Power-Sharing in the Workplace

President-elect Bill Clinton will shock those who expect him to cautiously tread only the middle of the political road if he follows through on even some of the exciting plans he is considering to revolutionize America’s workplaces. Many hope and believe the man some call Mr. In-Between will take few dramatic steps to pull us out of our current economic mess. And they seem sure he is ready to zap hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs by not demanding major modifications in the North American Free Trade Agreement that President Bush is ready to sign.

Clinton’s intentions about the trade pact with low-wage Mexico are still unclear. But those who want him to be only a most moderate President may be wrong because, as of now, he apparently accepts the need to democratize our companies that are run like authoritarian countries.

That means a radical change in the lives of employers and workers may come about during Clinton’s years in the White House.

He often talks about wanting to build a high-wage, high-tech economy as so eloquently advocated by former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, whom Clinton may well rename to that post. And one of the best ways to achieve that goal--with little burden on taxpayers--is to give workers a real voice in the way companies are operated.

The brains and talents of the average worker are too often ignored. As order-takers, not decision-makers, they are rarely consulted on ways to improve productivity or profits and only reluctantly--and less and less frequently these days--do employers negotiate with them through unions about wages and working conditions.

Clinton seems ready to try to change all that, as evidenced, first, by his own comments on a new book, “Negotiating the Future,” written by the father and son team of Barry and Irving Bluestone. The book ardently and persuasively calls for a dramatic “new work culture” that would give workers a serious share of power in the companies that employ them.

Clinton says the Bluestones offer a “new covenant for labor and management based on participation, cooperation and teamwork. Such an approach to working smarter will have to be adopted if America is to regain its competitive edge, and the Bluestones’ thoughtful book will help spread the word.”

No book, corporation, union or individual in the country could spread the word more forcefully than the President of the United States.

How seriously should we take him? His key economic adviser, Harvard Prof. Robert Reich, calls the Bluestone plea for power-sharing “a cogent and timely argument for a new enterprise compact between management and labor.”

Tom Schneider, Clinton’s longtime friend and campaign finance co-chairman, said last week:

“The governor and I have had many long talks over a number of years about the concept of industrial democracy. He fully grasps its importance and fully supports it.”

Another key adviser, Derek Shearer, who has written his own book on the concept, “Economic Democracy,” tells me plans are being made to create a national commission of key management, labor and academic leaders to try and draw up a realistic program for power-sharing in the workplace.

It isn’t a new idea. Many others have written about it. Many countries have done it in varying degrees for many years, with considerable success. Some U.S. corporations, such as Saturn and the General Motors-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, Calif., are also doing it, and well.

In fact, Ronald Reagan--hardly a progressive, pro-worker President--actually created a bureau in the Labor Department in 1983 at the suggestion of a department official, John Stepp, with the sole purpose of promoting industrial democracy.

Reagan mostly ignored the idea, but the bureau began effectively proselytizing the concept anyway, especially after then-Labor Secretary William Brock named an articulate union lawyer, Stephen Schlossberg, to press the cause.

But power-sharing is still rare in this country. President Bush took a strong dislike to it because Schlossberg, like the Bluestones and others, insists that workers need a union to help them have a strong role in power-sharing, and to protect that role once it is gained.

That was too much for the union-hating Bush, and he finally killed it off entirely last September.

Clinton could merely issue a vague new call for industrial democracy. That won’t take any courage or imagination and won’t greatly advance the cause.

But if he wants to significantly change our authoritarian way of working and make the United States truly competitive in the world economy, he will push for agreement at his proposed summit of leaders of management, labor and others on some of the challenging proposals made by, among many others, the Bluestones, Marshall and Schlossberg.

For instance, the Bluestones propose “enterprise compacts” under which workers and managers would jointly decide everything from corporate financing to product pricing and quality. They would be involved in design, plant location and expansion or contraction of the company itself, much like Saturn managers and workers are now doing.

Traditional union contracts covering wages and benefits would still be negotiated, and collective bargaining under a Clinton Administration will surely be encouraged far more than it has been under Reagan and Bush.

Don’t expect anything as far out as those enterprise compacts to come quickly under Clinton.

But the process could give workers power they’ve never had before. Managers would have to give up their enormous power to order workers around instead of helping lead them to greater, more productive and efficient ways of working.

But the basic, widely tested idea of democratizing the way we work is there. And Clinton will soon have a chance to lead us to a better, more productive life by pushing for workplace democracy that could be almost as important as our political democracy that elected him President of the United States.