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Most Americans spend most of their time at work. With @al_yan1, we ask what do workers want from work? Using a conjoint experiment, we find that Americans want workplace democracy.
Our results
that the lack of econ. democracy is not because Americans don't want it.
Our results
that the lack of econ. democracy is not because Americans don't want it.
If you're not looking for a thread and just want the paper, you can find it here.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/j9asz https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6uw6qgw3epbpm5/mazumder-yan-wd-worker-pref.pdf?dl=0
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/j9asz https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6uw6qgw3epbpm5/mazumder-yan-wd-worker-pref.pdf?dl=0
Workers today are productive than they have ever been, yet average compensation has stagnated since the 1970s (src @EconomicPolicy).
There's also a great deal of work most notably by @PikettyLeMonde @gabriel_zucman and Saez that wealth inequality is at a historic high and that the declining worker power is one major factor in understanding inequality today @annastansbury @LHSummers. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27193
While unions have historically been the key link to combat economic inequality (see work by Farber, Herberst, @ikuziemko, and @snaidunl), unfortunately private sector union density is at a historic low today.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w24587?sy=587
https://www.nber.org/papers/w24587?sy=587
More recently, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson writes how many workers essentially work in dictatorships where firms control workers on and off the clock. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/7/17/15973478/bosses-dictators-workplace-rights-free-markets-unions
The idea of firms as being in tension with democracy is of course not new (what idea is?). Robert Dahl actually wrote a book about this problem! https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Preface_to_Economic_Democracy.html?id=nd1f4qfBVJoC
Dahl actually wrote quite a bit about this topic in @DissentMag back in the 80s.
Dahl actually wrote quite a bit about this topic in @DissentMag back in the 80s.
The regime type of firms used to be an object of serious study as @alexgourevitch shows in his book. The late Erik Olin Wright also took up this mantle in much of his later writing on real utopias. Even Ronald Coase defined firms as quasi-dictatorships.
We draw heavily on Anderson and Wright's work on distributions of power at work and conceptualize workplace democracy as institutions within firms that more equitably distributes power.
So the big puzzle is, why don't we see more forms of democratic firm organization like worker co-ops, workers on corporate boards, worker ownership, profit sharing, etc.? Well one answer could be that "well hey! workers just don't want that!"
We fielded an experiment on a representative sample in the US that randomizes different types of democratic firm governance in addition to a whole host of other factors that could covary with workplace democracy (hold that for some cool stuff we do later in the !).
!).
Our experiment shows that relative to private corporations, workers would rather work at places that have workers on the corporate board, direct election of management, and employee stock ownership plans.
We designed our experiment to allow us to also separate whether the results are driven by instrumental benefits or intrinsic desires for more equitable distribution of power. We find that Americans want workplace democracy largely because they view it as enhancing their power.
A brief methods aside, mediation is hard! One under appreciated advantage of conjoints is that they can allow the sequential ignorability assumption to be a lot more reasonable. We talk about how conjoints can be used to identify mediators ( @matt_blackwell @maya_sen Acharya).
Given the role of partisanship in shaping everything these days, you might be wondering about this as it relates to workplace democracy. We find (using methods developed by @Susan_Athey and co-authors) evidence of some (but not a ton!) of partisan polarization on this issue.
We also find that our results are economically meaningful and that it replicates "real world" behavior. We recover roughly the same labor supply elasticity wrt income that other paper find using behavioral data. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180150
We have some depressing results that Americans are highly polarized about working at union shops so we view our findings as hopefully ways to complement a revitalized 
labor movement today.
labor movement today.
Our work has seriously benefited from financial support from @InequalityHKS, encouragement from @awh, survey support from @johnlray at YouGov, and colleagues like @pfrymer @awh + many more who have engaged deeply with our work.
We also got to workshop this within the American Political Economy Summer school put on by Paul Pierson, @Jacob_S_Hacker, @awh, and Kathy Thelen and I highly recommend you keep your eyes out for future workshops.
Broadly, we hope that this type of work helps to bridge the divide between political theory and "positive" social science. Being able to engage with political theory in this project has been rewarding and we hope other work does this more!
Political scientists have largely ceded corporate governance and business ethics to other disciplines. This project pushes political scientists to engage with work we normally do not engage with.
There's a whole lot to dig into here and we ourselves have really only scratched the surface with this project. We hope you find this line of work as interesting as we have. Do send along any thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns, etc. to us!
And if you want to better understand how this relates to the racial and class politics of incarceration, see here: https://twitter.com/shom_mazumder/status/1171828440103698432?s=20
Also, @al_yan1 is an amazing grad student at UC Berkeley and one of the best co-authors one can hope for! Hire him when he's on the market!
