Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel Go to Table of Contents 7. Workplace Decision Making

"There is no corresponding improvement in refrigerators that would warrant a four percent jump in demand. Sally asks for a check on reasons people gave in a few representative communities for requesting new refrigerators..."

The Intricacies of "Working Overtime" to Earn More "Income" Lydia, the reader will recall, lives in a complex whose members are artistically inclined. When not working at John Henry she works with a drama group that puts on plays throughout the region. She likes this so much she spends more time doing it than the time needed to balance her John Henry complex, but since she considers it fun, she doesn't claim it as extra work. However, Lydia wants to get a new computer this year to help her with design and writing for the coming season. She could propose these in the plan as investments for her drama group, but she knows they would not pass since the need is not pressing. Lydia also has the option to "borrow" to make the purchase herself-her Emma Goldman co-housing mates and others in the neighborhood would be happy to oblige this request, especially since her plays provide so much social well-being-but Lydia is not overly pleased with committing herself to "pay back" a loan by consuming less in the future. She prefers to work extra hours now to "earn" the right to the extra consumption right away. She puts in a proposal to the plant facilitation board requesting sufficient overtime to war-rant the extra consumption. She would prefer to take less time for lunch and come in early or work later each day to working on her days off or evenings since that's when she works with her drama group. Once John Henry's plan is settled and the time comes to assign tasks, Lydia's proposal is considered. Confident no one will protest-Lydia works hard, has made few previous special requests, and the John Henry workers are the first to enjoy her plays-facilitation workers assign Lydia the extra time she requests subject to approval by the council as a whole. Matthew also requests extra work because, like last year and the year before, he wants to ask for an above average consumption bundle. Matthew wants to do the work at convenient times, an extra half hour daily three times a week, for as long as needed. Facilitation workers doubt, however, that others will want to juggle their work schedules to help Matthew still again, so they ask if he'd be willing to come in Sundays to clean as his additional work. Matthew balks, and his request goes unincorporated into the facilitation board proposal of work assignments at John Henry. Although Matthew later argues his case to the council, its response is the same as the facilitation workers'. He appeals, to no effect, turns down the compromise offer to do overtime on Sundays, and decides to look for a different primary workplace. In the meantime he goes without the above average consumption he wanted. Evaluating and "Bartering" During the period allowed for preparing the third proposal, Sally decides the gap between what the steel industry as a whole has proposed and what consumers have initially demanded is so large that filling the demand would require a significant increase of steel production either at considerable burden to current workers, or by transferring many workers from other areas with disruptive effects. She, like many other steel workers, decides to investigate the reasons for the high excess demand before putting in her third round proposal. Of course, Sally is quite familiar with how John Henry steel is used. She has a good overview of the whole economy and the role steel plays. She thought the facilitation board's estimate of a three percent drop in demand for this year-given the long term switch from steel to new high-tensile alloys-was reasonable. Therefore, when she first heard it, Sally believed the high demand must have been because some town or city was making a huge request related to a major construction project they would modify quickly seeing the excess demand for steel. She didn't do any serious checking on demand but only on supply to see that John Henry was keeping pace with other plants. But now she becomes interested in components of demand because they must be diverging dramatically from what she expected. Her first step is to set aside a couple of hours one evening to use one of her complex's main database terminals to conduct her inquiries. Sally begins by calling up statements regarding current proposals for steel supply and demand, including a comparison of current demand proposals with last year's final figures and with the facilitation boards' most recent predictions. Next, Sally requests a breakdown of demand by industry and region to see the roots of the increase. There could have been a generalized increase in demand for all products requiring steel, but that would contradict the downward trend in steel use. Sally finds that the demand jumps were common to quite a few regions, but not all, and primarily centered in two industries. Apparently citizens in Northern regions made unusually high demands for automobiles, while people generally were making at least four percent higher than anticipated requests for refrigerators. Because Sally herself hadn't made any such requests she doesn't know what reasons might be at work. With a ten percent increase in automobile requests in the northern regions, it seems likely she could find the explanation with just a few well-conceived inquiries. Thus, Sally next requests a sequence of print-outs including: 1. The average commune and per capita request for automobiles in the relevant regions as well as the national average, the average for other regions, last year's national average, and the projection for this year. 2. A summary of all changes in this year's car models. 3. A similar summary of changes in refrigerators. With this information, Sally sees that the new model cars have innovations that make them more economical and efficient than last year's models for travel in the cold and snow and she is a annoyed that facilitation workers didn't sufficiently foresee increased demand for new cars in heavy-snow regions. There is no corresponding improvement in refrigerators that would warrant a four percent jump in demand. Sally asks for a check on reasons people gave in a few representative communes for requesting new refrigerators and discovers an inordinate number of people claiming their refrigerators were out of service. Further research shows that a refrigerator model introduced five years ago is now showing signs of unexpectedly low durability, leading to the unexpectedly high requests for replacements. In light of her findings, Sally recalculates her own proposals for production at John Henry, scaling things up more than she had initially intended, but not quite as much as consumers sought. She feels the refrigerator need is urgent, but some of the people in the cold regions will simply have to manage without new cars. She also adds her comments to the qualitative data base. Sally is eager to see whether facilitation board workers will come to similar conclusions in their revised projections for the next round and is gratified when their new projections and explanations are released. They did indeed perceive the same unexpected causes of high demand and elevate their projections for final production of steel only a bit more than Sally had thought warranted. Differential Productivity in "Competing" Steel Plants One of the more interesting differences between John Henry's plan and Northstart's is that John Henry varies dramatically from the productivity norm for its industry. Publishing companies are all able to attain comparable productivity and any publisher producing below average output per input has to have acceptable reasons for doing so. Some steel plants, however, have technologies neither as pleasant to work with nor as efficient in outputs per inputs as others because the yearly fall in demand for steel makes retooling all existing plants inadvisable since the new capacity would just lie idle some years down the road. Instead, selected old plants were only modestly improved in the expectation that before too long the plants would be closed or converted to other uses. The few plants needed to provide the lower steel demand projected for the future were retooled extensively, but other plants like John Henry were only minimally updated. Thus, during the year's planning, John Henry's old technology cannot approach the productivity of the completely retooled plants, or even live up to the industry average. The point, of course, is that whereas in an employee-managed market economy workers at the old plants would suffer lower incomes due to their plant's lower capabilities, in a participatory economy no such penalty would arise.