Karl Klare - self-realization demands employee participation

Karl Klare ("Workplace democracy & market reconstruction: an agenda for legal reform”, (1988 – 1989) 38 Catholic University Law Review 1) argues for a sweeping reform of labour law to promote active employee participation in firm governance.

Klare calls for a recasting of corporate governance and labor law to promote workplace democracy. He argues that the main goal of labor law should be to expand and enhance democracy at every level of the experience and organization of work. This is a demand both of a respect for self-realization and of the practical needs of the firm operating in a modern economy. Employees increasingly look to their work as a source of self-realization in a deep sense (as presenting opportunities for learning and expression, challenging work and an improvement in their technical skills and personal capacities). Labor law’s goals should be to promote employee security in turbulent times, enhance human capital and reduce discrimination in the workplace. Klare challenges the assumption that the common law as it stood, or is imagined to have stood, at a give era represents the natural state of things so that the burden of proof rests on those who argue for a deviation from this norm. He argues that even the common law, at any stage in its development, has a built-in regulatory agenda of its own that is open to challenge