Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

A Possible Future

Currently we have laws protecting rights and structures controlling relationships as shown in figure 11.1. If people continuously see their rights as defensible or indefensible, then who is to trust the judge in court, when the dice are politically loaded, and the integral relationship is conflict-oriented?

Labor and capital find commonality of purpose where there are rules set by labor law, but only where things go wrong, involving a system of governance in which a vote of no confidence can be cast by any person against any other person in the organization for a violation of the common purpose. It does not minimize the right to strike, nor does it minimize the right to make a profit. It is simply an open system in which a multitude of democratic mechanisms are put into place by mutual consent to give direction to the business unit which serves the economic interest of both parties. This is shown in figure 11.2.

You may minimize conflict but inevitably the management old-paradigm prerogative (whatever that is) would always rule the day simply because of the boss–worker autocratic relationship. The people will not have real influence, because no underpinning value system is in place against which mutual violation could be questioned, both from union's and management's side.

Surely a future labor dispensation could look as shown in figure 11.3. The law should be designed not to regulate the relationship between capital and labor but the relationship between all ...