Forum Post: Some examples of workplace democracy.

Sorry if this is rambly. It's late and I'm tired...

Let's say a person makes beautiful, renowned sculptures. Not only does it require their talent, but it's hard work, and extremely tedious. It also requires the use of a chemical that's known to cause cancer. They hire someone to sit for 4 hours a day at a cash register and take peoples money who buy the sculptures. Now, should this hired person be entitled to equal profit? It took the artist 4 days of sweat, but took this person 4 hours, most of which they spent playing on facebook.

If I offer you a certain amount of money to help me with one aspect of something that I'm doing, and you agree, then why should you be given the right to have a say in that business of mine? Mind your own business.

Let's say a brilliant person named Bob really understands shoes like nobody else does, and he decides to make the best shoes ever. To achieve this he hires several people to sit around and preform simple tasks. Bob stresses night and day to make sure things are working just right, stuff the hired people don't have to worry about when they go home. They just do their thing, get paid, and then actually have free time.

No offence to these people, but they're idiots when it comes to shoes. Not only do they decide that they should be paid as much as Bob, but they think that the shoes would look better with a red stripe, and since workplace democracy is the law, they have the power to control these decisions. So they start making the worst shoes ever, and all the money Bob put into the company is drowning in poor sales, until they shut down, and there goes the risk Bob took with his life savings.

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Why do coops work so well with grocery stores? Because a grocery store never requires brilliance. Sorry to make that so blunt, but when you unify popular will you dilute any brilliance, simply because you have unified the level of understanding. And brilliance is never really understood until it's had that chance to have an effect.

But think about this. This isn't about having the right to control businesses just because you work there, because that's ridiculous. It's about being exploited, and it's also about the cost of living.

Take a good look at Norway. A mixed economy allows private ownership of business while still being able to regulate certain things democratically.

The approach Norway has that seems to work so well is providing a decent standard of living by default, giving people their own space to find work and become motivated for increasing their depth of living even further. The democratic regulation of essential infrastructure is how our world resources can be made sustainable and how the exploitation of people can be neutralized.

The public would decide that something like pollution is too much, and it would be the responsibility of government to respond, not ignore.

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Personally, I think we have a pretty good standard of living by default, if only sleeping outside wasn't illegal. Seriously, welfare in the US is enough to eat, even organic high end food. And if it's too cold to sleep outside there are homeless shelters. It's absolutely perfect, as long as the police don't harass you for sleeping (so you find a nice spot on the outskirts of town, or a beach maybe). Other people are not out to kill you.

Nobody thinks that i'm a homeless person because I don't drink or get dirty (that's a stereotype because sickened people often end up in homeless situations). I started being homeless because it occurred to me that paying rent was a joke, and it's amazing how much money you can save when not doing that. Now that I'm used to sleeping outside, the nature and fresh air is so much better then any box, I feel sorry for people addicted that way.

I know everyone isn't physically young and capable, and our system is definitely set up to poke and prod people into a certain way of living. That whole commercial program treating everyone like a crop on a farm. It's terrible. We need this to be understandable. People are in fact exploiting the world, and the planets getting trashed, and that absolutely has to stop. But even from my position it seems like a lot of people want to use democracy for the sake of more indulgence. We want more, but really, we need less.