Work is a central domain of human activity. Our working lives help to mould our character, and play an often-decisive role in whether our not we are able to succeed in the development and pursuit of our life-plans. Work can be a site of human liberation, and can provide opportunities for cooperative self-development. Alternatively, it can be a domain of oppression and domination, and can stultify rather than facilitate human flourishing.

Clearly the organisation and regulation of work, and of labour market institutions, is a fundamental matter of political concern, and generates foundational questions of social justice. Political philosophers have a responsibility to investigate the question of what sort of workplaces can legitimately be justified within democratic societies, and to develop a normative analysis and an agenda for reform that is sensitive both to the underlying conceptual and normative issues of social justice that are in play, and to the really-existing institutional structures and historical trajectories that shape the current structures of working life.

This project will seek to discharge that responsibility. It will seek to investigate the way in which work structures and distributes power and voice for employees, and asks what alternative arrangements might be desirable or accessible. In doing so, particular attention will be paid to how the commitments to equal concern and respect for democratic citizens can be extended into the workplace, and how democratic societies can use the power of the state to change the regulation of employment so that working life will more often take a form that is justifiable to free and equal citizens. At the same time, the research is also addressed to activists, unions and other institutional actors, with the aim of aiding in the task of developing a 21st century agenda for the reform of working life.