Industrial Democracy

1. Pressure Groups

The pluralist idea of democracy that characterized Western politics since World War II was highly important for the development of pressure group democracy—also referred to as the interest model or collective bargaining. This model rejects the orthodox class struggle between exploiting capitalists and exploited workers. Alternatively, the company is viewed as consisting of many different interdependent groups of interests, and power is divided among several groups.

In the 1950s, H. A. Clegg argued that in pressure group democracy the important interests of participants were organized and represented in various interest groups. Not all desires could be met, but sufficient to make everybody feel that they were being treated fairly, making it possible to reach a situation of equilibrium. The way of achieving this goal was for the workers to put pressure on management through collective bargaining—under the condition that management was not weak. Industrial democracy requires both strong management (elite) and strong pressure groups among workers. Clegg defined three principles for industrial democracy: (1) unions should be independent of the state and the company management system; (2) only the labor movement could represent worker interests; and (3) ownership was irrelevant for good industrial relations. In general, labor representatives should minimize participation in company decisions in order to avoid cooptation.

The model in its purest form has primarily been practiced in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It has also played a role in other European countries, but here it has to a larger extent been combined with certain of the subsequent models.

2. Comanagement

Comanagement dates back to around World War I, developed first by the British and further developed by the Germans. The controversy raised by Clegg in the mid-1950s was an attempt to oust the idea of comanagement. The attempt failed, and in the 1960s comanagement came to play an important role in many Western countries in discussions of issues such as [Page 649]works councils, partly autonomous work groups, employee representatives on boards of directors, and worker directors.

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