I was going to post a comment on this last night, but lost track of it. Yesterday, I was listening to a CBC episode of The Current on my Ipod which dealt with the new managerial fad -
Holacracy....which is supposed to be a new way of organizing a company hierarchy away from top down lines of authority to something that allows equal participation. The problem is that there has been a steady long line of new advice and new programs to fix whatever is wrong with the company as far back as the 70's and 80's, which succeeded in ending a lot of the jobs of middle management and little else!
In the mid-80's, when I was a lowly furnace worker for an abrasives manufacturing company in Niagara Falls, they got on the "Quality Control" bandwagon. At the time, there was a panic that the Japanese were taking over the world and outproducing and outperforming the U.S., so management advisers were making a killing by studying and trying to apply some of the Japanese management techniques. The problem was that North American companies were only interested in fixing product reliability numbers so they could make more money. The Japanese system had a clear hierarchy of management that was based on subtle and intangible cultural factors that were demonstrated by little quirks such as how low one person bowed when addressing the other. These are things that are a big deal in Japanese culture which could not translate over here. And no doubt were a big part of the reason why someone would aspire to management and executive class in Japan, without seeking a much higher pay or living status than lower ranking employees. Also, westerners were shocked that a CEO would pick up a broom and sweep the shop floor if it was dirty, rather than ordering an underling to do it. I think we figured out how it would work out when the executive name plates were taken off of the parking spaces under the small roofed area of the parking lot for the managers...so supposedly everyone driving to work was equal....except that anyone new who parked under the roof was quickly informed by a foreman or an engineer that the covered section was still for management!
I think the quirks of Japanese culture are one of the reasons why there has been far less income stratification than in the U.S. and elsewhere, compared to other industrialized nations. In "The Spirit Level" Richard Wilkinson notes that the income gap between ceo and plant worker is equivalent to Sweden, although the relative equality in Sweden is accomplished through progressive taxation, while in Japan, it has been accomplished by a lack of executive salary increases compared to the west.
As for that Holacracy thing I mentioned earlier...my primary skepticism of this comes from searching through their website and all of the rhetoric about inclusion and participation, and finding nothing addressing the money! This is where the rubber meets the road, because a lot of people working on the shop floor of a factory, a metal fabricator, or even service jobs in retail and restaurants know where the money is going when the business is profitable....and it is not into their pay packets! The fundamental problem of capitalism is that workers have to produce excess value for their work for a company to be profitable. And when the company is profitable, the value of their work is harvested by the directors at the top of the corporation! At one time, unions had more power to push back against greedy managers and executives, and we even played the major role in raising non-union wages and improving working conditions. Right now, capitalism has unshacked itself from any restraints applied by workers, and we're back to the pre-depression Guilded Age.
For my part, my primary objection to a system of capitalism is that it doesn't seem to exist without the need for growth. As I understand the situation today in the world from an environmental perspective, we don't have room for more economic growth, and that's why capitalism has become increasingly a game of seizing wealth from others. If there is a road to the future, it will come through zero growth or no growth economics that is not dependent on constant priming of consumers to demand new and more products for no good reason. The best way to organize large scale production of needed products in a no growth future will come through workplace democracy...using the Mondragon Cooperatives of Spain as a template, where the workplace is organized as a democratic society and each worker has a vote and a share in the profits.
Democracy At Work info.
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