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Foreword: Promoting Employee Voice in the New American Economy

In this age of the far-flung global economy and increased out-sourcing of American jobs, it has become more difficult for workers to get themselves heard by their employers. The traditional vehicle of collective voice in the workplace, the bread-and-butter unionism of Samuel Gompers, has found itself surviving in fewer and fewer industries and with its corporate opponents seeking to stomp out collective employee action once and for all. Recent attacks on public sector unionism in Wisconsin and other states is just the most recent and notorious example. Of course, another source of the lack of meaningful employee voice in the workplace is the anachronistic nature of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), due to the political stalemate that has left the law basically unchanged in its current form for over fifty years, even as the labor, capital, and products markets have changed dramatically. Not only is traditional labor failing workers in providing adequate voice in the workplace through union representation, but its de facto replacement, employment law, is a multi-headed hydra made up of a confusing array of minimum labor standards and workplace rights. Additionally, private litigation in the area has been substantially diminished by a U.S. Supreme Court seemingly set on an anti-litigation agenda in the civil rights context. One potential way to increase employee voice in the workplace in the new global economy is by pushing for not only workplace governance reform, but simultaneously for corporate governance reform. One of the pioneers of business models where employee voice is encouraged is Professor Ken Dau-Schmidt, the Willard and Margaret Carr Professor of Labor and Employment Law at Indiana University – Bloomington, Maurer School of Law. Indeed, it was based on his unique and innovative scholarship at the intersection of workplace governance and corporate governance theory that I invited Professor Dau-Schmidt to be the principal speaker at Marquette’s labor and employment law symposium. In addition, I invited six eminent labor and employment law scholars from across the country to challenge different aspects of Professor Dau-Schmidt’s reform proposals and make additional suggestions of their own. I think the reader will agree with me that the product of the “Promoting Employee Voice in the New American Economy” Symposium has produced a rich body of new scholarship and resources for practitioners, academics, and government officials to draw upon in determining the appropriate, future direction of workplace governance.