Neo-Republicanism and Workplace Democracy: Questioning the Adequacy of the Non-Domination Ideal

One value typically appealed to in arguments for workplace democracy is that of freedom. This appeal poses two questions: first, what do we mean by freedom, and, second, how would workplace democracy either express or promote what we mean by freedom? In this paper, I consider the case for democratic worker voice and control based on the neo-republican ideal of freedom as non-domination. While not unconvincing, this case is primarily consequentialist in character and therefore open to significant empirical disagreement, and this from within the neo-republican perspective itself. Indeed, together with a) neo-republican arguments for democratic worker voice, there are b) neo-republican arguments for worker voice that reject workplace democracy, c) neo-republican arguments that, while not dismissing worker voice, see state regulation plus universal basic income as sufficient for minimizing domination at work, and d) neo-republican arguments that focus exclusively on right of exit and are hostile to the idea of augmenting workers’ voice. My central claim here is that this policy indeterminacy stems from the neo-republican restriction of freedom to the dimension of non-domination alone. If we expand our understanding of freedom to include worker autonomy, we can arrive at a less contingent and thus less precarious freedom-based case for workplace democracy