2.1 Carens’s Theory of Social Membership

In The Ethics of Immigration, Carens (Reference Carens2013) develops his social membership argument as the organizing principle for thinking about inclusion in democratic states. He starts from the “conventional view” that states may exercise discretionary control over admissions and then interrogates what follows from widely shared democratic commitments once people are in fact living within a state’s territory (Carens Reference Carens2013: 10). The social membership argument is the core of this internal critique. It holds that the moral standing of non-citizens is not exhausted by their formal legal status. Instead, their claims to rights, security of residence and eventually citizenship arise from the social reality of living, working and forming relationships inside a political community over time (Carens Reference Carens2013: 89, 158–159).

Carens captures this view in the basic idea that “social membership matters morally” (Carens Reference Carens2013: 158). The starting point is a descriptive claim: people who live within a state’s territorial boundaries participate in its social and economic life, pay taxes, form families, send their children to school, and build life plans whose feasibility depends on remaining where they are. These facts of presence and participation make them members of the society in a sociological sense, irrespective of whether the law categorizes them as citizens, permanent residents, temporary workers or irregular migrants (Carens Reference Carens2013: 159–160). The normative claim is that such social membership generates moral claims on the political community, and that those claims deepen as people’s ties and life plans root them more firmly in that place (Carens Reference Carens2013: 158–159, 165).

Time is therefore a central element of Carens’s principle. He argues that residence and time function as administrable proxies for “richer, deeper forms of connection” that are otherwise hard to measure without objectionable intrusiveness or discrimination (Carens Reference Carens2013: 165). Someone who arrives yesterday has only very weak claims beyond basic human rights. Someone who has lived and worked in a society for many years has become enmeshed in dense networks of social cooperation and expectation. They have developed attachments, accumulated contributions and structured their life around the assumption that they belong there. For such individuals, Carens argues, deportation is a profound moral wrong (Carens Reference Carens2013: 105–106; Carens Reference Carens2010: 50–51).

On this basis, Carens contends that “the moral right of states to apprehend and deport irregular migrants erodes with the passage of time” (Carens Reference Carens2013: 150). Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that a democratic state is initially entitled to exclude and deport those who enter without authorization, that entitlement weakens as people settle. Over time, the weight of social membership comes to dominate the initial fact of law-breaking. What may be permissible in the first months or few years after entry becomes objectionable once individuals have built extensive lives in the host society, especially when they have formed families, are raising children there, or have spent significant portions of their working lives contributing to the local economy (Carens Reference Carens2010: 17–24; Carens Reference Carens2013: 147–151).

Carens develops this temporal logic across a range of cases. For children, the threshold is particularly short. Those born and raised in a state are, for him, already full social members from early childhood. They grow up speaking the local language, internalizing its norms and regarding the country of residence as home (Carens Reference Carens2013: 24). To deny them secure legal status or eventual citizenship is to treat them as perpetual outsiders in the only society they know, a stance he regards as incompatible with democratic principles of equal membership (Carens Reference Carens2013: Ch. 2). The same reasoning extends, with appropriate temporal adjustment, to children who arrive at a young age and receive their education in the host society. Their socialization within the community grounds a strong right to remain and to be recognized as full members in due course (Carens Reference Carens2013: 48–49).

For adults who are lawfully present as permanent residents, Carens argues that the transition from social membership to citizenship should be facilitated. Since permanent residents are typically long-term members of the society in all but formal status, democratic principles “severely limit the conditions which a democratic state may impose as prerequisites for citizenship” (Carens Reference Carens2013: 45, 89). For example, demanding cultural or linguistic tests cannot be justified by appeal to the very values of equality and inclusion that liberal democracies profess (Carens Reference Carens2013: 58). Time and residence, together with a basic expectation of law-abiding conduct, are sufficient to ground a claim to citizenship for long-term residents whose lives are already embedded in the host society.Footnote ³

Carens further applies the social membership argument to temporary workers. He accepts that genuinely short-term labour migration schemes can be compatible with democratic values if people come, work for a limited period and return, but he insists that “democratic states cannot keep people indefinitely in a ‘temporary’ status” (Carens Reference Carens2013: 113). When states repeatedly renew “temporary” permits, or tacitly tolerate the long-term presence of workers without offering them a path out of precarious status, they in effect create a permanently subordinated class (Carens Reference Carens2013: 116). Because these workers contribute to the host society and sink roots there, their social membership deepens, and with it their moral claim to secure residence and, eventually, to full political inclusion (Carens Reference Carens2013: Chs. 6, 8).

In summary, Carens’s social membership argument reframes questions of immigration and citizenship as questions about how democracies should treat those who have, through residence and participation over time, become part of the “we” of the political community. The central normative move is to treat time spent living within a state’s territory not as a morally neutral factor but as a generator of moral claims: to stay, to be protected by the law on equal terms, and ultimately to share in collective self-government. This temporal account of membership provides the foundation for extending democratic inclusion beyond formal citizens to long-term residents of all kinds, including those whose legal status is insecure. The deepening of social ties transforms their status. What began as a temporary or even unauthorized presence evolves into membership, generating a robust right to remain and, eventually, to full citizenship. This principle is implicitly recognized in democratic practices such as pathways to regularization after a certain period (Carens Reference Carens2013). Time, in this framework, fundamentally alters the moral obligations of the political community toward the individual.

2.2 Time and Social Integration in the Firm

I contend that a parallel process occurs within the firm. Just as living in a country over time transforms a newcomer into a member with deepening claims to citizenship, working in a firm over time transforms an employee into a member of that firm’s community, with claims to what I call workplace citizenship. This status entails not merely material benefits, such as seniority pay, but also political rights within the firm, such as a voice and a vote in the decisions that govern the workplace.

To sustain this analogy, I draw on recent work in the political theory of the firm, which challenges the atomistic view of the corporation as a mere “nexus of contracts” (Alchian and Demsetz Reference Alchian and Demsetz1972). Political theorists and business ethicists increasingly describe firms as cooperative enterprises and social communities that exercise power over their members (Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Anderson Reference Anderson2017; Herzog Reference Herzog2018; Singer Reference Singer2019; Kwok Reference Kwok2020; Claassen Reference Claassen2023). On this view, firms are sites of ongoing joint production under shared norms. They generate internal cultures, role expectations and patterns of authority that deeply shape employees’ lives. Estlund’s Reference Estlund(2003) study of the contemporary workplace as a primary locus of intensive, often involuntary cooperation across social cleavages, reinforces this picture of the firm as a socially thick environment rather than a series of arm’s‑length bargains.

Carens’s membership argument can then be transposed from the state to this meso‑level community. As mentioned above, Carens (Reference Carens2013) argues that the moral claim to citizenship and associated political rights is grounded primarily in people’s embeddedness in networks of relationships, associations and identities within a polity. Over time, as individuals live, work, form families and participate in local institutions, they “sink roots” and thereby acquire membership‑specific rights, including secure residence and political inclusion, even if they originally entered only as temporary migrants (Carens Reference Carens2013: 158–159). Treating the firm as a social community reveals structurally similar integration dynamics. A newly hired worker, like a recent arrival in a state, typically has only weak social ties, limited knowledge of local norms and a tenuous expectation of remaining. At this initial stage, the relationship is largely instrumental and contractual: the exchange of labour for wages with minimal mutual dependence. On Carens’s (Reference Carens2013) account, such a person counts at most as a very thin member, whose claims to governance rights on social‑membership grounds are correspondingly weak.

Over time, however, many employees become woven into the organization’s fabric. They acquire firm‑specific skills and institutional knowledge (Hsieh Reference Hsieh2005; Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Singer Reference Singer2019); they develop friendships, informal networks and professional reputations (Estlund 2003; Herzog Reference Herzog2018); they internalize the workplace culture and often come to identify, to some degree, with the firm’s projects (Herzog Reference Herzog2018; Singer Reference Singer2019; Kwok and Li Reference Kwok and Li2026). Recall the opening story of Mike Heil: part of the reason we find the firing decision morally problematic is that he was being expelled from dense networks of friendship and organizational cultures into which he had already sunk deep roots, after three decades of working there. Simultaneously, the firm invests in their training, structures workflows around their expertise and plans on their continued presence. This pattern of mutual dependence and shared history closely matches what Carens describes as social membership in the civic case: being situated within a “dense network of relationships and associations” that are intimately tied to a particular community (Carens Reference Carens2013: 164). It is, in Marshallian terms, a sharing in the organization’s “social heritage”: its accumulated practices, norms and common life (Marshall and Bottomore Reference Marshall and Bottomore1992: 6).

Again, Estlund’s (Reference Estlund2003) sociological work on workplaces as arenas of sustained cooperation and civic skill‑building demonstrates the normative significance of this embeddedness: long‑standing workplace bonds can foster trust, mutual recognition and capacities that matter for democratic life more broadly (see also Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Anderson Reference Anderson2017; Herzog Reference Herzog2018; Kwok Reference Kwok2020). Empirical work on democratic firms likewise suggests that when workers participate in governance, the workplace becomes a site where broader solidaristic attitudes and public‑regarding orientations could potentially be cultivated (Harnecker Reference Harnecker2009; Weber et al. Reference Weber, Unterrainer and Schmid2009; Kwok Reference Kwok2020).

Transposed into Carens’s framework, these imply a time‑sensitive case for workplace democratic inclusion. While short‑term or highly mobile employees may have only limited claims to voice grounded in social membership, long‑term employees who have sunk deep roots in a firm possess a prima facie claim to participate in the governance of the organization whose internal norms and decisions pervasively structure their lives. The emerging political theory of the firm, which already evaluates corporate power through democratic and egalitarian lenses (Anderson Reference Anderson2017; Singer Reference Singer2019; Claassen Reference Claassen2023; Kwok Reference Kwok2025), thus provides a conceptual bridge between Carens’s macro‑level theory of social membership and a meso‑level argument for extending democratic inclusion to entrenched members of the workplace community.

2.3 From Membership to Democratic Claims

The critical question is why this social membership generates democratic claims, rather than merely claims to fair treatment and seniority-based benefits. The answer lies in (1) the nature of the firm as a political governance structure, (2) the socialization that occurs within the firm and (3) claims to legitimacy that arise from being subjected to a governance structure under which one develops social ties that matter significantly to one’s well-being and identity.

Analogous to the political community, being subject to an organization’s authority and contributing to its ongoing success give rise to considerations of justice. The longer one has lived under a set of rules and contributed to the enterprise governed by those rules, the stronger one’s claim to participate in shaping them. This intuition is central to democratic theory. As Abizadeh (Reference Abizadeh2008) argues, regarding state borders, democratic legitimacy requires that individuals should not be indefinitely subjected to coercive institutions without having a say in them. While workplace authority, to a certain degree, differs from state coercion (a point that will be addressed in section 3), it is nonetheless a pervasive form of power (Hsieh Reference Hsieh2005; Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Anderson Reference Anderson2017). If an employee is subject to the firm’s authority day after day, year after year, democratic principles suggest they should be recognized as co-authors of the rules, not merely their subjects.

Time, in this context, functions as a proxy for at least three morally relevant factors that strengthen the claim to inclusion. It is important to begin by clarifying that the argument does not treat time as intrinsically valuable. Time’s normative role is mediating. It serves as a workable proxy for the cumulative and partly irreversible investments that workers make in and through the organization. As tenure grows, (i) workers typically contribute to collective output across repeated organizational cycles, (ii) adapt their skills and life plans to the firm in ways that reduce the feasibility of exit and deepen vulnerability and (iii) become socially recognized as “one of us” through cooperation, shared routines and expectations of loyalty and reciprocity. These dimensions are distinct but reinforce one another: dependence makes voice more urgent, while contribution and integration make exclusion harder to justify and, potentially, more insulting. The “sinking roots” metaphor is thus normative in that it marks when employment begins to structure a person’s prospects and identity in ways comparable to residence in a polity, as is the case for most full-time employment relationships today.

The first morally relevant factor concerns contribution and cooperation. Long-serving workers have contributed consistently to the firm’s productive achievements. Their labour is integral to the firm’s value creation and to the dense web of routines, relationships and tacit knowledge on which production relies. From a broadly liberal egalitarian perspective, those who participate over time in a cooperative scheme that generates benefits for all are owed a fair say in how that scheme is structured (e.g. Rawls Reference Rawls2001). While Rawls applied this to the basic structure of society, the underlying reciprocity principle extends naturally to firms as ongoing systems of cooperation (Singer Reference Singer2019). Other political theorists of workplace democracy argue that persistent contributors acquire a claim not merely to fair compensation but also to non-domination in the governance of the enterprise (González-Ricoy Reference González-Ricoy2014, Reference González-Ricoy2022; Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Landemore and Ferreras Reference Landemore and Ferreras2016; Anderson Reference Anderson2017; Breen Reference Breen2017; Kwok Reference Kwok2021). In this sense, as long as one accepts the idea that long-term contributions and cooperation generate claims to a fair share of benefits, and accepts the idea that a fair share of benefits also includes a fair share of decision-making power on issues that matter significantly to one’s interests and well-being, then long-term employees have a strong claim to democratic inclusion.

Social psychology and organizational sociology reinforce this normative claim. Research on organizational justice shows that people care deeply about fair procedures and opportunities for voice, not only about distributive outcomes (Lind and Tyler Reference Lind and Tyler1988; Greenberg Reference Greenberg1990; Adamovic Reference Adamovic2023). Tyler and Blader (Reference Tyler and Blader2000), for example, demonstrate that when group members perceive procedures as fair and feel respected, they tend to be more willing to cooperate and accept burdens for the sake of the collective. These findings suggest that contributors also desire to be co-authors of the firm’s cooperative practice. Denying them a say in governance while relying on their sustained cooperation exploits the very reciprocity on which the organization depends. In this sense, the longer such denial, the deeper such injustice.

The second factor is the employee’s reliance on, and vulnerability to, the firm. As the length of employment increases, an employee’s life prospects become more tightly bound to the organization: mortgages, family plans, skill profiles and social networks are growingly organized around continued employment. In some of the places where individual and family insurance are tied to employment status, such vulnerability is even higher. Empirically, internal labour markets and firm-specific skills mean that exit typically becomes more costly as workers specialize more (Jacobson et al. Reference Jacobson, LaLonde and Sullivan1993; Neal Reference Neal1995; Hsieh Reference Hsieh2005). Hirschman (Reference Hirschman1970) suggests that when exit is difficult or costly, voice becomes a more necessary institutional mechanism for contesting deterioration. In contemporary political theory, republican and democratic workplace theorists make precisely this point: because exit from employment is neither costless nor equally available, reliance on formal freedom of contract is insufficient, and workers require institutionalized voice to protect them from arbitrary managerial power (Hsieh Reference Hsieh2005; Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Anderson Reference Anderson2017; Kwok Reference Kwok2021). Moreover, because systems of appeal and contestation might not be sufficient to check arbitrary managerial power, some workplace democrats further claim that democratic inclusion is thereby necessary (Breen Reference Breen2015; González-Ricoy Reference González-Ricoy2022). The claim from the temporal account, then, is that the longer employees have been integrated into a firm, the more dependent and vulnerable they become, and the stronger their claim to democratic inclusion.

This deepening dependence and vulnerability are both economic and psychological. Social-psychological and organizational research on employee voice and silence shows that dependence, perceived power asymmetries and fear of retaliation systematically deter workers from speaking up, even when they observe serious problems (Milliken et al. Reference Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin2003; Morrison Reference Morrison2011). Employees who feel they “can’t afford” to alienate supervisors and risk their jobs are especially likely to remain silent about issues that threaten organizational performance or their own well-being (Milliken et al. Reference Milliken, Morrison and Hewlin2003: 1453). Procedural justice research also indicates that when decision-making processes deny meaningful voice and respectful treatment, people tend to judge procedures as less fair; such judgements are associated with lower legitimacy and with reduced cooperation or greater oppositional behaviour (Lind and Tyler Reference Lind and Tyler1988; Tyler and Blader Reference Tyler and Blader2000). Against this backdrop, structural inequalities within firms undermine workers’ agency and moral standing unless counteracted by more democratic forms of governance, such as board-level worker representation and multi-level participatory schemes (Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Kwok and Li Reference Kwok and Li2026). In Carens’s (Reference Carens2013) terms, long-term and multi-dimensional dependence on a social structure intensifies the moral wrong of exclusion from the rights and protections associated with membership. Applied to the firm, this temporal account implies that the more a worker’s life becomes enmeshed in the organization, the stronger their claim not merely to consultation but to democratic co-authorship of the rules that govern them.

The third factor is the long-term social integration of the employee into the firm. As workers remain with the same organization for years or decades, they typically accumulate dense webs of relationships with co-workers and supervisors, shared routines and narratives, and a sense of belonging to a collective “we”. Social identity theory explains how such group memberships become important components of individuals’ self-conceptions: people come to define themselves, and to be recognized by others, as members of particular collectives, and they expect this membership to be acknowledged and respected (Ashforth and Mael Reference Ashforth and Mael1989; Tajfel and Turner Reference Tajfel, Turner, Jost and Sidanius2004). In organizational settings, this often takes the form of organizational identification, in which the organization becomes incorporated into employees’ self-understandings and guides their loyalties and expectations of reciprocity (Ashforth and Mael Reference Ashforth and Mael1989). Research on job embeddedness provides insights into how, over time, employees become tied into “nets” of links, fit and anticipated sacrifices that bind them to the organizational community (Mitchell et al. Reference Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski and Erez2001): long-serving workers develop more extensive on-the-job relationships, structure their residential and communal ties around the firm, and stand to lose more if they leave. From this perspective, tenure is a proxy for the depth of integration between the firm and the employee’s wider life-world.

Over time, this integration tends to transform workers’ orientations and personal lives. Research on collective psychological ownership shows that as group members work interdependently over time, they may develop a shared sense that the organization and its outputs are “ours”, especially where members collectively recognize shared control, shared knowing and shared investment in the work (Pierce and Jussila Reference Pierce and Jussila2010). Empirical sociological work similarly shows how long-term employment could potentially reorganize family routines, temporal rhythms and even emotional life around workplace demands and culture (Hochschild Reference Hochschild1997, Reference Hochschild1983). Against this empirical and theoretical backdrop, the exclusion of long-serving employees from corporate governance is not a neutral allocation of decision rights; it misrecognizes as outsiders those whose life plans, identities and social relations have become deeply interwoven with the firm. Analogous to Carens’s (Reference Carens2013) claim that “deep roots” in a territorial society ground moral claims to citizenship, long-term cooperative labour, dependence and social integration within the firm ground a claim to meaningful democratic inclusion in its rule-making structures. In other words, the temporal workplace membership view developed here treats the passage of time in employment as morally salient because it tracks the deepening of social and personal integration. A long-term employee is therefore a member toward whom the firm has obligations of reciprocity and recognition in governance. On this account, the longer employees have been integrated into the firm, the stronger their claim to be included as equal participants in collective decisions.

Put simply, the Carensian social membership argument provides a powerful framework for understanding how time transforms the employment relationship. It moves beyond a purely contractual view to recognize the emergence of social membership. This membership, grounded in sustained contribution, reliance and integration, generates moral claims to democratic inclusion. Before delineating who among the firm’s stakeholders holds the strongest claims, I will first establish why the firm itself should be considered an appropriate domain for democratic principles.

3.1 Argument 1: Firms as Sites of Governance and Potential Domination

First, firms should be understood as structures of governance, not simply market intermediaries. As Dahl (Reference Dahl1985) stresses, firms, like states, are organized around hierarchical decision-making in which managers issue binding orders and employees face sanctions, including dismissal, for non-compliance. In the Coasean transaction cost tradition, the very point of the firm is to replace continuous market contracting with an internal authority structure that coordinates activities under managerial direction (Coase Reference Coase1937; Singer Reference Singer2019). This is why Coase (Reference Coase1937: 388), quoting D.H. Robertson, describes firms as “islands of conscious power”.

Anderson (Reference Anderson2017) compellingly characterizes this structure as “private government”. For most workers, employers exercise extensive and often discretionary control over their daily lives without the constitutional constraints or avenues of contestation that limit state power. Republican theorists argue that such discretionary power constitutes domination when it is not effectively controlled by those subject to it (Pettit Reference Pettit1997; Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2014). Domination does not require actual abuse; the problem lies in being dependent on another’s will and vulnerable to arbitrary interference. In typical employment relations, the threat of dismissal, blacklisting and subtle forms of discipline gives managers pervasive leverage over workers’ options and expectations.

Appeals to exit as sufficient protection underestimate both the structure of labour markets and the temporal dynamics of employment. For long‑term employees in particular, exit is costly: they have accumulated firm-specific skills, seniority and social ties that are not easily reproduced elsewhere (Hsieh Reference Hsieh2005), not to mention the loss of relational and personal goods, such as friendship and the sense of belongingness one has cultivated with the workforce over time, as in Heil’s story. Yet markets do not reliably supply democratic workplaces as alternative options, so the ability to quit seldom neutralizes internal domination (Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Kwok Reference Kwok2020). Recent works on workplace democracy therefore reposition firms as political communities whose internal rule must satisfy standards of justification and non-domination, rather than as merely efficient contractual devices (Frega et al. Reference Frega, Herzog and Neuhäuser2019).

This first argument connects directly to the temporal thesis developed in section 2. The longer a worker remains within such a governance structure, the more her life is shaped by, and dependent upon, the firm’s rules. Over time, what might initially have been an arm’s‑length contract becomes a thick relation of governed membership, thereby intensifying the democratic questions about how that authority is exercised and why it is justifiable. Section 5 will return to this point in addressing voluntarist defences of managerial authority and the sufficiency of contractual consent and exit.

3.2 Argument 2: Corporate Authority as Publicly Constituted and Socially Embedded

A second argument challenges the idea that corporate governance is a purely private matter grounded only in shareholders’ property rights. The modern business corporation is a legal creation, constituted and empowered by public law rather than emerging spontaneously from private contracts. Ciepley (Reference Ciepley2013) argues that corporations are “franchise governments”: they are entities chartered by the state, endowed with legal personhood, limited liability, asset shielding and so on. These privileges, and the corresponding authority of managers over employees and assets, exist only because public institutions create and sustain them (Claassen Reference Claassen2023).

If corporate governance is largely a product of public authorization, then the question of who should wield that governance authority is inherently political (Ciepley Reference Ciepley2020). Contemporary normative theories of the firm take this seriously. Singer (Reference Singer2019) develops a political theory of the corporation that treats governance rights as institutional design choices to be evaluated in light of democratic and egalitarian norms, not as natural property entitlements (Singer and Ron Reference Singer and Ron2023; Ron and Singer Reference Ron and Singer2024). Greenfield (Reference Greenfield2007) likewise argues that corporate law’s commitment to shareholder primacy reflects a contingent and contestable legal arrangement that can be reformed to recognize other constituencies, including workers, as legitimate holders of governance claims. Political theorists of the firm have also shown that it is misleading to treat shareholders as the “owners” of the corporation (Singer Reference Singer2019; Ciepley Reference Ciepley2020; Claassen Reference Claassen2023; Kwok Reference Kwok2025). Ordinary share ownership does not confer the full bundle of property rights typically associated with private property; rather, the main justification in the business literature for granting shareholders ultimate decision-making authority is that such arrangements are thought to minimize agency costs (e.g. Jensen and Meckling Reference Jensen and Meckling1976; Blair and Stout Reference Blair and Stout1999). Robé (Reference Robé2020) consolidates this point by showing how the legal structure of the firm partitions assets, control and liability in ways that systematically favour capital over labour.

Moreover, as Herzog (Reference Herzog2018) points out, organizations are socially embedded institutions: their moral and political character depends on how they are embedded in legal, institutional and cultural structures. Since firms “impinge on the ways we live our lives” and can become sites of identity formation, their governance cannot be assessed purely in financial terms (Herzog Reference Herzog2018: 1, 256). In an increasingly fissured economy where subcontracting and precarious work fragment responsibility (Weil Reference Weil2014; Bieber and Moggia Reference Bieber and Moggia2021), corporate decisions become even more consequential for their distributive and democratic implications. Seeing corporations as publicly enabled and socially embedded centres of power makes it difficult to defend an insulated purely “private” conception of managerial authority. Instead, it is natural to ask whether the governance of such entities should reflect the democratic values that regulate other public forms of power.

This second argument consolidates later parts of the article in two ways. First, it adds to the move that will be developed in section 4 from shareholder primacy to worker-centred conceptions of the firm’s demos: if corporate authority is a publicly constructed office, then there is no principled reason to reserve it exclusively for shareholders. Second, it supports the critique in section 5 of property-rights based objections to workplace democracy, by showing that governance rights should track institutional design and public justification, not pre-political ownership claims.

The argument for workplace citizenship presupposes that the firm is a political entity: a site of governance where questions of legitimacy and justice arise. Neoliberal economic theories often resist this characterization, viewing the firm as a purely private association coordinated by market transactions and the voluntary consent of owners and employees (Friedman Reference Friedman1970; Alchian and Demsetz Reference Alchian and Demsetz1972). This section challenges that view by drawing on the growing literature on the political theory of the firm to demonstrate that firms exercise significant power akin to government, making them appropriate domains for democratic norms.

3.3 Argument 3: Temporal Social Membership and Democratic Inclusion in the Firm

Given that firms are sites of governance and that corporate authority is publicly constituted, a third argument links the Carensian theory of temporal social membership to the internal politics of the workplace. Carens (Reference Carens2013) argues that in liberal democracies, the moral case for political inclusion rests primarily on social membership: over time, individuals who live, work and form relationships within a polity and thereby acquire claims to secure residence and, ultimately, citizenship, even if they began as temporary outsiders. Abizadeh’s (Reference Abizadeh2012) discussion of the boundary problem in democratic theory echoes this intuition: democratic legitimacy requires including all those subject to the exercise of political power, rejecting the idea of a prepolitically given “people” independent of institutional articulation. Transposed to the firm, this suggests that those most deeply and enduringly subject to corporate governance, long-term employees, have the strongest pro tanto claims to inclusion in its rule-making processes.

The temporal social membership account developed in section 2 refines this insight for the firm. Time tracks three morally salient features: contribution, reliance and integration. Long-serving employees have contributed to joint production over many years; their efforts are woven into the firm’s routines and intangible assets. Their life plans and external relationships are progressively organized around continued employment, deepening their vulnerability to managerial decisions. And their identities, social networks and sense of belonging are increasingly anchored in the firm as a community (Estlund 2003; Harnecker Reference Harnecker2009; Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Herzog Reference Herzog2018). When such individuals remain excluded from governance, the injustice is both distributive and political. They are treated as outsiders to a meso-level political-like community they effectively co-constitute.

This third argument brings the claim back to the core concern of defining the firm’s demos. It explains why, among all those affected by corporate decisions, long-term employees possess especially weighty claims to democratic inclusion, while acknowledging that other actors, such as short-term workers, contractors, local communities and investors, may have weaker, though still non-negligible, claims. Existing practices often implicitly recognize this principle. Firms typically differentiate between regular employees and temporary or probationary hires, granting full benefits and protections only after an initial period. A similar logic can apply to political rights. A probationary period before acquiring full voting rights would mirror the process of naturalization, ensuring that individuals have demonstrated a long-term commitment and integration before becoming full members of the governing body.

Put differently, once we treat the firm as a publicly constituted site of governance capable of dominating its members, the Carensian framework of temporal social membership provides a powerful time-sensitive case for prioritizing long-term employees as the core citizens of the corporate polity. The theory of temporal social membership explains that long-term workers, by virtue of their sustained integration into the firm and prolonged subjection to its authority, have the strongest claims to democratic inclusion, while leaving room for other employees and stakeholders to be included on additional non-temporal grounds.

5.1 Voluntarism, Consent and the Limits of Exit

A first line of objection insists that no special claim to democratic inclusion can arise in the workplace because employment is consensual and continuously revisable (Alchian and Demsetz Reference Alchian and Demsetz1972). Freedom of association and contract are taken to do the core normative work: as long as workers can reject an offer or later resign, managerial authority is legitimate.

The voluntarist objection presupposes a highly idealized conception of consent. Most workers accept jobs under severe income constraints and with little real opportunity to shape the terms of governance. Long‑term employees often have even less effective bargaining power than new hires: over time they accumulate firm‑specific skills, social ties and benefits that are not easily portable, making exit increasingly costly and risky (Hsieh Reference Hsieh2005). Even if exit is formally available, the standing possibility of arbitrary sanction, including dismissal, creates status asymmetries that look, normatively, much closer to subjection than to a series of discrete and freely renewed contracts (Anderson Reference Anderson2017). Moreover, contemporary labour markets are characterized by path dependence and sectoral concentration, such that leaving one firm often means entering another organization structured by the same non‑democratic template (Malleson Reference Malleson2014).

The theory of temporal social membership advanced earlier directly targets this weakness in the voluntarist story. Carens’s (Reference Carens2013) account of long‑term residents in a state emphasizes that even if their initial status as non‑citizens was consented to, the combination of ongoing subjection to the state’s laws and deepened social integration eventually grounds an independent claim to political membership; initial consent does not fix the normative status of that relationship forever. Analogously, long‑term workers may have agreed to work under non‑democratic governance at the outset, but years of continuous subjection and integration transform the moral landscape. Their relationship to the firm shifts from that of an arm’s‑length contractor to that of a “resident” of a governed community. At that point, appealing to an initial signature on an employment contract to block claims to voice functions much like invoking an immigrant’s original visa conditions decades later to deny them a pathway to citizenship. The temporal dimension is precisely what undermines the claim that consent and exit suffice for legitimacy.

5.2 Property Rights and Economic Efficiency

A second objection holds that workplace democracy, particularly in the form of franchise rights for long‑term workers, illegitimately infringes on owners’ property rights and risks undermining economic efficiency. Shareholders, on this view, are the residual claimants and thus the “owners” of the firm; corporate governance should therefore be organized primarily around their interests and the delegation of decision‑making authority to managers in order to minimize agency costs (Jensen and Meckling Reference Jensen and Meckling1976). Giving long‑term employees binding voting rights is said to amount to a partial expropriation of owners’ control rights, and to threaten efficient management by empowering actors who may rationally prioritize job security or local community interests over profitability.

This objection assumes a proprietary conception of the firm that has been extensively challenged in recent legal and political theory. Ciepley (Reference Ciepley2013) argues that corporations are “franchise governments”, chartered by the state and endowed with legal personhood, limited liability and internal governing authority by public law, not merely by private contract. Pistor’s (Reference Pistor2019) account of the “code of capital” similarly shows how law constructs and protects capital assets by selectively extending strong property‑like protections, thereby making the structure of ownership and control a matter of institutional design. From these perspectives, shareholders do not own the corporation’s productive assets nor the firm itself; they own shares, while the corporation, as a separate legal person, owns the assets and bears the liabilities (Robé Reference Robé2020). How voting rights are distributed inside the firm is a normative and political question about how a publicly enabled governance structure should be organized. Existing experiments with codetermination already demonstrate that legal systems can allocate board‑level representation to workers without abolishing shareholders’ claims to profits (Kwok Reference Kwok2021). Indeed, as Singer (Reference Singer2019) points out, a normative political theory of the corporation must treat questions about the internal distribution of authority as political questions about justice and legitimacy, not as an issue of private ownership (Claassen Reference Claassen2023). Temporal workplace citizenship thus does not “confiscate” a pre‑political right of shareholders. It proposes to revise the terms of the corporate franchise so that those who have become enduring members of the organizational polity, long‑term workers, acquire a say in its governance, consistent with the fact that the corporation is already a publicly constituted institution.

The efficiency worry also appears weaker in light of both empirical and normative work on worker participation. Dow’s (Reference Dow2003) comprehensive synthesis of the economics and practice of worker control shows that labour-managed firms (LMF) can survive and compete in market economies.Footnote ⁵ As he (Reference Dow2003: 227) points out: “LMFs are not rare because they fail disproportionately”, since “[o]nce created, they appear robust”; “they are rare because in absolute numbers they are created much less often than KMFs [capital-managed firm]”. More recent work suggests that democratic inclusion may also correct pathologies resulting from shareholder primacy. Stout’s (Reference Stout2012: 63) critique of the shareholder value myth shows how a singular focus on “maximiz[ing] shareholder values” encourages myopic decision‑making and underinvestment, to the detriment of investors themselves and wider society.

Against this backdrop, the temporal criterion appears as a way of aligning democratic inclusion with productive incentives. Long‑term employees tend to have the strongest stake in the organization’s durable success; their livelihoods, skills and identities are tightly bound up with the firm’s future. Including them in governance, whether through direct voting rights or board representation, channels their firm‑specific knowledge and long-time horizons into decision‑making, potentially counteracting short‑term shareholder pressures (Stout Reference Stout2012; Malleson Reference Malleson2014; Kwok Reference Kwok2020). Even if some marginal efficiency costs remained, democratic societies routinely accept such trade‑offs in other domains, for example, constitutional checks on executive power, in order to secure legitimacy, fairness and freedom from domination. The firm, as a pervasive site of governance, is not an obvious exception.

5.3 The Outsider and Mobility Worry

A third objection targets the political economy of temporal social membership. Even if the length of employment tracks deepening contribution, reliance and integration, institutionalizing a tenure-sensitive workplace franchise may unintentionally harden an insider–outsider boundary inside firms. Critics may worry that once “full members” enjoy special governance rights, employers will respond strategically by preventing workers from reaching the relevant threshold, for example by shortening appointments, cycling workers through serial temporary contracts or moving tasks to subcontractors and external agencies.

The Dutch employment law illustrates the general structure of the concern: as a baseline rule, employees must be offered a permanent contract “after 3 consecutive temporary contracts, or after 3 years of temporary contracts”, subject to deviations in sectoral collective agreements (Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) n.d.). Such rules, as critics worry, may generate perverse incentives for employers facing budget constraints or seeking flexibility, potentially worsening precarity for outsiders.

This objection raises a real design issue, but it does not undermine the temporal membership argument itself. First, the temporal account is a moral claim about when membership-based entitlements arise. If firms respond to emerging membership claims by further fissuring work, that reaction is best interpreted as corroborating my broader critique: it shows how organizational power can be used to block the very conditions of membership, thereby maintaining a permanently subordinate class inside the firm. Second, if such perverse incentives are widespread and undermine the very purpose of the temporal social inclusion arrangement, the appropriate response could be an institutional design that avoids sharp discontinuities and reduces incentives for manipulation. Instead of a single “all-or-nothing” threshold, governance rights can be structured as a gradually expanding bundle: minimal voice and contestatory protections for all employees from the outset, with voting scope or weight increasing with tenure until employment reaches a certain number of years. This preserves the core normative intuition (i.e. membership rights deepen over time) while mitigating strategic gaming. In cases where firms face financial constraints yet require new staff, instead of making new contracts more precarious, one might consider whether a potential solution lies in the redistribution of internal resources. For example, if no other financial measures are available, employees might collectively agree to a modest reduction in wages in order to finance new positions on regular and stable terms. This suggestion is not simply a naïve fantasy; in worker cooperatives, there have been cases where members collectively agreed to lower their wages in order to avoid dismissing colleagues due to financial constraints (Malleson Reference Malleson2014: 60–61).

A related worry is that grounding workplace membership rights in long-term standing could discourage mobility by increasing the perceived cost of leaving. However, if long-term workers value a labour market with low mobility costs, then granting them political standing within the firm gives them leverage to advocate policies that lower the costs of exit, for example through portability of benefits and real protections against retaliation. Even if a tenure-sensitive scheme did reduce inter-firm movement, it is unclear why increasing mobility should take priority over securing democratic standing for those who are in fact long-term governed by workplace authority. The question is whether preserving higher rates of switching is worth maintaining a governance structure that excludes long-term workers from meaningful participation in decisions that pervasively shape their working lives. Finally, one might question whether the temporal account fits coordinated market economies, such as those in Europe, better than liberal market economies, such as that of the USA (Hall and Soskice Reference Hall, Soskice, Hall and Soskice2001: 8). However, even in the USA, the median job tenure is around 4 years, and many workers remain with the same employer long enough for workplace governance to become a durable source of subjection and reliance (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024).