Classical Liberalism and Workplace Democracy

This is a paper coauthored by Tej Gonza for the European Liberal Forum, the foundation associated with the Lib-Dem parties of the EU in the EU Parliament. It explores the support for workplace democracy given by democratic classical liberals such as Tocqueville, Mill, Dewey, and Buchanan.

Fallacies of Corporate Analysis

Our goal is to analyze a miscellany of fallacies concerning the Citizens United case, corporate personhood, the stakeholder theory, the affected interests principle, and finally ending with the deeper fallacies concerning the rights of capital that are embedded in the conventional economic theories of capital and corporate finance.

The Case for Workplace Democracy

“In Chapter 11, David Ellerman offers a theoretical justification for a form of workplace democracy. He argues that a philosophical defence of workers’ control of workplaces and the products of their labour is possible outside of the lineage of Marxist and communist theory.” [Editor’s introduction] Amen

Interview at Norwegian Thinktank Manifest (English trans.)

English translation of June 2018 interview at Oslo think-tank Manifest.

Worker Cooperative as an Employee Ownership Fund

This paper shows how a worker cooperative can serve as an ESOP-like employee-ownership vehicle to make a partial or total buyout of a conventional company.

Some Less Well-Known Supporters of Workplace Democracy

This is a collection of likenesses or pictures and some representative quotations of a number of less well-known supporters (all dead white men) of workplace democracy.

Alleged Problems in Labor-Managed Firms

This paper will discuss two problems that have plagued the literature on the Ward-Domar-Vanek labor-managed firm (LMF) model, the perverse supply response problem and the Furubotn-Pejovich horizon problem.

Lord Eustace Percy’s “Unknown State” Lecture

Lord Eustace Percy was a Conservative public servant but was better known as a serious thinker, indeed, as the “Minister of Thinking.” There is a remarkable and much-quoted passage in his 1944 Riddell Lecture The Unknown State.

Panopticon vs. McGregor’s Theory Y

This paper is part of a larger project to better understand the limitations of the economic theory of agency and incentives. The economic approach focuses on extrinsic incentives whereas a better understanding of human organization requires an understanding of intrinsic motivation and the complementary or substitutive relationships with extrinsic motivation.

English and Swedish Versions of Swedish ESOP Report

In September 2017, my long-time associate, Chris Mackin, and I did a speaking tour on ESOPs in Sweden hosted by the filmmaker, Patrik Witkowsky, the to-be-lawyer, Mattias Göthberg, and the labor-oriented think tank, Katalyst. Afterwards, Patrik wrote a report, here translated into English, introducing the ESOP idea to a larger Swedish audience and describing the US experience.