Should democracy, in the sense of the right to participate in decision making, extend to the workplace? How would an economy with worker controlled enterprises differ from our own? What protections should employees have against unjust dismissal? These are some of the major questions discussed in the following pages. In the first part of this issue of PERSPECTIVES David Schweikart, Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago, and author of Capitalism or Worker Control? (New York: Praeger, 1980), discusses worker participation in the management of business enterprises. Two commentaries follow his paper, one by Warren Clayton Hall Jr., Professor of Economics in the Stuart School of Management and Finance at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the other by Thomas M. Calera, Professor of Management, also at the Stuart School.

The decade of the nineteen seventies saw the emergence of legislation, administrative orders, and court decisions that substantially enhanced protection of public employees from unjust dismissal. In recent years the subject of such protection for employees in the private sector has received increasing attention. The second part of PERSPECTIVES surveys the topic of employee rights, summarizing current law, recent developments, and proposals for further change.