive to developing states.
3. The right to form and join unions for the protection of people’s interests is included among the human rights enunciated in article 23 of the Universal Declaration (1948). That right would seem to require also a second right, namely, to collective bargaining over wages and conditions of work. Indeed, the UDHR article also specifies a right “to just and favourable conditions of work,” to “equal pay for equal work,” and to “just and favourable remuneration” providing for the worker and the worker’s family “an existence worthy of human dignity.” Clearly, these are examples of rights that are dependent for their form on a particular stage and type of institutional development. Nonetheless, I believe that these rights, including the right to form unions, are responsive to the even more basic right to an adequate level of material well-being, as well as to the conception of the freedom and dignity of all humans that underlies the Declaration.
We can see that, short of worker management or control, collective bargaining is a crucial tool for the improvement of the conditions of work and the achievement of material well-being and equal social status for labor. It can be seen as required by both the common activities and the All-Affected Principle, inasmuch as it enables participation and representation in regard to labor’s affected human interests in the sphere of work. One concrete proposal would be to make the recognition of the right of collective bargaining a condition for all trade agreements and for all foreign direct investment. This would extend the notion of human rights conditionality in a more progressive direction to include an underappreciated human right. Needless to say, in the United States, the rights to form unions and to collective bargaining have been eroded over time rather than becoming more fully recognized and established over the years. Short of the introduction of self-management, however, unions and collective bargaining constitute crucial means for ameliorating the effects of capitalist political economy on labor, both domestically and in international contexts.
4. It is sometimes suggested that free trade is bad for workers but that protectionism will be good for them. However, I think we need to recognize that both free trade and protectionism as presently constituted for the most part operate to benefit corporations and wealthy interests rather than workers, who nonetheless are deeply affected by these policies. So it is necessary to address and assess trade from the standpoint of its impact on labor. In addition to questioning the functioning of the WTO and its lack of representation of the interests of workers, it would also be helpful to consider the connection of both labor and capital to borders. Capital presently is quite free to move across borders, while workers are most often bound by them, and in any case find it difficult to move. Some modest control on finance capital, or at least forms of taxation of it, should be contemplated. Besides this, enforceable labor standards can be attached to trade deals, to try to prevent the “race to the bottom.” Indeed, such standards would be helpful at an international level, although the problems posed by their disparate impact on developing countries would need to be addressed. Implementing these standards would thus require concomitant efforts to address global inequalities, for example, through some (modest) forms of global taxation, as well as by more open immigration policies.
5. An account of labor rights given the effects of globalization on workers would be insufficient without an acknowledgement of the unemployed. They are deeply affected by economies and markets, but have little opportunity for input or for participation. Policies that affect the unemployed are enacted politically so the All-Affected Principle would here seem to require their active participation in politics. But a basic precondition for such political participation is in jeopardy if the unemployed lack the basic essentials of life. This suggests the need to support them by way of guaranteed basic income (or other modalities of material support), in addition to the more standard directions of job training and job creation.
6. Related considerations of the role of economic well-being as a crucial condition for participation in democratic politics, which so deeply affects laborers and sets conditions for their activity, point to the need for a living wage, and its status as a central contemporary goal for labor. Of course, the call for a living wage also follows from the intrinsic importance of an adequate level of material well-being as a human right.
7. The All-Affected Principle helps to call attention to the impact of work on reproduction activity in the home and on the status of gender in work both in that sphere and on the job. Economic and development policies undoubtedly can have differential and often problematic effects on housework and caring labor, the burdens of which have traditionally been assumed mainly by women. As a form of labor, housework has tended to be uncompensated, despite its substantial value. Alternative ways of providing it and/or compensating for it need to be assessed not only in economic terms, but through a consideration of its differential impacts on women. Alleviating their unequal burden remains a requirement for full gender equality. Moreover, caring work and housework require reevaluation and valorization as equally essential forms of work in comparison with standardly compensated types. The All-Affected Principle specifically requires that women, and care workers more generally, be represented in processes of legislation and policy making that affect their care work and, more mundanely, their housework, and that the needs of all care workers should be taken into account in deliberations concerning the policies that affect them as workers.
Beyond these proposals, it is clear more generally that focusing on all those affected by the modes of functioning of contemporary economies helps to call our attention to the disparities in power relations that characterize the sphere of politics and economics. It calls for a more inclusive approach on the part of policy makers and citizens that would cut through ideological or epistemically unjustified biases, and requires instead considering the entire set of people and groups impacted by a proposed law or policy. I have suggested that labor is prominent among such groups and that it is often marginalized in such decision-making processes. However, it is not the only such group disadvantaged by capitalist economic organization and existing globalization processes, or by governments that often reflect the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Indeed, conflicts have arisen, and can be expected to continue to emerge, between labor and other affected groups, for example, Indigenous people, or the unemployed. The All-Affected Principle does not directly provide guidance toward resolving such conflicts, although if sensitively applied, it can help provide guidance for whose interests need to be taken into account in any given case.
Conclusion
It is useful to observe that conflicts between labor and other groups in fact presuppose, and are likely exacerbated by, the existing social and economic context, one marked by separation among various groups, each of which is taken to have quite different interests. While we can expect that some sorts of variations in the interests of diverse groups will undoubtedly persist through all social formations, the proposal made above for self-management and more democratic economies could function to moderate some of the most pernicious differences and conflicts among groups. It would involve a degree of structural transformation, with the potential result that a broad subsection of the population as a whole would be understood to fall under the heading of labor. In this transformation, an empowered labor would not be understood as it is at present as limited to a “working class” sharply distinguished from a “middle class” or from the “upper class.” Rather, if full worker control were to prevail, with few exceptions people would be considered to be – and would take themselves to be – workers or laborers (and also managers). Of course, some groups, e.g. the unemployed or those who cannot work, would still need to be treated separately.
I suggest that this transformation would likely endure even as work itself becomes less prominent over time (at least in its traditional forms), given the increased automation of work processes. We can expect that the concept of work will itself undergo a transformation, to include more than remunerated production and service activities. It would extend to creative, caring, and community service work as well. However, the application of the All-Affected Principle to that new context would need to be further explored, in ways that go beyond the present chapter. In the near term, this principle clearly requires that workers be given much greater opportunities to address the potential consequences of automation, both in their own workplaces and in the political sphere. Indeed, this same requirement can also be seen to follow from the core proposal for democratic management developed earlier in this chapter. It is evident, in any case, that both of the principles considered here – the Common Activities Principle and the All-Affected Principle – have multifarious and interlocking implications for enhancing the role and status of labor in contemporary political economy and in our political societies more generally.
Open access