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.
History These methods are often seen as associated with
trade unions or
syndicalism (or more lately
eco-syndicalism), or in extreme forms
anarcho-syndicalism.
Most unions have democratic structures at least for selecting the leader, and sometimes these are seen as providing the only democratic aspects of work. However, unions are not everywhere, and not every workplace that lacks a union lacks democracy, and not every workplace that has a union necessarily has a democratic way to resolve disputes.
However, some unions have historically been more committed to it than others. The
Industrial Workers of the World pioneered the archetypal workplace democracy model, the
Wobbly Shop, in which recallable delegates were elected by workers, and other norms of
grassroots democracy were applied. This is still used in some organizations, notably
Semco and in the software industry.
Associated with ideologies Industrial and organizational psychology and even more formal
management science has studied the methods of workplace democracy. They are just that - methods - and do not imply any particular
political movement, agenda, theory, or ideology: There are many
management science papers on the application of
democratic structuring, in particular, to the workplace, and the benefits of it. Such benefits are usually compared to simple
command hierarchy arrangements in which "the boss" can hire anyone and fire anyone, and takes absolute and total responsibility for his own well-being and also all that occurs "under" him. The
command hierarchy is a preferred management style followed in many companies for its simplicity, speed and low process overheads.
Studied by management science 20th century pioneers of workplace democracy include the early Belgian advocates of
syndicalism who argued that workers had more knowledge but less control of the workplace than they had of major political decisions (where they at least had a vote and the right to be heard even if they knew nothing about the situation). Of these theorists the most influential,
de Paepe, is often considered as a peer or competitor to
Karl Marx's concept of the workplace as merely a cauldron and test for the
proletariat.
Early theory However, workplace democracy theory closely follows political, especially where businesses are large or politics is small:
Spanish anarchists,
Mohandas Gandhi, farm and retail
co-operative movements, 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
Green Parties worldwide adopted this as one of their
Four Pillars and also often mimic workplace democracy norms such as
gender equity,
co-leadership,
deliberative democracy applied to any major decision, and leaders who don't do policy.
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.
Relation to political theory Current approaches Many organizations began by the 1960s to realize that tight control by too few people was creating
groupthink,
turnover in staff and a loss of
morale among qualified people helpless to appeal what they saw as stupid decisions. Usually employees who criticise such stupid decisions of their higher management are fired from their jobs on some false pretext or other. The comic strip
Dilbert has become popular satirizing this type of oblivious
management, the icon for which is the
Pointy Haired Boss, a nameless and clueless social climber.
The Dilbert Principle has been accepted as fact by some.
Much
management philosophy has focused on trying to limit manager power, differentiate
leadership versus management, and so on.
Henry Mintzberg,
Peter Drucker and
Donella Meadows were three very notable theorists addressing these concerns in the 1980s. Mintzberg and Drucker studied how executives spent their time, Meadows how change and leverage to resist it existed at all levels in all kinds of organizations.
Adhocracy,
functional leadership models, and
reengineering were all attempts to detect and remove
administrative incompetence.
Business process and
quality management methods in general remove
managerial flexibility that is often perceived as masking managerial mistakes, but also preventing
transparency and facilitating
fraud, as in the case of
Enron. Had managers been more accountable to employees, it is argued, owners and employees would not have been defrauded.
Limits of management Managerial grid models and
matrix management, compromises between true workplace democracy and conventional top-down hierarchy, became common in the 1990s. These models cross responsibilities so that no one manager had total control of any one employee, or so that technical and marketing management were not subordinated to each other but had to argue out their concerns more mutually. A consequence of this was the rise of
learning organization theory, in which the
ontology of definitions in common among all factions or professions becomes the main management problem.
London Business School chief
Nigel Nicholson in his 1998
Harvard Business Review paper
How Hardwired is Human Behavior? suggested that
human nature was just as likely to cause problems in the workplace as in larger social and political settings, and that similar methods were required to deal with stressful situations and difficult problems. He held up the workplace democracy model advanced by
Ricardo Semler as the "only" one that actually took cognizance of human foibles.
Semler and Semco 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
[1].
Venezuela A more political approach to workplace reforms was advocated in
Closing The Iron Cage: The Scientific Management of Work and Leisure by Canadian
sociologist Ed Andrew based on
Max Weber's notion "that the spirit of
capitalism envelopes our activities like an
iron cage, that the ubiquitous structure of
technical rationality appears as an iron cage to those who live in it."
Andrew critiques
Frederick Winslow Taylor and so-called
Taylorism that has grown up - beyond limits that Taylor himself would not have advocated - to become a "scientific management of leisure."
Andrew asks provocative questions such as:
Andrew argues that both the
political left and the
right accept the thesis of "leisure-as-compensation" and that most issues between unions and "management" are too narrowly framed. Andrew in particular believes that scientifically managed leisure is "the closing of an iron cage of technological rationality" on all human life. In other words, a
technological escalation not just in the workplace but also imposed by the need to use communications, transport, and other technologies to get to work, learn, do the work itself, and justify the work afterwards. New technologies take time to learn and to use, and that time is taken away from either real work, or leisure.
The growth of
scientific management in the industrial work force, and the consequences of that growth for how workers spend their leisure time, according to Andrew, combine to create a false idea of workplace efficiency. His critique is similar to that used to justify
throughput accounting: overfocus on human labour is counter-productive since more and more minute divisions of labour deny workers' intelligence and creativity at work, destroys their ability to enjoy their time away from work, and puts them always at risk of losing opportunities simply for experimenting, thinking or dreaming on the job. An undemocratic workplace cannot be substituted by "more, and more enjoyable, leisure" if "boring and denigrating work" that alienates the individual - a key concern of Marx's
sociology - remains the daily norm.
He counters pseudo-"conservative claims by efficiency experts that productivity is greatest when individual initiative is minimized" which is exactly the opposite of the ideal preached for
entrepreneurship.
He presents his own model,
worker self-management, which he claims "would give all workers the same ability to create their jobs and to mingle leisure and work", as a radical alternative to both scientific management and technocratic socialism. His economic and organizational framework he intends to provide a unity of meaningful work and leisure.
His model parallels that of
Amartya Sen who argued in his 1999
Development as Freedom that the goal of all
sustainable development must be the freeing of human time. But while Sen addresses the interface between the workplace and leisure-place, Andrew addresses freedom within the workplace.
Many of Andrew's ideas were echoed by companies during the
dotcom boom during which many experiments in combining work and leisure were launched, but mostly applied only to higher level creative workers such as
software developers, not to people doing more routine work.
Are work and leisure mutually exclusive spheres?
Can individuals condemned to alienating "scientifically managed" work environments ever really function as free players in their "free" time?
versus Taylorism Workplace democracy is too complex to offer more than a general overview of its advantages and its disadvantages in this article. Two obvious differences are that
lockouts can't happen without the support of the majority of the workers, and
strikes will not be motivated by lack of control over who manages.
Centralization and
change management take place only by request: work teams and units must retain at least the power to resist changes and centralization of work functions they have performed. Presumably, though, any
private sector work team recognizes legitimate arguments to centralize or change.
Advantages and disadvantages Employee development,
job enrichment,
job rotation can be arranged
ad hoc 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.
Succession planning is everyone's problem:
senior management will be replaced by whoever is elected to replace them.
Mentoring specific people to do those jobs may be more risky, as
management development is uncertain: a
highly effective manager who is disliked can simply fail to achieve the position that they have been groomed for. This is also true in
representative democracy, where "groomed" leaders can fail to win an election or lose their party's support. But in organizations there is less talent ultimately to choose from, and losing people is more serious, especially if
leadership development is more certain elsewhere.
Individual career development Office politics in such an environment can be extreme: 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.
Performance appraisals in particular is extremely sensitive, as it's conducted by peers.
Meetings and
meeting systems must generally be extremely efficient, and require strong models of chairmanship and sophisticated models of how to handle consent and
dissent.
Open-space meetings and
wiki 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.
Organizational commitment cannot be promised without extreme consultation. This may be an edge, in some industries, but it certainly takes longer.
Organizational development,
metrics for same, changes in the
structure also take longer to negotiate.
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
resistance to change is easier if the rate of change or depth of assessment is negotiated with one's peers who must deal with the same changes and challenges. 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.
Process improvement is often thought to be facilitated by such swaps, e.g. the
CBC television show
Venture runs a regular series called
Back to the Floor, a corporate
reality show where
Chief Executive Officers and a low level employee change jobs for a week.
Process management is usually reported as benefiting from the direct attention of the CEO, and
professional development of the lower level employee is also facilitated, as they discover whether they feel fit to take leadership or not.
According to proponents,
Servant leadership is inevitable: leaders who do not serve are simply voted out of the job.
Organizational structure and management Talent identification and management take place at the same time, on the shop floor where it is easy to assess competence.
Team building and
management rely on the same interpersonal relationships as did hiring.
Termination of employment is also by the same people. This is a simple, perhaps even
tribal, model of how human teams must work.
Work stoppages are common but very short in such an environment, due mostly to interpersonal problems that are soon worked out, because the team has the power to resolve the issue itself.
Unfair dismissal claims are impeded because any firing is due to losing the support of one's fellow team members and the faith of the
social network of one's peers on the
shop floor. In any jurisdiction, this is a legitimate criteria for dismissal, that one is not able to retain the faith of one's colleagues.
"The co's" (
Co-determination,
co-operation,
coaching,
collaboration and
collective bargaining) 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.
Not always applicable Common ownership Guild socialism Workers' Control Responsible autonomy participatory democracy
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First witness: Commander Luis Carrion
