New rules for electing players to the All Star teams were
used this season. As in a presidential election, fans now vote in a primary and
then in a conclusive election. The primary determines the top three players at
each position for each league (each league’s top nine outfielders are grouped
together). The fan’s conclusive vote determines the starters. Then MLB players
have a ballot, plus the All Star managers and the commissioner have some
discretion. Thus some players are All Stars by way of the fans, others by way
of fellow-players and some by way of management.
New rules for electing corporate
boards are needed. Currently, stockholders vote (including by proxy). Many of
these stockholders are “the most uninvested, irresponsible parties involved”
with the company, says David Ciepley in Hedgehog Review (Spring/19).
“They have never contributed a dime to the corporations” because they acquire
the stock on speculation in the secondary market, often in a bundled retirement
fund. They hold a stock on average for four months. They are uninterested in
“making improvements for long-term returns” but instead favor “quickly
squeezing what they can out of the company.” A few people acquire a company’s
stock in a different way, but they too are often fixated on the firm’s
quarterly performance on the Nasdaq or another exchange. These people are the company’s
executives who are paid in stock, not cash. At election time they nominate and
vote for like-minded directors.
A crucial step “for reducing
corporate misconduct and for reorienting the corporation to public purposes,”
writes Ciepley, is “overthrowing the baleful notion, currently regnant in law
schools, the business press and even the courts…that corporations are purely
private associations and that their stockholders are [in any meaningful way]
their members, owners or principals.” He admits that “there is no
simple or obvious path to restoring the public purpose of the corporation.”
Ciepley does though allude to co-determinism, a mechanism for including
stakeholders in corporate governance.
This notion, which derives from
Catholic doctrine, has long been advanced by theologians, public policy leaders
and business executives, as Matt Mazewski, a student at Columbia University,
details in Commonweal (3/22/19). There are examples from Great Britain
and elsewhere, though he concentrates on Germany.
Catholic philosopher and mining
engineer Franz von Baader (1765-1841) was among the first to develop sound
arguments for worker participation in corporate governance, Mazewski finds. By
1891 Germany passed legislation for factory councils to advise management.
The notion gained popularity after World War II. For example, Heinrich
Dinkelbach (1891-1967), a Catholic and a steel manager, devised a plan for
general input from trade unions for business direction. In 1951 Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), also Catholic, won legislative support for special
co-determinism provisions.
The general concept appears in
several Church documents. It is explicitly promoted by Pope Pius XI (1857-1939)
in his 1931 encyclical Reconstructing the Social Order. His Latin phrase
for co-determinism, collegia ordinum, is translated industry council
plan in the U.S. Pius XI and the others said that some form of this
doctrine tempers adversarial feelings between workers and owners because both
are participating in the company’s success. It puts an emphasis on
self-regulation and thus makes government meddling in business less necessary.
The temptation to absorb these stakeholder councils into one or another
government agency must be resisted. Unions do not disappear; management does
not disappear; stockholders remain and government retains a role. The council
plan can be variously constituted and look differently in various sectors. With
genuine and full cooperation a business grows because participation is enhanced
through the plan.
Establishing a true community of
work “will not be easy,” Mazewski concludes. But putting varied interests on
corporate boards “would certainly be a good place to start.”
Droel is associated
with National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629). NCL
distributes Were You Born On the Wrong Continent by Tom Geoghegan ($20),
which considers co-determinism in Germany.
