Usually, board-level worker representation is a topic discussed in the
context of legal reflection on the governance structure of companies, and,
therefore, more from the point of view of corporate law than of labour law
(so, for example, in Denmark, Germany, and in the EU’s legal framework).
Without in any way willing to part from this traditional perspective, in this
chapter I would like to develop some arguments in favour of the
participation from a perspective that privileges the individual right of
workers, by freely developing certain elements of reflection drawn from
moral philosophy, and in particular from the idea of “social freedom” as
elaborated by Axel Honnet1, and of “non-domination” as theorized in the
neo-republican thought by Philip Pettit2, to which is added the important
contribution of Amartya Sen on the “capabilities” as an expression of the
freedom of people in acquiring important functioning. I believe that these
currents of philosophical-moral thought can usefully be mobilized in a
convergent perspective, in which board-level worker participation
represents the outcome of a process of revisiting the assumptions of
traditional labour law, so that the employment relationship is the
expression of a structure of domination (the capitalist firm) which
necessarily limits the freedom (negative and positive) of the worker, and
which identifies in the conflict between capital and labour the only horizon
in which the values of the respective (social and economic)spheres find
some precarious and transitory moments of composition. I believe that by
adopting this traditional perspective - which is still very widespread in the
doctrine of labour law - the possibility of promoting the participation of
workers in the management of the company is greatly limited, even on the
political-institutional level, whether it is considered as the natural and
intrinsic outcome of social freedom achieved in the main spheres of human
life (described in Hegel’s philosophy of law: the affective relationships, the
market and the democratic state), whether we consider it an extrinsic legal
construction with respect to a capitalist dynamics governed by a purely
individualistic rationality based on exploitation, according to Marxian
reading
