Strikes are the blind spot of democracy US Senator Fetterman hospitalized for depression

Even if you don’t notice it much, big things are happening in Europe right now: next Saturday, more than a million people will probably take to the streets in France again because they don’t want to work longer than before. At the same time, the biggest wave of strikes since the Thatcher years rolled across Britain. In Germany, postmen are going on strike, in Essen and Cologne buses are at a standstill this week and ver.di is paralyzing German airports this Friday.

That, according to the unions, could be just the beginning. That is why the SME Union is now demanding that the right to strike be curtailed. Britain has already moved on: here the government has introduced a law designed to allow certain employers to require employees to provide a ‘minimum service’ in the event of strikes.

These conflicts, as well as the strength and endurance of the protests, already show that it is not about a few euros, but about much more: a new struggle for the democratization of the working world has erupted in Europe .

The strikers and demonstrators demand nothing less than a say. A say on their wages, but also on working conditions, on the rules and conditions to which they are subject for up to eight hours a day and more. They want to deliver on democracy’s promise of participation and self-determination, not just at the ballot box, but also in the world of work. Their opponents, the Union for SMEs or the British government, want to limit this participation further.

Oddly enough, this dimension is almost completely overlooked in public. If they get attention at all, the strikes and demonstrations are interpreted not as a dispute over democratic relations in one of the most important areas of life, but (especially in the French case) as yesterday’s folklore, at best as private fights for money . .

Isn’t that strange? There is a constant concern about how democratic the world is, but the area in which adults spend much of their lives is usually left out: the world of work is democracy’s blind spot.

Employers as «private government»

“How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It)” is the subtitle of a 2017 book by American philosopher Elizabeth Anderson.

In it, Anderson dismisses the idea that even a liberal labor market, where everyone can freely sell their labor, guarantees people’s self-determination: “We are told that we have a choice between free markets and state control, while most adults spend their working lives entirely under a third party: the private government.”

Private here means: the rules set by the company are not open to democratic negotiation, they are not part of the public sphere, but belong to the private affairs of the company. So when free citizens enter the factory or office, they become the rulers.

That sounds exaggerated, especially when describing Europe’s social market economies. Here, democratic co-determination is built into the labor market, through trade unions and employers’ organisations, through employees who exercise power in works councils and supervisory boards. The German political scientist Martin Höppner describes this second pillar of democracy as follows: “With the participation of the citizen comes that of the economic citizen, and with parliamentary-representative democracy comes industrial democracy.”

Only: This model no longer works like that. Collective labor agreements now only apply to every second job, in 1996 this was three out of four. Collective agreements are the codes of the working world, without which the employee is on his own. If co-determination through collective labor agreements erodes, that too is part of democratic decline, writes Höppner.

But since there is a shortage of skilled workers, why not just change jobs if you don’t like it? Because this cannot be a collective answer, not a democratically negotiated answer, but an individual answer. Changing jobs is easier the more flexible, younger and higher educated you are. Those who have no question or are immobile for private reasons are at the mercy of their employer’s private government. They are “from businessmen to appendages of the market,” writes Höppner. “Taking this seriously as an independent dimension of dedemocratization changes the overall picture – and in particular the nature of desirable countermeasures – quite considerably.”

When the market was still “left”.

Why are we so blind to this? Why not treat it as a primary democratic issue, but as a private side issue? Because, and this is the point of Anderson’s reflections, we still cling to pre-industrial ideas about markets. Both the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, and (from today’s perspective) more left-wing theorists believed that in a free-market society, almost everyone would work for themselves.

They simply had not foreseen the huge factories with their armies of workers and servants. But an independent society in which no one is ruled by others. An egalitarian utopia in which nothing needs to be collectively negotiated because no one has power over others.

Industrialization, with its dependent workers forced to sell their labor and time, destroyed these hopes, Anderson continues, but not the idea of ​​a market society on which those hopes rested. As a result, “to this day we operate with a model of our world that disregards the relationship between employers and employees in which most of us live”. The demonstrations and strikes, the budding new workers’ movement only make this visible. It’s not about a few euros of wages or a pension, it’s about democracy.

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.