Eric Levitz at New York Magazine has a piece out about an intriguing policy proposal for all congressional Democrats to embrace in the midterm elections: a law that would require all large companies in the United States to each have a third of their boards of directors elected by their workers. This arrangement, called co-determination, is widely used in Western Europe, and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin has put forward a bill to implement it in the United States.
Levitz folds his proposal into a larger argument: that ideas around larger government involvement in the economy have found a receptive audience among both Democrats and Republicans, and that an idea previously seen as of the left might not be perceived by the public as such. His description of how the debate over co-determination might play out suggests why it might scramble ideological categories. Republicans would inevitably be put in the position of arguing that working people aren’t qualified to help run a company, a bad spot for any political party to be in, and forcing the GOP to side with bosses over the working class. This is not a good look for a party that has long fought to persuade voters that it’s not the defender of plutocrats.
But co-determination also scrambles ideological categories for two particular reasons. First, it cuts the political conflict more clearly into an axis of the 99% versus the 1%, rather than left versus right. Second, when viewed as a left-wing policy, it’s effective because it provides clarity that liberals stand for enhancing the political and economic power of those who work against those who profit off their work.
Co-determination also seems like a strong palliative to the broad perception among working class people that too much of our economic direction has been ceded to highly educated, supposedly non-ideological experts who it is clear actually have their own biases about the nature of the economy. This is not to say that only working class people would be represented on the boards of directors as the “workers” contingent, but it would open up a whole new perspective on whose opinions should be considered at both the level of the company and of the economy as a whole.
Levitz also suggests that the default GOP argument that particular economic policies should be opposed because they primarily or disproportionately benefit minorities would be ineffective here, since co-determination would apply across all large companies and not have any discernible racial angle. I feel less sanguine about Republicans’ capacity to resist racializing even a broad-based policy like this. At a minimum, though, I think there’s no overestimating the hysteria of GOP politicians’ response were the Democrats to advocate for co-determination on a mass scale. Their billionaire and millionaire donor base would open the taps as never before to defeat such a fundamental pro-worker change to the economy. It is also quite possible that such opposition to a policy that would benefit millions of Republican voters would create explosive rifts in the GOP.
But I fear that the very reasons that would drive Republican officialdom to call out such a Democratic policy as the communistic-socialistic end of America as we know it are the same reasons the Democrats will not adopt co-determination as a broad, unifying proposal for the midterms. Too many Democrats not only don’t want to piss off their own wealthy donors, but also are believers in an economy that puts employers over employees and capital over labor. But even if we’re not ready for this to be the decisive issue for 2018, it’s not too soon for progressives to push it in primaries against their more centrist opponents, and to cudgel their Republican opponents with it in the general election.