Can a society call itself democratic if its citizens spend much of their waking life subject to the dictatorial control of bosses? Today the question may provoke puzzlement: Why not, as long as the electoral system is in ship shape? But for much of the twentieth century, a critical mass of citizens on both sides of the Atlantic would have answered “no.”

Twentieth-century democratic thinkers were intensely focused on the causes of totalitarianism. Some worried that workplace dictatorships cultivated undemocratic habits and attitudes that would spill into the polity and soften the ground for authoritarian political movements. Others worried that workers’ frustration with dictatorial bosses fostered radical support for socialist or communist alternatives to both capitalism and liberal democracy.

The versions of “industrial democracy” and “industrial citizenship” that took hold in North America and Europe helped to shore up both capitalism and political democracy. Workers won the right to form independent trade unions, to bargain collectively with employers, and to exercise economic leverage through strikes. In some European countries, this was supplemented by enterprise-based works councils and codetermination on company boards.

To be sure, workplaces thus democratized were nothing like the Greek polis. Managers got on with managing, and workers got on with their jobs. But industrial democracy, as embodied in collective bargaining, was the foundation of an implicit social contract for labor. In exchange for a measure of subordination at work and de-escalation of industrial conflict, workers gained economic security, a fairer distribution of resources and power, and a kind of civic respect in the polity. Workers backed by trade unions – in the vivid formulation of republican theorist Philip Pettit – could stand tall and look their bosses in the eye without scraping or fawning.

After a good run of several decades, however, those industrial relations structures began to lose their grip in the 1970s. Today just 6 percent of U.S. private-sector workers and 12 percent of UK workers are union members.

Union decline in some ways mirrors the broader decline of “intermediary” institutions of civil society, including political parties and civic and fraternal associations. But union decline has its own causes and consequences. It has contributed to growing economic inequality, and perhaps to the rise of ethno-nationalist politics among working-class voters, both of which threaten the sustainability of capitalism and democracy. As for causes, union decline is bound up with a shift of the workforce from foundries and factories to offices and services, and from vertically integrated firms to fissured supply chains.

Today many workers have neither a boss nor a workplace in their conventional guises. Some workers are hired, fired, and managed by algorithm, and perform “gigs” dealt out through digital platforms. Others work remotely, without the face-to-face cooperation and sociability that shared work often entails. These trends advance the atomization and disintegration of social life, and pose steep challenges to existing models of union organizing.

Workers still want and need a stronger voice in their working lives. But they will not get that by simply refurbishing the labor institutions fashioned in the 1930s. They need a mix of solutions, including sectoral collective bargaining, worker centers, enterprise-based representation structures, and tripartite labor standards boards. Democratic processes will yield different answers in different jurisdictions, sectors, and occupations, and that will require political creativity and coalition-building (as well as some devolution of labor lawmaking authority to subnational units of government).

For decent and workable solutions to emerge, however, workers must be armed with some basic legal entitlements to expression and association free from governmental and employer interference. Workers should have rights to contest employer power and stand up for their interests both in the polity and at work, and both individually and collectively, whether informally, through traditional unions, or otherwise.

Those contestation rights cannot be absolute or unbounded, of course. But neither should they be confined to polite disagreement. Workers’ right to contest employer power, including through disruptive means like strikes, is among the basic elements of the old model of industrial democracy that should be vigorously defended, even as many institutional particulars of the model lose traction.

Devising a decent, democratic, and sustainable variety of capitalism will require reinventing “industrial democracy” and “industrial citizenship” for a post-industrial era. Much like the twentieth-century invention of those concepts and institutions, their reinvention will have to come from workers and their own associations. A just and stable democratic society requires equitable mechanisms for workers to pursue their collective interests at work. Lacking those mechanisms, workers may come together around causes and leaders far less supportive of democratic values than unions have been.

This post is cross-posted as part of our cooperation with the NYU Law Democracy Project. The “100 Ideas in 100 Days” essay series by the NYU Law Democracy Project brings together experts from across the ideological spectrum to explore the challenges facing democracies in the United States and around the world. Read more about the Democracy Project and the “100 Ideas in 100 Days” series here. The authors are working on a book applying neo-republican theory, and freedom as non-domination, to the law of work.