Moving from Contracts to Constitutions: Employee “Governance Rights” and Strategies of Resistance Under Corporate Autocracy

• In Event: 30406 - Politicizing the Workplace - The Intersections of Politics and Labor Relations

Abstract

Private corporations govern much of our day-to-day lives. They design many of the products that we buy and use; they filter the information that we receive; they offer us economic benefits in exchange for our submission and our labor. Yet, unlike the State, few democratic procedures exist to offer employees or consumers a voice in corporate governance. Yet politics nevertheless infuses the workplace (Fligstein and McAdam 2012).
Debates over corporate ties to Israel, corporate handlings of sexual harassment and assault, corporate commitments to reducing climate impacts, and corporate submissions to anti-democratic forces have recently split the workplace. Google employees staged walkouts and sit-ins in response to the firm’s ties to Israeli government projects; Washington Post editors have protested and resigned following Jeff Bezos’s interference with the editorial room; ACLU lawyers and staffers resisted the organization’s long-standing commitment to support unqualified free speech when that speech advocates for white supremacy. While advocating for a greater voice at work is not new in the American workplace (Blum and Wolinsky 1995; Fletcher and Gapasin 2008; Teoh, Welch, and Wazzan 1999), these events mark a broad shift in the relationship between many employees and their employers – a shift towards considering employees corporate citizens, not just corporate drones.
This paper offers an introduction to the nascent but growing effort to develop employee “governance rights” within the workplace. Drawing on interviews with worker activists in the technology and media industries and quantitative data from the General Social Survey and the Crowd Counting Consortium, it first describes who participates in this movement and how participation mirrors existing political realignments, and, second, it illustrates how employees translate political and ethical decisions – those associated with governance – into the technical elements of their day-to-day occupations.

Author

• Mason Barnard, Princeton University; Harvard Law School