John Lewis’s outsourced cleaners are striking for a living wage. You might be inclined to file that under obvious – where in the world are cleaners not outsourced and underpaid? With John Lewis, though, it points to an important general problem with the viability of employee ownership of businesses (for readers outside Britain, the John Lewis Partnership is owned by its 81,000 employees; it is a successful operator of department stores and supermarkets, and its annual profit-sharing bonus for employees is widely reported in the media). Since the 1950s, economists have speculated that a profitable employee-owned business would not grow as much as the same business would if it were owned by capitalists, because the incumbent workers would not want to dilute their individual shares of profits by adding new worker-owners. This argument is known as the Illyrian Model, for reasons to do with the name of a province of the Roman Empire and the practice of worker-self management in Communist Yugoslavia, but that’s a story for another time. Within a capitalist economy, workers who happen to own their business can try to have the best of both worlds. By hiring non-owner employees whenever an opportunity for growth presents itself a two-tier system is produced – owners and non-owners – and this has been widely seen as leading to the degeneration of the worker-owned company, marking its gradual descent into capitalist ownership. Notice that the Illyrian model is both a prediction about the fate that will befall worker-owned enterprises (they will either stay small, or stop being worker-owned), and an explanation for why worker ownership is not more widespread. John Lewis has long been seen as an important counter-example to the Illyrian model, a case which casts doubt on the economists’ gloomy prediction.

[The political theorist Bonnie Honig talks to IPPR’s Juncture about the roots of her thinking, the radical and positive potential of political contestation and the importance of ‘public things’ in a vibrant democracy.] Nick Pearce: What’s noticeable about your work is that you have an engagement with continental theory which isn’t typical of Anglo-Saxon political philosophy. Where does that come from? Bonnie Honig: In the mid to late ‘80s I was in graduate school at John Hopkins University, where French theory was quite central to the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. Reading in that literature you take on board some of its conceptual apparatus, even if you are establishing your own relationship with it. So certain terms, like interpellation and discipline and normalisation, entered into my own vocabulary. The words stood for ideas I needed to draw on. If I blend analytic and continental archives, it was because I was driven to do so by my work on Hannah Arendt.

[The following piece is a reply to Craig Berry’s Unpacking the 99% (see below), in which he argues that the slogan may be unhelpful for Britain, as it obscures the realities of actual wealth distribution.] The statement ‘We are the 99%’ has the resounding attributes of any truly powerful slogan. It not only captures an issue but creates an identity. The true power in the slogan is that for perhaps the first time, the myriad interest groups within the 99% realised they had more in common with each other, than the 1%. This is a vital step in any truly republican movement. In defending the 99% slogan, one must first attest to its accurate portrayal of the single greatest failure of neoliberalism; breathtakingly unequal distribution of wealth. James S Henry, former chief economist for McKinsey and now steering committee member for the Tax Justice Network, presented global wealth distribution figures in 2012 to illustrate this point. According to Henry, just 0.1% of the world’s population owns 81% of the wealth; the other 99.9% of people left with 19% of the wealth. This is a quite stunning failure of an ideology that purports to be the champion of fairness, justice and opportunity. It is quite right that this be called out, and that the 99% understand their position not only relative to each other, but in the broader context which goes practically unspoken in popular discourse. [This is the final piece of a trio exploring wealth distribution in Britain. See the first, Policy commission on UK wealth distribution, by Karen Rowlingson. It sits within our Democratic Wealth debate, in partnership with OurKingdom.

Occupy has spotlighted the super-elite, but the ‘average Brit’ that is pitted against this class does not exist. For the struggle to empower all citizens to succeed in Britain, mapping actual wealth distribution is critical. [This is the second of three pieces exploring wealth distribution in Britain. It sits within our Democratic Wealth debate, in partnership with OurKingdom.]

The University of Birmingham established a Policy Commission on the Distribution of Wealth in September of last year to bring leading figures from the public, private and third sectors together with Birmingham academics to generate new thinking on this issue. We published Wealth inequality: key facts in December to stimulate debate and then identified a number of key questions about the nature of any ‘problem’ of wealth inequality. As one of those working on this project, I would like to set out the questions it is raising, put the call out for responses and invite readers to attend the two public debates we are holding after our evidence-gathering phase, which runs until the end of March. We plan to launch the findings of the Commission in October in the House of Lords. Details on how to get in touch are at the end of this piece. [This is the first of three pieces exploring wealth distribution in Britain. It sits within our Democratic Wealth debate, in partnership with OurKingdom]

Social democracy seems perpetually at a crossroads. But today, more than a hundred years after the first of the parties affiliated to the Second International won a plurality in a parliamentary election (in Finland in 1907; Anderson, 1992, 307), social democrats may finally be running out of rope. All the main European social democratic parties are facing a crisis, registering at long last endlessly postponed questions about their fundamental purpose.

Republicans seek to protect and promote individual freedom. So do libertarians of the right. The difference? Republicans recognise that the market is constructed through political, public action. Freedom in the republican tradition requires enjoyment of the fundamental liberties with the security that only a rule of law can provide. You must be publicly protected and resourced in such a way that it is manifest to you and to all that under local (not unnecessarily restrictive) conventions: you can speak your mind, associate with your fellows, enjoy communal resources, locate where you will, move occupation and make use of what is yours, without reason for fearing anyone or deferring to anyone. You have the standing of a liber or free person; you enjoy equal status under the public order and you share equally in control over that order. [This post is part of the Democratic Wealth series, hosted by Politics in Spires in partnership with Our Kingdom.]

Historically, republicanism has failed to reconcile the principle of non-domination with the realities of economic life. What do contemporary republican thinkers have to say about work and domination? [This post is part of the Democratic Wealth series, hosted by Politics in Spires in partnership with Our Kingdom. It is Part Two of a two-part piece on the history of republicanism and work]