Negotiating the Future.

With ashington trying harder every day to demonstrate that Ross Perot really won the 1992 election, debate on the basic causes of our current economic and political discontent becomes all the harder. Democrats and Republicans strive to avoid a "stimulus package" whose size was mere tokenism from the first. In such a context, we more than ever need discussion of the ways in which the priorities and power of American corporations have made our market economy both inegalitarian and inefficient.

The recent work of Barry and Irving Bluestone, Negotiating the Future, is a thoughtful discussion of the causes and remedies of our economic decline. The Bluestones begin with an accessible analysis of economic stagnation. Inadequate attention to public investment in both education and infrastructure has played a key role, along with an ill-conceived trade policy. Competition from foreign firms whose research-and-development capacities have been enhanced by their governments and which have made better use of their workers' talents is also an important part of the story. But the Bluestones' special contribution is their exposition of the ways the sclerotic and undemocratic nature of workplace organization prevents shop-floor workers from responding to foreign challenges in both productivity and quality.

Since the late 1960s, it has been clear that apathy and antagonism on the shop floor are major business problems. But too many U.S. firms responded to these concerns either with token quality-of-worklife programs or even by strengthening the supervisory core. Too many unions also emphasized only wages and job security and resisted rank-and-file efforts to raise issues of worker empowerment. Workers were left with rote-work, demeaning jobs, and productivity stagnated.

These problems impeded Government ability to stimulate the economy and exacerbated bad relations within the working class. When Government does spend money, much of it trickles out rather than down: It leads American consumers to purchase cheaper and better foreign goods.

Workers, for their part, resent a Government that provides even its current diminished level of welfare support for the poor while their hard work yields neither intellectual challenge nor much chance of economic progress. And because there now seems to be no politically acceptable way out of these dilemmas, politics itself becomes increasingly an endeavor to find scapegoats.

A politically acceptable solution for America must improve productivity and create new investment options without creating an omnicompetent state trying to micromanage all private economic decisions.

The Bluestones' answer is to create a more genuinely entrepreneurial capitalism by empowering workers on the shop floor. Workers would be involved in all areas of decision-making from job design to product planning, plant siting, finance, and advertising.

They clearly distinguish between token job enrichment and more fundamental efforts at worker empowerment. They make a convincing case that any form of worker empowerment has a better chance of succeeding when backed by a union with strength and willingness to protect the interests of its members.

Such a restructured workplace will be more egalitarian because it will give workers a chance to develop a broad range of skills. And such a workplace will be potentially more ecologically responsible as well. Workers who have more knowledge and control of their production process will be less likely to introduce a whole range of noxious technologies whose first victims are the workers themselves.

But corporate America faces agonizing decisions about democratizing the workplace, and the Bluestones don't adequately address this problem. They postulate that both sides will engage in bargaining over relative slices of the pie even as they cooperate to expand the role of workers. But at some point workers may come to the table with enough practical and intellectual resources to have the upper hand in such negotiations, a consideration not entirely lost on some management experts and an issue which European social democracies have had to face in various forms. Nonetheless, these would be nice problems for citizens of this country to face.

The Bluestones do realize that one cannot just wait for a restructured workplace to happen. In this regard, they are far ahead of the Clinton Administration, which seems to hope that talk will make it happen. They advocate labor-law reform, especially in areas dealing with replacement workers and procedures to make it easier to organize businesses. Unfortunately, they do not address the problem of democratizing unions themselves.

An industrial policy which democratized the firm and made more technological assistance available could make our economy more productive and any stimulus package more successful. By itself it would not, however, eliminate major tensions within the lower class. The long-term unemployed, African-Americans, and other minorities trapped in poverty or dependence will not actively support an industrial policy which leaves them out. Only an emphasis on an adequate minimum wage and job training for real jobs in the public and private sectors will open up the possibility of support by such groups for the kinds of contested changes that this economy will need.

Such an emphasis, along with support of service-sector unionizing by the more powerful industrial unions, will create increased consumer demand and greater economic productivity in this sector. Just as importantly, it will help foster the creation of the kinds of political coalitions required to build a more democratic economy in the face of inevitable business resistance.

Organizing around such a policy will not be an easy task. Years of cynicism about our private economy and about any form of public intervention must be overcome. But an analysis that spells out ways in which an accountable public authority can build adequate support for the private economy, and empower individual workers and firms to develop more effectively, is a good start.

The Bluestones show that Government can intervene in ways that foster more opportunities for initiative and self-development, and they make a convincing case that our politics will remain stalemated without such basic reforms.

It is up to us to accept their challenge. The birth of a new political economy will take a measure of civic commitment we have not seen in a long time, a willingness to develop, embrace, and implement a broad set of interrelated programs which are themselves necessary if we are to restore our confidence in ourselves.

This is a chicken-or-egg problem familiar to all proponents of fundamental social change. We can muse over the dilemma or plunge ahead into the politics of our communities and workplaces. The Bluestones have given us an inspiring start.