"This is why labour law belongs at the centre of these debates. Labour law is not merely a technical field regulating wages, contracts and dismissal. It is one of the principal ways in which the rule of law enters the workplace. Employers are granted legal powers to direct, monitor and discipline workers. Those powers are not natural facts. They are constituted and structured by law. Labour law exists, in part, to ensure that these powers do not become arbitrary and all-encompassing, and that workers do not cease to be citizens the moment they enter the workplace. Workers’ rights, in that sense, are not just social entitlements. They are democratic safeguards.

The urgency of this becomes clearer still once we turn to artificial intelligence and algorithmic management at work. These technologies are usually discussed in the language of innovation, efficiency and competitiveness. But they also reorganise and reinforce authority. Employers increasingly use digital systems to hire, direct, evaluate and discipline workers, while collecting immense quantities of data about productivity, pace, location, communications and behaviour. The point is not simply that privacy is endangered, though it is. The point is that managerial command is being intensified through technology."

https://www.socialeurope.eu/silicon-valleys-anti-democratic-turn-begins-at-work

#SiliconValley #EconomicDemocracy #Authoritarianism #Surveillance #AI

Myths vs. Facts: The Reality of Billionaire Wealth

#EconomicDemocracy #economy #InequalityReport #Leadership

https://masonq.com/2026/03/27/myths-vs-facts-the-reality-of-billionaire-wealth/

"National economic planning would be opened up to popular input. At the enterprise or business-firm level, workers would take over management of day-to-day operations. This is all foreign to liberalism but not to social democracies around the world (though the extent of worker management in social democratic countries is still rather limited).

When Sanders broke the national political ice on the word “socialism” in 2016, I recall sappy messages to the effect that “socialism is nice; even your public library is socialist.” But that’s wrong — socialism is so much more than that.

Here I want to describe some economic policy projects that might define a distinctively socialist (or social democratic) approach to policy in the United States today, one that pushes beyond the frontiers of liberalism. These are differences in kind, not of degree. For the principal US social democratic projects, I suggest the following breakdown:

- Labor power
- Industrial policy
- Social insurance
- Social ownership
- Anti-federalism

There are traces of all of these in the history of liberal social policy, but I want to highlight the categorical distinctions between liberal and socialist approaches to each element. Such distinctions can give rise to political themes and to explicit campaigns.

(Socialists also crucially differ from liberals in our commitment to internationalism and our opposition to the United States’ militaristic imperialism. But I focus here on the distinctive elements of socialists’ domestic policy agenda.)"

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/socialism-liberalism-economic-policy-agenda/

#Socialism #USA #EconomicPolicy #PoliticalEconomy #EconomicDemocracy