By Andrew Cumbers

- The Case for Economic Democracy (2020)
- Reclaiming Public Ownership; Making Space for Economic Democracy (2012)
The idea that the people have a right to shape political decisions through democratic means is widely accepted. The same cannot be said of the decisions that impact on our everyday economic life in the workplace and beyond.
Andrew Cumbers shows in The Case for Economic Democracy why this is wrong, and why, in the context of the rising tide of populism and the perceived crisis of liberal democracy, economic democracy's time has come. Four decades of market deregulation, financialisation, economic crisis and austerity has meant a loss of economic control and security for the majority of the world's population. The solution must involve allowing people to 'take back control' of their economic lives.
Cumbers goes beyond older traditions of economic democracy to develop an ambitious new framework that includes a traditional concern with workplace rights and collective bargaining, but shifts the focus to include consideration of individual economic rights and processes of public engagement and deliberation beyond the workplace.
The Case for Economic Democracy is a topical and original book that will be essential reading for anyone interested in radical solutions for our economic and political crises.
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Table of Contents of The Case for Economic Democracy
- Introduction
- A Brief History of Economic Democracy as Industrial Democracy
- The Three Pillars of Economic Democracy
- Putting Economic Democracy into Practice
- Conclusion
Panel Discussion with Cumbers on Public Ownership
At a panel discussion hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington on April 10, 2019, experts from both sides of the Atlantic discussed how activists were successfully pushing back against privatization and reclaiming a deep and positive heritage of public ownership:
Relevant Links
- "Economic democracy: why handing power back to the people will fix our broken system" - article by Cumbers on The Conversation, 5 December 2019
- "Reconfiguring Economic Democracy: Generating New Forms of Collective Agency, Individual Economic Freedom and Public Participation" - article by Cumbers and three other researchers in the academic journal Work, Employment and Society, November 2019
About Andrew Cumbers
Andrew Cumbers is Professor in Regional Political Economy at the University of Glasgow. He has written extensively on the problems and the prospects for a more democratic and egalitarian economy and society. He is currently working on a project funded by The Economic and Social Research Council to create an Economic Democracy Index. His book Reclaiming Public Ownership (Zed) won the 2015 Gunnar Myrdal Prize for Evolutionary Political Economy.