Documents Mcmaster, Robert 3 results

"We seek to advance debate and thinking about economic democracy. While recognising the importance of existing approaches focused upon collective bargaining and workplace organisation, we articulate a perspective that emphasises the importance of individual economic rights, capabilities and freedoms at a time when established norms and protections at work are in retreat in many parts of the world. We outline a framework where both individual rights to self-government of one's own labour, as well as the right of all citizens to participate in economic decision-making, are emphasised. The framework identifies a set of underlying principles, prerequisites, critical spheres for intervention, progressive institutional arrangements, and policies in pursuit of an expanded agenda around economic democracy. In this way, economic democracy potentially empowers individuals and creates the basis for generating new and sustainable alliances that challenge elite dominance in contemporary capitalism."

"The condition of European economic democracy is generally recognised to be in a fragile state. Recent discussions have centred on pressures to converge towards an Anglo-American model of flexible and deregulated employment relations and systems, consonant with a broader neoliberal economic governance discourse. Existing approaches suggest an uneven experience between countries around a general trend of deterioration. In this article we offer two new contributions to these debates. First, we introduce findings from an Economic Democracy Index (EDI) we have developed. This goes beyond existing indices of employment and industrial democracy to allow us to examine the changing nature of individual employment rights as well as collective bargaining conditions between European countries. Second, we depart from existing studies of European employment relations, which tend to take a comparative national approach, by situating national employment relations and trajectories within a wider set of spatial and social relations. Qualitative analysis of three country cases (Denmark, Portugal and Slovenia) supplements our EDI analysis. Our evidence suggests the importance of multi-scalar relational and institutional dynamics between social actors at the national scale and those at higher scales such as the European Union in understanding variations in country performance on the EDI."