Re: Labor and COG's Role in creating Voluntary Policy Experiments

[Shann Turnbull <sturnbull@mba1963.hbs.edu>]

Dear Group

Deb states in her posting below that:

"In the US enabling legislation would be necessary to permit these types of
boards,
without requiring them"

I have not obtained any evidence from that enabling legislation would be
necessary as suggested by Deb.  Bill Allen, the former Chancellor of the
Delaware court has given me to understand that this is the situation in the
State of Delaware.  Please refer to my answer to Deb in the Homestead group
today.

"I am very nervous about what the outcomes
might be in all areas of property management if we created the time limits".

There is no need to be nervous as time limited property rights are
universal for ALL intellectual property and very common for real property
as found provided for by leases.  Limited life corporations where the
universal rule in the US up until the middle of the last century.  Refer to
my other postings sent today to the Homestead group.

Regards

Shann


At 05:13 AM 7/1/2000 , Deborah Groban Olson wrote:
>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

Shann Turnbull
P.O. Box 266 Woollahra, Sydney, Australia, 1350
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