Ruth Dukes, Wolfgang Streeck, Democracy at Work. Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023, 182p.

The book is written in a concise and clear manner and intended to be accessible to a wide audience. From the outset, the authors focus on the clear value added for political economy of a careful consideration of labour law (p. x). First, distinguishing labour law from contract law highlights the latter’s manifest inability to consider the fundamental inequality between the parties (employee and employer) to the labour contract. Secondly, linking political economy and labour law illustrates the eminently political nature of the latter, its aspiration to democratize capitalist societies in the sense of a certain equality. From the outset, Dukes and Streeck stress the ideal-type nature of the concepts used (p. 5). This is particularly true of the notions of contract and status which structure the whole discussion of industrial democracy throughout the book. The notion of ‘industrial citizenship’, conceived interchangeable with the concept of democracy at work, is also constructed as an ideal type. It concerns, on the one hand, the employee as a bearer of rights at work, and on the other hand, the recognition of the spheres of industry and the economy as issues of democratic governance (p.8). Finally, a last ideal type underpins the presentation: this is the ‘labour constitution’, a notion developed by Ruth Dukes based on the work of Max Weber and especially Hugo Sinzheimer (p.15). The notion appears particularly flexible, as it can be applied to a plurality of analytical units, from a specific workplace to a sector of activity or to an entire state. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter presents the ideas of two major authors: Philip Selznick, a sociologist of organizations, business and law, and H. Sinzheimer, a labour lawyer and legal sociologist. Selznick published Law, Society, and Industrial Justice in 1969: in this landmark book, he studies the progress of industrial justice in the United States, i.e. of an internal order of the organization (the large corporation) that gradually relies on the rule of law (p.25). The result was a form of corporate governance based on a ‘constitutional’ foundation, upon an orientation of action with reference to values, those of justice, equity, and the fight against arbitrariness (p. 28). This conception of the firm as a private government ensuring, under pressure from the unions, a certain degree of industrial citizenship was, however, as Dukes and Streeck point out, an overly optimistic reading, belied by historical developments. At the time, large firms were vast autonomous organizations, controlled by the managers and not by a multiplicity of shareholders, focusing on long-term growth and not on short-term over profit. However, this period of managerial corporation came to an end at the turn of the 1980s, with what the authors call the neo-liberal counter-revolution, whose emblematic assertion, due to Milton Friedman, is that the only social responsibility of the company is to maximize the assets of its shareholders (p. 34). The second part of this first chapter is devoted to Sinzheimer, the founder of labour law in its collective dimension in Germany. Sinzheimer had a decisive influence on labour law in the Weimar era (1918-1933), both constitutionally and legislatively. The chapter closes with a comparison of the partly convergent ideas of Selznick and Sinzheimer, while noting the (eventual) failure of the institutional experiments in labour law propelled in Germany by the November Revolution of 1918 and in the United States by the New Deal of 1933-39 (in particular, via the Wagner Act). The second chapter of the book deals with post-war labour relations in the industrialized market economies: Dukes and Streeck first discuss the …