Re-working Democracy: Defending Substantive Rights through Labor Struggle

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

This panel argues for the centrality of the workplace in struggles over democratic resilience. Many democracies are born out of workers’ efforts to establish better conditions and greater control at work. Most citizens work most of their waking hours most days, and few other arenas so directly determine our quality of life. One of the great achievements of democracies over the past century has been to meaningfully improve the quality of life for millions of people by improving working conditions. When democracies fall apart, the first signs of weakness often appear as threats to workers’ rights, and the erosion of organized labor further diminishes the capacity for resistance against plutocratic and authoritarian tendencies. Even with the turbulence entailed by economic transition away from industry, organized labor remains an important source of social solidarity, protecting the egalitarianism necessary for durable democracy. Centering the importance of labor rights to substantive, meaningful democracy, this panel investigates causes for democratic backsliding and the prospects for democratic renewal in the twenty-first century.

We begin with Dean’s investigation of the relationship between different trajectories of democratization across 175 developed and developing countries from 1945 to 2020, showing that bottom-up mobilization for democracy is more likely to result in regimes that protect labor rights. Deepening our understanding of the important linkage between civil society and substantive democracy, as well as the roots of democratic retrenchment, helps explain why some new democracies may not necessarily lead to enhanced protections of labor rights. This analysis invites discussions of innovative approaches to ensure that democratization not only occurs but also results in protections for the general populace.

Lyon et al. focus our attention on one of the most shocking instances of substantive democracy’s failures in our time: the retrenchment of child labor protections in the United States. Lyon and her co-authors draw on multiple data sources, including original data, to offer a clearer picture of contemporary child labor at both the national- and state-levels, illustrating how democratic backsliding at multiple levels of analysis has important substantive consequences. In explaining why child labor has returned to the US, Lyon et al. illuminate mechanisms for renovation of broken policies and deficient political processes.

Indeed, in the face of increasingly precarious working conditions, organized labor offers one of the most encouraging avenues for renovating the promise of substantive democracy. Schulze-Cleven compares unions’ efforts to reduce workers’ precarity across several post-industrial democratic regimes in the US and Europe, showing that, despite pessimism about labor rights in post-Fordism, unions can effectively protect workers in the face of economic and social complexity. Moreover, Schulze-Cleven demonstrates that, across cases, workers have developed strikingly similar organizational strategies to achieve their aims.

With many democracies faltering on the edge of giving up their commitments to substantive rights, efforts to build civil society power in non-democratic countries are increasingly useful for reimagining pathways to meaningful democracy. Chen’s analysis of workers’ social networks in China provides valuable insights into how workers have developed innovative tactics to defend the rights of migrant labor and informal workers. As migrant labor and informal labor markets have spread around the world, these insights offer promising lessons for protecting workers far beyond China, especially in countries where workers are not protected by substantive democratic rights.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Labor Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 6: Political Economy

Individual Presentations

• No Struggle, No Progress: Labor-Led Democratization and Labor Rights - Adam Dean, George Washington University

• The New Politics of Child Labor in the United States - Melissa Lyon, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York; Steve Holt, University at Albany, SUNY; Lucy Sorensen, SUNY-ALBANY; Ji Hyun Byeon

• In the Interest of Labor: Union Agency in the New World of Work - Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Rutgers University; Christian Ibsen, University of Copenhagen

• Guanxi Networks in Labor Contention: Network Attribute, Strength and Outcomes - Wei Chen, Nanjing University

Chair

• John Stephen Ahlquist University of California, San Diego

Discussant

• Ed Quish Hobart and William Smith Colleges