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EURED
European Union for the Research
in Economic Democracy
was founded the
15th of June in Stockolm following an idea
launched at the European Social Forum in Florence.
About 40 persons from many parts of Europe were present at the foundation.
Our intention is to give rise to a network of researchers in the field of
Economic Democracy. We decided to use this site
to give information and publish essays and documents.
The association is informal. No
subscription fees are required
and anybody can join us. Just send a message to
econ-dem@unisi.it
EURED's
Conference in Stockholm
14th-15th of June,
2003
click
here
for the summary
of the workshop
go
to Conferences
for the complete papers
EURED's Workshop at the
European Social Forum
Paris, 13th
of November
2003
"The
New Financial Capitalism
and
Economic
Democracy"
The workshop was aimed at discussing some trends of the contemporary
capitalist systems and their effects on economic democracy. In particular,
the workshop has taken its steps from the following consideration: the rise
of financial institutions as key actors in the international economic
scene has been accompanied by the introduction of new corporate governance
settings and new forms of employment relations.
These measures, which tend to modify the previous
structures of ownership, control and risk-bearing, include
for instance the spread of short term labor contracts,
the Employees Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP), the executive
stock options, the rise of pension funds, etc. We
wondered then whether these devices
actually endow workers of a significant decisional power, and how
they affect the workers' welfare.
Luigi Cerri argued that the introduction of
pension funds in Europe would not enhance economic democracy. The
introduction of pension funds attracts today some leftist thinkers because,
by using workers' savings to purchase the stock of corporations, these funds
might enhance workers' influence on corporate decision making; nevertheless,
a pension fund cannot be compared to a Meidner-plan workers' fund,
since it is to be placed in an open market framework, and as such it will
probably mimic the strategy of other institutional investors. Indeed, the
functioning of american pension funds shows that trade union funds may
hardly deviate from a shareholder value oriented policy.
Gaëtan Flocco analyzed the ideological
background and the arguments used by French policy makers to support
the introduction of pension funds and employees stock ownership. He found
out five main arguments: the attempt to increase workers' income, given the
disequilibrium between profits and wages; the attempt to limit the ingerence
of foreign investors; the intrinsic problems of mutual pension systems; the
efficient incentive structure of indexed compensation schemes; and the
attempt to grant more power to waged workers. He claimed that none of these
arguments is convincing: workers' stock ownership turns out to provide a
secure source of finance to corporations, and at the same time it
legitimates a wage reduction; foreign investors would not be affected by the
presence of domestic pension funds, since the latter would probably place a
consistent share of their assets abroad; furthermore, neither capitalization
pension systems nor incentive compensations schemes proved to be more
efficient than the systems that they are supposed to replace; finally,
ownership of preferred stock does not grant to employees' any increased
power of voice.
Alessandra Pelloni provided several figures
about the income inequality in the United States. She compared the ratio
between the top and the bottom 10% percentiles throughout the years, and she
found out that inequality has dramatically increased in the post-war period.
She remarked that the nowadays level of income inequality is similar to that
of the early 20th century; in the New Deal era inequality had actually
decreased, and it was in the same period that U.S. saw the emergence of a
"middle class". Besides, she provided evidence that one major source of
income inequality is the increasing gap between top executives' and
unskilled workers' wages: the ratio between the two wages has increased by
about two hundred thousand percent. She concluded by reminding how the
question of income inequality is important to any program aiming at
enhancing economic democracy.
go to Seminars
for the complete papers |
