Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.
An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn’t pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say “workplace democracy”
hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.
I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.
I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?
I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.
It’s quite simple, right now businesses are structured in a totalitarian manner, socialism seeks to overthrow that totalitarian regime within your workplace, there’s a number of ways to do this, nobody is suggesting the janitor should decide how a surgeon does his job, we just want to eliminate the useless position of CEO, and replace it with democratic systems managed by the people who work the jobs.
An easy to understand version of this would be if every company was transformed into a worker co-op, but that of course is only one of many models for socialism.
It is important to note that the government is not the worker, and therefore government control over the means of production DOES NOT COUNT.
What does a “workplace democracy” mean?
I’m envisioning that’s the janitor having a vote in where the brain surgeon makes the next cut.
That’s a possible interpretation of “the people control the means of production”, but that’s just ridiculous.
Well, that is a pretty ridiculous interpretation.
Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.
An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn’t pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say “workplace democracy”
I’d settle for just having a labor representative in the C-suite at this point.
They will give you less than you ask, everytime. So better ask for much more.
hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.
I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.
I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?
I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.
It’s quite simple, right now businesses are structured in a totalitarian manner, socialism seeks to overthrow that totalitarian regime within your workplace, there’s a number of ways to do this, nobody is suggesting the janitor should decide how a surgeon does his job, we just want to eliminate the useless position of CEO, and replace it with democratic systems managed by the people who work the jobs.
An easy to understand version of this would be if every company was transformed into a worker co-op, but that of course is only one of many models for socialism.
It is important to note that the government is not the worker, and therefore government control over the means of production DOES NOT COUNT.
It means the janitor has a vote on how their duties are done