EMPLOYEES' RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN DECISION MAKING: AN ETHICAL ANALYSIS

In this article, I examine the employees' right to participate in decision making. In the first section, I give two arguments in support of a right to participation. According to the first one, participation to decision making is necessary for preserving employees' dignity. According to the second one, employees have a special status among stakeholders, which entitles them to be involved in decision making. I also challenge the relevance of the minimal sense of consent. In the second section, I analyze the analogical argument based on the parallel between government-citizen and employer-employee relationships. I analyze two possible dissimilarities: voluntariness of employment and public/private character of ownership. I conclude that the first one only brings a difference of degree between the two terms of analogy, but the second one is relevant. Nevertheless, this essential difference does not fully remove the force of the arguments in the first part. In the last section, I sketch a more precise view of employee' participation, and I argue for a deliberative view of decision making.