Does larger-order economic democracy require that work itself be made more
democratic? How should the relationship between current practices of employee ownership
within capitalist economies and possibilities for broader political-economic reform be
conceptualized? This paper introduces and critically compares three competing views on the
relationship between workplace democracy and economic democracy: first, the view that
workplace democracy stands in an orthogonal, and perhaps even opposed, relationship to
economic democracy writ large; second the view that workplace democracy and larger-order
economic democracy are co-extensive, and that workplace democracy is fundamentally
constitutive of meaningful economic democracy; and third, the view that while there is an affinity
between workplace democracy and economic democracy, expanding the scope of democracy at
work is but one, and perhaps not the most important, structural requirement of larger-order
economic democracy. I examine these competing views with primary reference to three recent
efforts to articulate what a workable political-economic alternative might look like: the coupon
market socialism proposal of John E. Roemer, the model of “Economic Democracy” developed
by David Schweickart, and the “Pluralist Commonwealth” model of Gar Alperovitz