Henry Hansmann on codetermination

Codetermination is the practice of workers of a firm being able to vote for representatives on the board of directors in an enterprise. It has been getting a bit of press lately, in the US at least, thanks to a new bill from Senator Elizabeth Warren. When thinking about whether codetermination is a good thing or not it's useful to ask who should own a company and why. In his article 'Ownership of the Firm' Henry Hansmann makes a simple but important point about a firm's owners,

"In determining whether the costs of ownership are manageable for a given class of patrons, homogeneity of interest appears to be an especially important consideration. In particular, it is evidently a significant factor in the widespread success of the modern investor-owned business corporation, and it may be among the best explanations for the relative paucity of worker­owned firms, which otherwise have some significant efficiency advantages" (Hansmann 1988: 301-2).

Heterogeneity of interests can increase the firm's costs of decision making substantially. Codetermination seems to be the very opposite of 'homogeneity of interest' in that it deliberately sets out to increase the 'heterogeneity of interest'.

When discussing the German experience with codetermination in his book "The Ownership of Enterprise" Hansmann writes,

"[...] the worker representatives on the board represent constituencies with diverse interests. The legally mandated system for selecting worker representatives reinforces this, because it requires that there be at least one representative from each of three classes of workers: wage earners, salaried employees, and managerial employees" (Hansmann 1996: 111)

Hansmann goes on the say

"From all that has been said above, one would not expect that this system of representation would be highly viable as a means of governing the firm. Given the apparent difficulty of making collective self-governance workable for employees alone when the labor force is heterogeneous, it would be surprising if a firm's electoral mechanisms, including voting for and within the board of directors, could effectively be employed not only to resolve conflicts among different groups of employees but also to deal with the more serious conflicts of interest between labor and capital" (Hansmann 1996: 111)

Hansmann then notes

"The German expereince does not clearly belie that expectation" (Hansmann 1996: 111).

Hansmann then raises an important point about codetermination,

"[...] codetermination has been imposed upon German firms by force of law; no similar system seems to have been adopted by any significant number of firms either inside or outside of Germany in the absence of compulsion" (Hansmann 1996: 111).

You have to ask, if codetermination is so good for the firm why isn't it adopted voluntarily?

Refs.:

• Hansmann, Henry (1988). 'Ownership of the Firm', Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 4(2) Autumn: 267-304.
• Hansmann, Henry (1996). The Ownership of Enterprise, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.