Labor and COG's Role in creating Voluntary Policy Experiments

[Deborah Groban Olson <dgo@esoplaw.com>]

Dear EO Privers: 

        This is part of my response to a recent comment by Michael Harrington of
the Milken Institute. If you want to view the whole letter please go the
the COG Homestead archives at http://cog.kent.edu.
        I also want to respond to your comment about involvement of labor 
leaders
in pursuit of broad ownership agendas.  I have spent the last 20 years
working with the labor movement on employee ownership projects.  Employee
ownership is used grudgingly as a tactic, but is generally not seen as a
valuable strategy. It is interesting that in our privatization discussion
many people who have little involvement with labor have promoted labor's
greater involvement in employee ownership. While those from labor have
expressed much more reluctance. (Note the recent piece by Dave Wheatcroft
stating that privatizations have been a very negative experience for labor
and workers generally. Note also Per Ahlstrom's piece in this discussion,
in which he states that there is no single fix for the problems in the world.)

        Per is a pragmatist, as are most labor leaders. He sees the need to use 
a
variety of strategies to address a variety of problems. In my recent
correspondence about COG with Lynn Agee, General Counsel for PACE, the
Paper, Chemical and Energy Workers union in the US, who has just been
involved in a large employee buyout, he was less intersted in empirical
data showing that wages and benefits are higher in employee owned companies
and that unionized employee owned companies are more successful in some
areas than there non-employee owned counterparts. He wrote
> "Actually my interest is more in demonstrating that a Unionized
Partnering work place is more successful than a nonunion adversarial
workplace."

        We are not in a position to tell labor what they should be promoting
regarding broadened ownership. Instead, we need to lead with ideas and
examples that interest them as pragmatists. Furthermore, they are generally
very concerned about what is immediately politically possible. Much of what
we are discussing is aimed at a longer time horizon than that with which
they usually concern themselves. They have to deal with their members
immediate needs. That is why we do not have much active participation from
the labor leaders who are on this network. Yet, if we are able to develop
programs that are coherent, useful and communicable in clear, simple
language, devoid of religious intensity, we can have an impact. We have
labor leaders in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Austria, Beligum, South
Africa, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Egypt and a variety of other countries
(please excuse me if I have unintentionally left out the country of any
participants). 

        Our job is to create policy proposals that can fix what is broken 
without
breaking what is not. For example, perhaps SQPQ should only be attached to
licenses to use the airwaves, pollute the environment and other areas where
the people are giving up some exclusive general benefit, and should be
developed as a voluntary partial tax payment method. This could be
additional to, and not exclusive of, experiments with the opening of the
Federal Reserve discount window in certain areas to see if the Kelsonian
outcomes happen. I am also impressed with the Turnbull governance ideas as
something that could be proposed as a voluntary mechanism. In the US
enabling legislation would be necessary to permit these types of boards,
without requiring them. There would probably need to be anti-trust waivers
for these activities as well. I am very nervous about what the outcomes
might be in all areas of property management if we created the time limits
on property ownership Shann proposes. I would like to have further
discussion of that issue, and consider entertain proposals to experiment
with that concept as well.

        I would like to see some way for us to offer a variety of mechanisms for
experimentation, rather than spending our time fighting over the absolute
correctness of one and only one method. I also believe that if we come up
with an experimentation package, we are much more likely to obtain
resources to do the experimentation. From the experimentation we will have
better data to continue on.

Best regards,
Deb