This policy profile aims to support collective action around major levers of power outside labour including housing, environment, and care to increase the strength and ability of community bargaining. Countervailing power should operate beyond the workplace since many domains of extraction and exploitation lie outside wage work, such as housing, care, and the environment. This policy proposal aims to democratise negotiations across the economy so that people can organize around the major levers of power, not just their labour. It could involve legally recognising tenant associations as collective bargaining agents empowered to negotiate rent ceilings, eviction moratoria, maintenance standards, and housing quality with landlords, developers, and real estate investment trusts; establishing caregiver collectives that negotiate with public agencies and private providers on wages, working conditions, and the design of care and social protection systems, ensuring that unpaid and informal carers are represented; creating democratically elected local bodies with formal negotiation rights with utilities, extractive industries, and environmental authorities over pricing, pollution, and resource use; and redesigning competition law to extend coordination rights to community and worker organisations, allowing them to collectively set standards, share data, and bargain, while restricting monopolistic coordination among corporations. This policy proposal aims to shift democratic participation from periodic voting to continuous, participatory governance through infrastructures for maintaining and exercising coercive collective power.
