Interview: Isabelle Ferreras

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Could you talk about the history of the Democratize Work movement? How did it get started?

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

It started by chance, by seizing an opportunity — I guess a historic opportunity — in the first Covid-19 lockdown. For those who study and research the world of work, the first lockdown was a very consequential moment because we realised that many of the things that we knew about work could be known to the larger world. For one thing, we knew that essential workers are fundamental to the resilience of society, we knew that those who are the least paid and the least socially regarded are usually the most important care workers — from the nurse to the garbage collector — and then, all of a sudden, with the lockdown, governments were officially saying, “there is a list of essential workers”! And that signalled the possibility of recognising what we already knew.

I did my PhD dissertation in sociology on cashiers in the supermarket industry in the early to mid-2000s, so I’d been thinking about this for a while. When lockdown started, we started to receive requests from journalists for those with expert knowledge about these essential professions. I realised that wow, this is a really historic moment! I suggested to my close colleagues in France, Dominque Méda, and in the US, Julie Battilana, that we should prepare an open letter for Mayday 2020. It took a little longer than that but eventually, I drafted something, I sent it to them, they edited it, added their input, and so on. It was really clear that we had this vision that we should share the knowledge that we have in the social sciences and humanities about how differently society should be organised if we want to recognise essential workers and do so in a more meaningful way than just clapping at windows. So, we identified three principles, which are core knowledge, and lessons from history, flowing from the history of the twentieth century. They are: we should democratise the firm, decommodify labour, and decarbonise the economy.

We started to circulate the letter, first to our close colleagues, and first to women colleagues because we felt like women’s expertise had to be highlighted because they were going to be paying a very high cost during the pandemic and the lockdowns. And our colleagues reacted immediately saying that they agreed and wanted to put their names on it. In a matter of hours, we had an amazing response — we were totally overwhelmed! In two weeks, we had more than three thousand researchers from across the globe as signatories, from over 750 universities across the five continents, which spoke to the universality of those three principles. It was translated into a variety of languages by our colleagues across the globe who took the piece to their own national newspapers to have it published on the same day as Le Monde had promised us publication: 16 May 2020. This was in a matter of two weeks, with publication in 43 newspapers, in 27 languages, across 36 countries around the world.

We saw that the principles had so much global resonance, and we felt a sense of responsibility to nurture the conversation, to not let it die. That’s why we’re still here today and still trying to grow the conversation and grow the network.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What is undemocratic about the current organisation of work?

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

My shorthand answer is that what is fundamentally undemocratic is that those who are governed by the rules and decisions of the organisation — of the firm — are not in a position to consent. This is a situation in which workers are alienated and cannot consent. And, of course, the threshold of a democratic government is when those who are ruled can consent.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What's the best way to go about addressing the undemocratic nature of the contemporary firm?

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

There are two approaches to this. First, the more theoretical version and then the strategic or tactical discussion on the ground, in the various realities of different societies facing different circumstances. If you ask me for the ideal ways forward, I would say that we should put front and centre our understanding that firms are political entities and that their current despotic character is inconsistent with the democratic ideals of our societies. If we want to uphold the democratic ideals of our societies, then we must act, we have to put an end to the contradiction between capitalism and democracy.

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

Capitalism is a political regime of government as democracy is. Democracy is the regime of government which is based on the recognition that we recognize each other as equals in dignity and rights. And based on that ideal, we build up a system of collective government, which has to reflect that ideal. We vote and we receive, on the principle of equality, the same weight in that voting. There are many conversations today in terms of technologies of representation, including lotteries, and deepening what democratic government requires, but it’s grounded in the principle of tying political rights to equality. Capitalism is also a regime of government, but it's a regime of government, which ties political rights, the right to govern, to the ownership of capital. The best expression of capitalism, its institutional form, is the firm governed by the corporation. This is an important distinction: the firm is not the corporation, the firm is a sociological reality, made of legal instruments, with workers who enter contracts and tied to labour law. But the idea is that capital has the right to govern, and that access to political rights to govern is tied to injecting capital. That’s the profound contradiction that I see between this reality and the aspiration to equality that drives the larger democratic project of our societies. Workers should be recognised as equals in dignity and rights in the workplace, as fellow citizens. Currently, the workplace expresses the contradiction between capitalism and democracy.

We should also work on how the labour market is structured because the commodification of labour also has dire consequences for the ability of workers to live as equals in dignity and rights. Access to health care, to education, to all that makes for a dignified life should not be tied to the market but to the existence of a person as a member of society that qualifies that person to access those fundamental rights.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What are the main barriers to the democratisation of work?

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

Probably a professional bias, but I would say, understanding. I put a lot of emphasis on the fact that I don’t think people see the nature of the problem clearly. We have become so immersed in this capitalist society that we can’t see how things are. It’s like we swim in an ocean of terms which perpetuate this misunderstanding. That’s why I believe in the importance of our work as a network for Democratizing Work. Global and national conversations can try to bring some light on those problems. In particular, we need a big conversation with unions, to get them to more clearly articulate what they expect from the nature of the government of the firm. Of course, the other massive problem is the power of capital. The power of capital is so immense that it dwarfs our political, and public powers. That’s why it’s helpful to see these giants as political entities themselves, that should be made accountable to the demos of democracy, and to understand that this has to be tackled for the sake of the democratic project and the viability of democracy as an ideal for our societies. That’s the second obstacle, then.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

Could you talk us through the three principles of democratising work as you lay them out in the book, Democratize Work?

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

We wanted to zoom in a bit and put those three principles — democratise, decarbonise, decommodify — into their historical contexts. The long-term history is that workers are best understood as what I call “labour investors”. I mean that not as a concession to capitalism but as a critical tool to reclaim the legitimacy of workers in a capitalist economy which pretends that the only thing that matters is capital investment. What really makes the difference in capitalism is the willingness of workers to invest themselves — body and mind — in the task, in the position they have. It’s a perspective that centres labour. We know that presently, everything is done not to recognise that labour investment. This is something that Marx says so well — workers receive just enough to reproduce their own working force and the profits go to the capitalists. Of course, too, the labour investment is riskier in practice because capitalists enjoy limited liability. Losing financial investment is not the same as the risks borne by workers in the workplace. Today, I read that one out of two workers in the auto industry in France report themselves as being in a state of mental distress. Those numbers are really alarming.

We identify the central principle of democratisation as collective veto rights for workers. It has to be more than having a small say or validating decisions made elsewhere. It has to go beyond the co-determination system, like the Mitbestimmung system in Germany. What we need is a collective veto power for workers, in a second chamber.

The second principle is decommodification: the consequences of the commodification of labour are very serious. The third is decarbonising the planet. We take that to be a shortcut for fitting the economy within planetary boundaries. If we don’t respect those boundaries, we are putting humanity on the verge of collapse.

These two principles can be identified historically, too, throughout social movements and unions. And typically, those three principles go together, they are interdependent. We need them to be pursued together. The situation is urgent; if we don’t do so, we won’t be able to pass on a society that is sustainable and democratic to the next generation.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

It's notable and laudable that in the book, all the authors are women. I wonder how feminism and feminist theory fit within democratising work and within your work more generally.

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

We have deployed a very consistent feminist strategy without making it the first issue to be discussed. As for myself, I did my PhD dissertation on workers in the supermarket industry, and I ended up working on all women workers. I think I come from that tradition of feminism which takes women as equal such that they can be considered the generalisable person. So, I built all my understanding, all the theory of work that I’ve developed, which has led me to the political theory of the firm, on studying women workers. To me, they are as representative. I mean, we’ve built the world by looking at the situation of men, never really wondering if it’s possible to universalise from them. To me, women workers deserve that status.

In terms of strategy for our network, when the pandemic started, we really could see how a lot of domestic work would fall into women on top of their paid work. In fact, a recent statistic about France had women working eight more weeks than men per year in terms of housework! Women are overworked compared to men. Before publishing the op-ed, after speaking to my co-authors Julie [Battilana] and Dominique [Méda], we had the feeling that the pandemic would have profound consequences for women and began to wonder what we could do to highlight that as an issue. We wanted to make sure that women experts were heard and show women in light of their expertise. There are a lot of male colleagues also involved, but we recognise that if we want some sort of equality in this movement, we have to be so mindful about gender parity, that it was best done through women leading, and we also want to ensure more diversity in all its dimensions.  We also want to make sure that it’s more than an academic network: we involve practitioners and activists. That’s very important to us.

[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

How does the international aspect of the network work? The campaign has lots of national chapters —how can solidarity be sent across borders?

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

One way to do it, I think the way we are practising it, is to be mindful of the fact that we want to stay true to the universal dimension of the three principles through the way we organise our activities. We want to make sure we’re giving adequate attention to regions. One thing now is that our focus and perspective are led by what is happening in South Africa in terms of a very interesting debate in relation to, amongst other things, a job guarantee programme. Earlier this year, we had a workshop on the situation in South Africa. We look at the different national and regional contexts and consider what we can learn from them, and we really want to feel a sense of internationalism, that is a global movement: whatever takes place on the ground is relevant not only for its own local context but for the larger context, too. We want to learn from what is happening and support each other. There are commonalities in terms of the core problems we all face given the global nature of both capitalism and climate change, and that gives us a dynamic sense of optimism — that’s very important not to feel isolated and discouraged. We are in the process of trying to get funding to be able to support the work of different national chapters especially those who are underfunded or are in countries where there will be no funding or possible; this is also a way to extend support from the global north to the global south.

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[.cdw-name]Amelia Horgan[.cdw-name]

What’s happening next for the Democratizing Work campaign?

[.cdw-name]Isabelle Ferreras[.cdw-name]

We hope for substantive democratic gains in some countries that we will then be able to leverage to inspire other countries. For instance, in Spain, there is a very important discussion taking place on democratising the corporation. The Minister of Labour visited Germany to understand how codetermination works there. The national chapter in Spain is nurturing the discussion around that and hoping to push it further, beyond codetermination and towards a collective veto right for workers. In Italy, the national chapter has stepped up its support for factory workers at the GKN plant near Florence who are fighting to save their plant and transform it radically. Their struggle is an embodiment of what we mean by democratise, decommodify and decarbonise. We’re hoping that developments like that, and events we hold in the network can function as a source of inspiration and build a community. We discussed developments in India, Spain, France, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, etc. throughout our #DemocratizingWork Global Workshop Series. Again, this is because these are global challenges, although they are translated in national contexts, given the type of legal system each country has and the country’s specific history and so on. But that national reality should never be taken as the only reality that exists. If we want to really tackle global change, and if we really believe in democracy, then we cannot stop worrying about the common good of humanity: that is, how are we going to set norms at the global level, for humanity to be able to treat each other as human beings, as free and equal in dignity and rights, and to ensure that our human system is in line with the planetary boundaries for a viable future, and we intend to do so by nurturing these conversations and learning from society.