Sunday, July 11, 2010

Workers Democarcy

Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms (including voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, systems of appeal, and so on) to the workplace.It usually involves or requires more use of lateral methods like arbitration when workplace disputes arise.Workplace democracy theory closely follows political democracy, especially where businesses are large or politics is small:movement, farm and retail co-operative movements, Democratic Employee Stock Option Plans all made contributions to the theory and practice of workplace democracy and often carried that into the political arena as a "more participatory democracy." The Socialist International Social Democrat, Socialist and Labor Parties should adopted this as one of their Main focuses. Workplace democracy norms such as co-leadership, deliberative democracy applied to any major decision, and leaders who don't do policy. The Democratic Socialist Parties have always supported the notion of work place democracy and democratically controlled institutions.In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party made laws and reforms 1950-70 to achieve more democratic workplaces. The unions right to balance the management and have some influential power was rather radical at that time, but still within the capitalistic society. ( which should be burned out)Politically, Salvador Allende inspired a large number of such experiments in Chile before his death on September 11, 1973. The book Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer details experiments in workplace feedback that exploited systems theory extensively.Venezuela has instituted worker-run "co-management" initiatives in which workers' councils are the cornerstone of the management of a plant or factory. In experimental co-managed enterprises, such as the state-owned Alcasa factory, workers develop budgets and elect both managers and departmental delegates who work together with strategists on technical issues related to production.
Individual career development
Employee development, job enrichment, job rotation and entrance training can be arranged by the work team itself to suit its own schedule. Job sharing is also possible and desirable if a worker wants time off and another is in a position to do overtime, without the concern that this will set a precedent for management abuses or job losses.Training should not be for insiders or the well connected but should benefit the community.Succession planning is everyone's problem: senior management will be replaced by whoever is elected to replace them. There shall be no discrimination or class. All people will have the opportunity to have positions, entry positions, education, and leadership training. with out coming from and important family or special connections.
Organizational structure and management
Office politics in such an environment can be difficult: people might devote a lot of time to keeping their colleagues satisfied and supporting them socially and politically, and there is less surety of success. Success is much better through a co-operative system. Performance appraisals in particular are very sensitive, as it's conducted by peers. Meetings and meeting systems must generally be very efficient, and require strong models of chairmanship and sophisticated models of how to handle consent and dissent. Open-space meetings and other methods to define their agendas have been used by some organizations, notably political party and management consultant organizations. One example is the Living Agenda pioneered by Canadian political parties.There must be assurances that fellow workers will not abuse and protection instilled by quality control and Union Committees.Organizational culture should however be generally more accepting of organizational learning and peer review of performance.Performance improvement, self-assessment and coping with one's own Ability to adapt and mature. However, this is not to say those skills always apply in management: Peter principle applies if anything faster: people who are perceived as effective are elected to run things, which they promptly fail at. However, there is much more acceptance of returning to the shop as a worker if someone fails at management, which is much more difficult in organizations where there is a culture gap between managers and workers. This can be improved by education for competence and ability in a education system that doesn’t fail to provide the education needed.Also grievance and resolution can be applied. The better planned organization, the better the chances of success. There should be an avoidance of nepotism and the buddy system.
It may be easier in environments where consensus or consensus-seeking decision-making is already practiced for the most important decisions: who leads. Consensus democracy methods already exist to make very large scale decisions in social organizations.
As well as factories producing everything from textiles, ceramics, glass and rubber to food and refrigerators, the network also includes transportation companies, educational facilities and even hospitals. Most of them are headed up by men, but in some cases, the horizontal organizational structure has helped women move into leading roles.
One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the world's governments in 2000 is to promote gender equality and empower women. But in this case, the progress achieved by women is not a result of a government policy. On the contrary, it was the women themselves who took control of the abandoned factories and other businesses and got them back on their feet.
GrissinĂ³poli is a member of the National Movement of Factories Recovered by Workers, a collective of roughly 80 companies formed in the late 1990s to group together bankrupted businesses that had been abandoned by their owners, but not by their employees. These factories are now boss free and co-operative.
Everyone who sells their body for labor for a living are members of the working class. This includes most segments of society, workers who are self-employed as well as wage earners in the employment field. We are different in multitudes of ways but one thing we have in solidarity is that we are all members of the working class, we all depend on our work and that of our families. The real enemies of the working class are the capitalists - a small society that gets their income mainly from stocks, bonds, inheritances, and real estate. They control the political parties and the government with their wealth. These people make their money from birth right, not from work. The more profit they make, the more damage they do. The working class also does not include small employers and managers (petty despots) who control workers. Workers are 90% of the population. Although not all elements of Capitalism are bad, Capitalism should be the exception, no the norm.

2 comments:

  1. I believe that Socialism and Democracy are the only Political Ideologies that allow people to be completely Human. Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms to the workplace.

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  2. This was a very well-written and enjoyable post to read. Thanks a lot. Keep up the good works.

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