6 - Remedies: work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Summary
Justice at work means extensive participation by workers in governance, and frequently, or always, actual democratic governance by workers. But most contemporary work environments are not just: they are not democratic or even participatory; in addition, they often violate workers' dignity and autonomy, minimize their opportunities to participate in decision-making, subject them to unreasonably unsafe working conditions, and underpay them. In some work environments, especially in LDCs, working conditions are particularly dangerous and abusive.
A number of interim measures, while not satisfactory substitutes for workplace democracy, could help to bring contemporary workplaces into greater alignment with the requirements of practical reasonableness. These remedial measures could help to foster justice at work even in environments in which the dominance of investors and managers prevented the establishment of democratic workplace governance and in which background injustices had not been remedied.
I defend collective bargaining as an important mechanism for remedying the injustice of contemporary workplaces – at least in investor-governed firms, but perhaps also in worker-governed firms – in Part I, I argue that collective bargaining can play an important role in reducing power imbalances at work. In Part II, I briefly emphasize the consonance with natural law theory of governance mechanisms that, in the absence of workplace democracy, could supplement collective bargaining as ways of ensuring that workers could affect decisions in investor-governed firms. In Part III, I suggest that fair collective bargaining can provide an efficient and flexible mechanism for setting workplace standards in investor-governed firms.
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- Economic Justice and Natural Law , pp. 185 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009