Our undemocratic system cannot be justified on the grounds that it makes us competitive, because it does not. Codetermination is only half of democracy, but it would be a step forward. For years Ralph Nader has been calling for a federal corporation chartering law. Committed democratic progressives should be urging that policy on both major parties, and the minor ones, for that matter. The point is that codetermined corporations, while not fully democratic, have the capacity to raise the huge sums of investment capital that have made the corporations successful.
Classical cooperatives lack it.
What is needed is a hybrid form - a financial and work organization that has the democratic character of the classical cooperatives together with the financial capacity of existing corporations. That would be the next step beyond codetermination - the step to fully democratic corporations. The difficulty is to protect the reasonable interests of investors without allowing the investors to retain control of the corporate policies. If my retirement fund were invested in a cooperative corporation, I would be concerned that the employees would vote for policies that would increase their payoffs at the expense of mine. They are only human, after all.