Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel

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  7. Workplace Decision Making

 

My own hopes and intuitions are that self-fulfilling and creative work is a fundamental human need, and that the pleasures of a challenge met, work well done, the exercise of skill and craftsmanship, are real and significant, and are an essential part of a full and meaningful life. The same is true of the opportunity to understand and enjoy the achievements of others, which often go beyond what we ourselves can do, and to work constructively in cooperation with others.

 -Noam Chomsky

Language and Politics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Shortening work hours anywhere eventually benefits all. Improving work life anywhere eventually benefits all."

 

 

 




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"...after appropriate adjustments in work scheduling I would benefit more from greater improvements elsewhere than from improvements with less Impact where I spend most of my time."

 

 

Northstart Innovations

 

Before following Northstart planning, however, we should note one very important aspect of settling on plant organization and technology. Each worker decides what alterations in plant operations she or he wants to request. To achieve these changes she or he registers preferences for investments. The ensuing changes might, for example, diminish the output-to-input ratio to improve quality of work life, or might change how much work she or he, has to do given the demand for books. Whatever changes Northstart workers finally decide they want, they have to get an okay from the system as a whole, assuming they need additional inputs.

 

The important thing to note is that if Northstart workers request and receive significant workplace changes that dramatically improve quality of worklife at Northstart, this benefit will eventually be shared with other workers. How much work anyone does away from his or her main workplace depends on the quality of work differentials between that main workplace and society's average. Thus, when innovations significantly diminish the burdensomeness of work at one plant, the result, after job balancing committees have time to assess the change, is that each employee spends fewer hours there and more hours elsewhere. Innovations that make Northstart work relatively more pleasurable will change the time Northstart workers work there and elsewhere. So because of the principle that all workers enjoy comparable overall job responsibilities, gains accruing from Northstart investments manifest themselves in slightly improved conditions for all workers rather than in dramatically improved conditions only for Northstart employees. Therefore, workers have little reason to urge innovations in their own plants at the expense of innovations that could be enacted elsewhere with a more dramatic effect on quality of worklife. In short, after appropriate adjustments in work scheduling I would benefit more from greater improvements elsewhere than from improvements with less impact where I spend most of my time.

 

Traditional economists will argue that this will diminish workers' incentives to improve the quality of worklife, since workers will not be able to monopolize the gains they engineer. But this view conveniently ignores that in competitive models of capitalism technological gains are assumed to spread instantaneously to all producers in an industry. If this were not assumed, in these models it could not be claimed that they yield efficient results. But when it is assumed, incentives to innovate diminish since benefits spread first to other firms in the industry, and later through lower costs of production and lower price for the industry's output, to all producers and consumers. Of course, in real capitalism, as opposed to economists' models of it, improvements do not spread and the benefits of innovation accrue almost exclusively to a small number of owners--certainly not to workers-and there are consequent inefficiencies. In any case, since in an equitable economy technological improvements must rebound to everyone's benefit, we consider it a virtue that in a participatory economy innovations in thousands of plants change the overall societal average work load and work quality norms and that those changes in turn rebound equally to everyone's benefit.

 

So what does this reduce to in practice? If Larry works at Northstart and a proposal for a technological change there and throughout publishing would improve the average job complex for society by one hundredth of a percent, while a proposal for the steel industry (requiring the same investment expenditure) would improve the average by two hundredths of a percent, Larry will eventually benefit more from the steel innovation than from the publishing change. Likewise, Northstart workers have a greater long-term interest in an innovation in coal mining that greatly improves that industry's quality of work than in an innovation in publishing that would require an equivalent investment but improve the quality of publishing work to a lesser degree.

 

Larry's tastes, whether slight or great, are therefore summed with those of all other publishing workers and embodied in the evaluation of possible publishing industry alterations before any comparison with other industry proposals occurs. If Larry's views differ dramatically from the collective result, Larry will not necessarily like the final outcome. But the choice will reflect a fair balance of the tastes of all workers in both industries. Larry should vote as he likes, and if he does so, and all other workers do so as well, the collective implications noted earlier will apply.

 

It follows that the war of each against all for who will benefit from innovations gives way to a community of shared interests. Competition is replaced by cooperation. Shortening work hours anywhere eventually benefits all. Improving work life anywhere eventually benefits all. An equitable economy requires all this, but to increase individual incentives job balancing committees could calibrate the speed of adjustments to provide temporary "material incentives" to innovators. Or, alternatively, teams could be assigned whose job was to develop potential innovations. This would be their "output" by which their social usefulness would be judged. The equity implications of this way to stimulate innovation, essentially assigning more resources to innovation and holding those who use them socially accountable, has more desirable human repercussions in our view. In. any event, in deciding on innovations that have been well characterized, each actor chooses between proposals however they wish, but everyone has an incentive in a participatory economy to choose what is best for the whole economy because that is what is best for all actors. Ironically, the claim made propagandistically for markets-that pursuit of individual interests coincides with the social interest-actually holds for participatory planning. Pursuit of self-fulfillment under equitable arrangements and in a socially conscious way really does yield socially optimal outcomes.

 

Moreover, participatory economics' solidarity-promoting dynamic does not derive from some presumed biological transformation of our genetic characteristics, but from the concrete implications of actual social relationships. Desirable results promoting solidarity, variety, and collective self-management are not assumed because we postulate a suddenly beatific human nature, but because the structure and incentives of the participatory planning process promote these goals. Beside linking individual and collective well being, the system promotes participation, empathy, sociability, and the qualitative side of life that has been under attack since the dawn of capitalism over 300 years ago!