GEORGIA LAW REVIEW - StephanKinsella.com

GEORGIA LAW REWEW
2. Employees. -The struggle between corporations and labor is
of course an old one. In addition to the traditional complaints con-
cerning wages, hours, working conditions, and collective bargaining,
there are the more recent criticisms relating to sexual, racial, and
other forms of discrimination, to the lack of employee participation
in corporate decisionmaking, to the dehumanizing authority struc-
ture between management and workers, and to the lack of protec-
tion for employees' civil rights. Here too corrective proposals have
the flavor of greater "democratization" of the corporation; for deci-
sionmaking would be taken out of the hands of management and
put into the hands of either government regulators or workers them-
selves. Thus proposals include new regulations to prohibit discrimi-
nation, to broaden "affirmative action," to restrict a corporation's
right to fire employees, to mandate due process procedures for the
adjudication of "rights conflicts," and even to encourage
"workplace democracy" by permitting employees to determine a
broad range of corporate issues.33
3. Consumers and the Public. -The corporation-consumer rela-
tionship has received so much attention in recent years that com-
plaints in this regard need only be mentioned: charges concerning
defective or dangerous products, deceptive advertising, and collu-
sion and price-fixing are commonplace. Likewise, we need only
mention the criticisms of the corporation's behavior vis-a-vis the
public in general: corporations pollute the environment, reduce the
quality of life by stressing "economic values" over "human values,"
bribe public officials, "exploit" poor nations, and on and on. In each
of these cases reformers call for more public regulation, ranging from
a federal consumer protection agency with broad powers of inquiry
and enforcement, to stiffer anti-trust regulations and enforcement,
to various divestiture proposals, to community sanction for corpo-
33 Thus Yale political scientist Robert Dahl, in a passage as noteworthy for its precision of
thought as for its sentiment:
[Wlhy should people who own shares be given the privileges of citizenship in the
government of the firm when citizenship is denied to other people who also make vital
contributions to the firm? . . . The people I have in mind are, of course, employees
and customers, without whom the firm could not exist, and the general public, without
whose support for (or acquiescence in) the myriad protections and services of the state
the firm would instantly disappear.
R. NADER, supra note 25, at 123-24. See also A. CONARD, CORPORATIONS IN PERSPECTIVE 348
(1976); D. EWING, FREEDOM INSIDE THE ORGANIZATION: BRINGING CIVIL LIBERTIES TO THE
WORKPLACE (1977); Berle, Constitutional Limitations on Corporate Activity-Protection of
Personal Rights from Invasion Through Economic Power, 100 U. PA. L. REV. 933 (1952).
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