Worker Voice and Political Participation in Civil Society: Lousy Work Is Bad for Democracy

The stories are familiar by now: businesses claim that there’s a labor shortage and others reply that they need to pay more. Pay is obviously an important part of a job, but we need to remember that the positive and negative aspects of work are complicated, which means that we must consider more than pay when evaluating job quality and worker well-being. Among many important things, this includes paying attention to how the quality of work affects society.  

Concerns with how workplace experiences affect the political arena are longstanding. Over 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill advocated for worker cooperatives and participatory economic systems because he believed economic democracy fostered political democracy. Most workers, however, do not work in cooperatives. But varying forms of worker voice can have elements of economic democracy, or more widely-speaking, at least some degree of autonomy. In a seminal book, Carole Pateman argued that individuals with autonomy in their work—e.g., the ability to control certain aspects of the job—develop confidence that they are capable of autonomous action. This confidence can spill over to the political and civic arenas leading to higher levels of participation in these arenas. In other words, workplace voice can create “psychological supports” for political and civic engagement. A second line of theorizing focuses instead on skill development. That is, exercising voice in the workplace can enhance skills pertaining to things like advocacy, negotiation, and communication, which can also be useful in the political and civic arenas. So workplace voice can lead to greater political and civic participation through skill enhancement.

Stronger forms of workplace democracy include being represented by a labor union or works council, and being involved with these forms of voice can also trigger both of these channels. That is, participating in a union or works council—and probably a worker center, too—can enhance confidence, instill beliefs about the importance of democratic decision-making, and develop skills that translate into greater political and civic engagement. 

If individual or collective voice prompts greater political and civic participation through these channels, it’s a happy byproduct of workplace voice rather than intentional one. But labor unions and other collective bodies can also intentionally try to increase political and civic participation through voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives, campaigns to contact politicians or join demonstrations, and training programs for political advocacy and running for political office. So unintentionally and intentionally, unions, works councils, and worker centers can build “democratic character: the willingness and capacity of individuals to engage in democratic politics and to do so in ways that are informed by judgements of the common good.” Conceptually, then, we should expect workers involved with these forms of collective voice to participate more readily in the political and civic arenas compared to workers that lack avenues of workplace voice.

But does this happen in practice? Ryan Lamare and I have recently reviewed the literature, and we conclude quite strongly that there are strong relationships between individual or collective voice on the one hand, and political and civic participation on the other. One of our favorite studies—because we authored it!—shows that across 27 European countries, workers with greater individual workplace voice are more likely to vote, contact politicians, work in a political party, and engage in other activities. This is just one of a number of studies on individual voice that have broadly similar findings across various samples and using diverse measures of individual voice and political participation. But spillovers are not guaranteed—supervisor support or suppression can also affect the workplace-political linkage. There is also a large literature on the effects of union voice. Empirical results show that union members are more likely to vote (in the US, Canada,  and Europe), engage in other political activities, and give to charity. There's also evidence that unions can also mobilize non-members to engage in protests. 

Admittedly, specifically identifying causal relationships can be challenging. For example, workers who are pre-disposed toward political and civic participation might look for jobs with individual and/or collective voice, so their observed participation was not caused by workplace voice. But the studies that are able to specifically address issues of causality typically find that non-causal explanations cannot fully explain the observed empirical relationships. In other words, it appears that individual and collective voice prompt some additional political and civic participation that would not have occurred in the absence of this workplace voice. In this way, having more individual and collective voice would be good for society.

Consequently, while individual and collective forms of worker voice are accurately viewed primarily as workplace phenomena, the interconnections to and ramifications for political and civic engagement should not be overlooked. Labor unions, with their own internal participatory, democratic systems and their incentives for political education and mobilization, are perhaps the form of worker voice in which it is easiest to expect there to be spillovers into the political and civic arena—including spillovers that are the byproduct of experiencing unionization and others that result from intentional union strategies. But even the experience of individual forms of workplace voice such as in-job autonomy can have spillovers by fostering democratizing attitudes and civic skills.

Across time and space, then, what happens at work is not expected to stay at work. Researchers and commentators often present this in a positive frame, as has been done here—that is, higher levels of workplace voice are associated with higher levels of political and civic participation. But it is important to remember that if this is true, then so is the corresponding negative framing—that is, dictatorial and authoritarian workplaces in which workers lack individual and/or collective voice likely lead to lower levels of political and civic participation, with consequent negative impacts on society. Pay might be the #1 concern of workers struggling to make ends meet, but societally we should be pushing not only for jobs that allow workers to support themselves and their families, but also that contribute to the broader health of our society.

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Source: John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (2021) "Worker Voice and Political Participation in Civil Society," in Klaus F. Zimmermann, ed., Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics (Cham: Springer). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_213-1 [free access to the pre-publication version here].

What Happens at Work Doesn’t Stay There: (Poor) Workplace Democracy Promotes (Poor) Political Democracy

The workplace is not like Las Vegas—what happens at work, often doesn’t stay at work. Nearly 250 years ago, the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, worried that mind-numbing jobs would cause workers to lose the ability and motivation to be thoughtful, engaged citizen-people outside of the workplace (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article II). This is perhaps one of the few areas where Karl Marx would have agreed with Smith, and Marx’s rejection of capitalism is deeply rooted in his concerns with the far-reaching, negative effects of work. The detrimental effects on someone’s personal life and on their community might be fairly obvious for workplace injuries, and there is increasing recognition of the mental health risks of lousy work. But does the nature of the workplace affect other aspects of society, like political participation?

Some argue that the workplace can be a breeding ground for pro-democratic attitudes and political behaviors. That is, the use of deliberative and other participatory skills in one’s work can give someone the confidence and the skills to want to participate in the political arena. And hearkening back to Smith and Marx, the absence or repression of autonomous decision-making in the workplace can undercut attitudes and skills that promote political participation, thus weakening political engagement. But does this actually happen in practice, at least to a magnitude we can observe across many workers?

To investigate this, my co-authors and I analyze European Social Survey data on over 14,000 workers across 27 European countries. These workers reported their level of political participation in nine activities (such as voting, contacting a politician, wearing a campaign badge, and belonging to a political party) and also their interest level in politics. Moreover, they also answered several questions on the extent to which they have autonomy and participate in decision-making in their jobs. We combined these several questions into an index of individual voice or workplace democracy.

We then undertake a number of multivariate analyses and find that that employees with greater levels of individual voice at work are indeed significantly more likely to engage in a broad array of pro-democratic behaviors, and we find strong results even when controlling for a wide-range of employee and job characteristics. Or to put this in a negative frame reminiscent of Smith and Marx, dictatorial and authoritarian workplace practices are likely to be related to reduced political participation in the democratic arena.

This relationship appears just as strong as the commonly-accepted relationship between labor unions and political participation. We further show that the results do not appear to be driven by a small number of specific countries; rather, the relationship between workplace democracy and political democracy is one that is apparent across diverse countries, and hence across diverse institutional environments.

These results imply that the importance of organizational practices extends beyond the workplace, and public policy interventions might be warranted to prevent dictatorial work regimes that dampen political engagement. And while we use accepted econometric techniques to account for the possibility that the causal arrows runs from the workplace to the political arena, our findings are still important if causality actually runs from the political arena to the workplace. In such a case, then a participatory workplace should be seen as an important outlet for individuals valuing political involvement. In particular, workplace participation can prevent individuals from getting frustrated or losing their deliberative skills, thus reducing the likelihood that they withdraw from the political arena. So regardless of which way the causal arrow points, the workplace-political engagement nexus is an important one that deserves greater attention.

What happens at work, doesn’t stay at work. Rather, work is an inseparable part of our lives and our communities. As such, it deserves continued scrutiny by all of us. 

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Source:  John W. Budd, J. Ryan Lamare, and Andrew R. Timming (2018) "Learning about Democracy at Work: Cross-National Evidence on Individual Employee Voice Influencing Political Participation in Civil Society,"  ILR Review (https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793917746619).
Click here to read the full paper.

Contested Ideas About Work: The Crowding Out of the Occupational Citizenship Conceptualization of Work

Last week I had a stimulating time in Montreal at a conference on “New Frontiers for Citizenship at Work” sponsored by the InteruniversityResearch Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT, from its French equivalent Le Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la mondialisation et le travail). But what is citizenship at work? Unfortunately, some presenters didn’t say. Others used citizenship in the common legal way that distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens. Clearly, citizens and non-citizens can experience work in very different ways, especially as the latter typically has fewer rights and their work authorization might be tied to a particular employer. And there is a need to redress these differences.

But there is another important way of thinking about citizenship at work. From my perspective, the foil of seeing a worker as a citizen is not seeing him or her as a non-citizen in some legal sense, but is seeing a worker simply as a commodity or as a productive (human) resource. In other words, to see workers as citizens is to decommodify them to give them a status as more than just factors of production or individuals seeking personal fulfillment or identities. As such, citizens should be seen as having inherent equal worth and are thus entitled to certain rights and standards of dignity and self-determination irrespective of what the market or management provides. In my book The Thought of Work, I call this an occupational citizenship conceptualization of work, where the occupational adjective is to denote a work context, not to imply identification with a particular occupation.

But as I described in my CRIMT presentation, this is only one of a variety of important conceptualizations of work. More importantly, occupational citizenship is not the view of work embraced by many scholars, business leaders, policymakers, judges, and other influential individuals. Rather, the dominant mental models of work tend to be either hostile or indifferent towards citizenship at work. When work is seen as a commodity—as in the neoliberal market ideology—the workplace is prioritized as a place of production with economic efficiency as the key goal. Citizenship activities in the workplace, labor unions, and other practices and institutions are sharply criticized and resisted for interfering with productive and allocative efficiency. To see work as a curse or disutility—as in popular culture and mainstream economic theorizing—is to see work as a necessary burden to survive and earn income; deeper pursuits such as citizenship are left to other spheres of life. When work is viewed as a source of personal fulfillment—a common embrace in the behavioral sciences and high-commitment human resource management—then voice and autonomy are supported, but largely as individual rather than collective activities that improve satisfaction and commitment rather than citizenship. 

Feminist theorizing that sees work as caring is supportive of broadened citizenship ideals, especially via a greater valuing of caring activities, but greater citizenship practices in the workplace is not a core feature of this paradigm (and citizenship perspectives on work have, regrettably, traditionally focused narrowly on paid employment to the exclusion of unpaid care work). Views of work as identity and service could also be supportive of citizenship at work, broadly defined, but greater work--no pun intended--is required to integrate these perspectives.

So occupational citizenship / citizenship at work are under siege. The public discursive space in which work is defined is contested terrain, and there are academic divisions even among camps that should be supportive of citizenship at work (pluralist industrial relations v. critical industrial relations and feminist thought, for example). Neoliberal market and unitarist HRM discourses are at best indifferent to the ideals of citizenship at work, and at worst are openly hostile towards it, especially in the context of anti-unionism. 

I claim that in the public discursive arena, these dominant narratives have overpowered and crowded out conceptualizations of work that are supportive of citizenship at work. So promoting citizenship at work requires thinking fundamentally about what work is, and in turn making the case for the deep importance of work not only for workers, but for families, communities, and societies in complex ways. In other words, clashes over citizenship at work are as much contests of ideas as  they are contests of practices and institutions.