Companies are a source of binding standards. Until they become malleable to public discourse, these standards will remain arbitrary and anti-democratic because they go unchecked. Indeed, this form of government remains “private” in the sense that those affected by its decisions – namely the employees – cannot question the legitimacy of those decisions and are required to submit to this arbitrary power (or emigrate).
He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander – Aristole
With the admission that companies, especially larger ones, abide by the same rules most governments do, we are led to the conclusion that management teams operate in the same fashion as government officials, thus making the selection of a political system an obligation. The notion of government has always gone hand in hand with questions regarding its legitimacy. The idea of creating a parallel between the decision-making institutions of the State and those of the company in order to highlight the tension between our relatively democratic principles and the subordination endured by employees is traditional.
The “new feudalism” that was being established in factories as early as the 1830s became the target of the socialist party, which advocated “bringing the Republic down into the workshop”. Catholics of the Le Sillon movement in the late 19th century stated that it is impossible to “have the republic in society while the monarchy remains in the company.”
Before an attempt against or for corporate dictatorship is made, examining the effect of recent workplace events on the structure of consortiums is useful. There exists an argument that the “uberization” of the workplace and the rise of the gig economy have rendered wage labor and the idea of a monarchy in the workplace obsolete. Nevertheless, the realization remains. Contracts between platforms and “self-employed collaborators” or “partners” probably give companies more power over workers than traditional wage relations, particularly by putting them in competition with one another and creating the rules that set the game afoot.
For the moment, platform economy and self-employed labor are statistically marginal, so further conclusions about the effect of uberization in the structure of production must be refrained from.
What can be regarded as ground truth is that without regulation, private property rights, particularly in the working world, become a breeding ground for hierarchies of every kind.
Having established that a company is, in fact, a government, any possibility of its complete democratization must be ruled out. Resolving the issue of the anti-democratic nature of firms means, in general, that employees are given a stronger voice and are able to deny the company’s actions. This creates two struggling conditions that are difficult to alleviate: denying a company’s actions, even when supported by the majority, often has an impact on a whole host of other individuals whose opinion goes unheard. The second is that the majority has little or no oversight. These two conditions make corporate democracy extremely dangerous.
Successful companies have great operators. The tools required for the task are quantitative data, tools that exploit it, and a general sense of _ethics_.
There are only a few companies that have all three at their disposal. Usually, ethics, because of its vagueness and tentativeness, is the prime victim of operations. Walk into a management room, and everyone will brag about their ethical corporate model, but what they do have are unenforceable proposals.
Common solutions include labor relations under the proper rule of law, subjective rights, and voice amplification through compulsive participatory mechanisms. Those are simply disappointing and act as bandages over an open wound that needs stitching.
Two are the fundamental components to the solution of workplace autocracy: ethics and free exit.
A regulatory model based on moral principles that systematize defensive strategies and recommends concepts of right behavior across all levels of the organization, along with the true freedom of exit, can liberate the workplace of pathogenic behavior, forcing the survival of the fittest, both among the citizens but also among the companies participating in a free market.
Contractual barriers, such as noncompetes that bar employees from working for companies in the same industry, must be the first victims of ethical corporate dictatorships. Especially in high-demand markets, the lack of viable alternatives is no longer an excuse.
As far as moral principles, there are two indispensable ones: proof-of-work and non-zero-sum. A system that compensates participants based on the level of their involvement is crucial to dispensing the resources of the system fairly. What’s more, the realization is that individuals inside the company are not competing with each other but with the market itself, and the goal is to grow the market rather than hunt for a bigger stake in it.
There is no perfect way to sanitize the workplace, but injecting ethics into an already corrupt system seems to bear more fruit than attempting to democratize it.
Regulation should focus on the former.