Begum Icelliler

• Dissertation: The Workplace and Democracy

In recent years, reforms like universal basic income, guaranteed free time, and part-time work for all have been proposed to make work more just. All these proposals must go through channels of political democracy to be implemented. The problem is that democratic theorists don’t tend to think about work. When they do, they tend see work as an encroachment on democracy. While democratic theorists have not thought much about work, theorists of work have thought deeply about democracy. Many of them advocate for workplace democracy, which transforms the labor-management relationship into one akin to the citizen-representative relationship. Workplace democrats argue that this transformation is necessary to eliminate the dominating power of managers and corporations.

Neither side has considered how work can align more closely with democratic principles without democratizing firms, or how aligning work with democratic principles can strengthen political democracy. I argue that making work and democracy more just requires recognizing the workplace as a site of democratic formation essential to the well-functioning of a democratic polity. Work is constituted by social relations, both hierarchical and non-hierarchical. Both of these dimensions play a central role in shaping who we are as citizens. On the one hand, not all non-hierarchical workplace relations are compatible with democratic citizenship. For instance, extreme labor market segregation can reinforce existing social hierarchies by creating widespread status beliefs. On the other hand, hierarchical workplace relations can be compatible with democratic citizenship. This can be realized through institutions that organize workers for the purpose of constraining managerial power.

• Icelliler, B. (2025). “The Necessity of Labor Unions for Curbing Domination”. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1–23.

Ordinary citizens must act in concert to fight domination in their workplaces, but they face formidable barriers to their collective action. I argue that labor unions mitigate the collective action problems posed by capitalist labor markets by building collective power from the ground up and leveraging their distinct institutional capacity to lower the costs of collective action. Labor unions exhibit three core functions that serve to build collective power. These are epistemic, deliberative, and pedagogical. At the macro level, labor unions leverage their distinctive institutional capacity, including resources, institutional knowledge, leadership, and decision-making rules to curb domination. In institutionalizing worker power, labor unions mitigate the constraints on collective action inherent in capitalism.

• Constraining Managerial Power Without Workplace Democracy, In Preparation
  • Recipient of the 2026 GISME Prize in Markets and Ethics

Many workplace democrats are committed to capitalism for its capacity for efficient production but hold that firms should be democratized to eliminate the dominating power of managers and corporations. Workplace democracy transforms the labor-management relationship into one akin to the citizen-representative relationship to make management accountable to workers. This gives rise to what I call the representation problem. Even as a firm is democratized, its shareholders continue to exercise uncontrolled power over the firm. Because exit power can effectively bypass democratic procedures, it remains a source of unaccountable power. Taking seriously the structural dynamics of capitalism, as well as the distinctly economic nature of firms, leads me to argue that consciously and proactively experimenting with sectoral bargaining in the United States is a superior alternative to workplace democracy.