Autonomous Time and the Workplace: An Expanded Rawlsian Case for Economic Democracy

In recent years many political philosophers made use of John Rawls' theory of justice in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of hierarchical working conditions prevailing in current capitalist societies. Yet as it turned out, at least in its original version the Rawlsian theory doesn't seem to have the resources for establishing extensive workplace democracy in the name of justice. My aim in this paper is to show that from an expanded Rawlsian perspective (which also better accords with Rawls' overarching framework, or so I argue), full-fledged workplace democracy is at least pro tanto required. To do so, I will contrast two ideal-typical social orders, a welfare-state-capitalism and an economic democracy. I examine which of these is better suited to live up to the requirements of Rawlsian justice by looking at the distributional patterns of basic goods in the two social orders. While it can be convincingly shown (and has been by others) that a certain degree of workplace-participation is necessary to secure the "fair value" of certain basic rights and to promote self-respect-related traits of the workers (and is thus demanded by Rawlsian justice), securing a just distribution of those basic goods doesn't seem to rely on comprehensive democratic structures at the workplace. I therefore introduce a promising candidate for a basic good able to extend the demands of justice towards comprehensive workplace democracy. I argue for expanding the list of basic goods to include "autonomous time", by showing that it constitutes a necessary precondition for realizing one of the higher-order interests within Rawls' minimal conception of the good and is hence required on Rawls' own terms. Given that autonomous time is best conceived of as a basic good of which it is convenient to have as much as possible and given the close link between autonomous time and democracy, it can be shown that contrary to all other basic goods, autonomous time is able to ground extensive workplace democracy at least pro tanto: If both social orders are equally efficient in terms of the distribution of orthodox basic goods, economic democracy would be preferable, because here the basic good autonomous time would be distributed more efficiently (according to maximin). Within the so broadened Rawlsian framework the basic good of autonomous time is thus the only one with the potential to give economic democracy precedence over welfare-state-capitalism.