Needed: Self-Management and Workplace Democracy

Participatory Management: Looking Deeper at the Mondragon Principles

By John McNamara

The next principle from Mondragon is that of Participatory Management. This seems like a no-brainer for worker co-operatives. What is the point of going through all the work of setting up a worker co-op if the workers don’t actually have a say in how the place is run? They would be better off in a unionized Employee Stock Ownership Program.

I’ll get more into this in a second. First, I want to share the language of the principle from Mondragon (translated, as they all are, of course):

“The Mondragon Cooperative Experience believes that the democratic character of the Cooperative is not limited to membership aspects, but that it also implies the progressive development of self-management and consequently of the participation of members in the sphere of business management which, in turn, requires:

a) The development of suitable mechanisms and channels for participation.

b) Freedom of information concerning the development of the basic management variables of the Cooperative.

c) The practice of methods of consultation and negotiation with worker-members and their social representatives in economic, organisational and labour decisions which concern or affect them.

d) The systematic application of social and professional training plans for members.

e) The establishment of internal promotion as the basic means of covering posts with greater professional responsibility.”

(source: The Mondragon Cooperative Experience, by José María Ormaechea, 2000)

Second, I want to parse the word management. We manage our co-operative whether or not we have a person holding a title with the word “manager”. Some co-ops manage collectively, some manage through a hierarchy, but we all manage the same things: assets, liabilities, equity, work performance, customer satisfaction etc. In this, as in most posts, I use the term management and manager in the broad sense.
Participatory management does not mean democracy and democracy does not mean participatory management. I say this because they are often linked together in a synonymous manner. A worker co-operative can have a strict top-down hierarchy that allows little or no member input and still elect its board of directors. Likewise, the concept of participatory workplaces can exist in capitalist organizations.

This principle exposes some dangers to worker co-operatives in that it is this area that the co-operative movement may be co-opted. World Blu has created a list of the “most democratic workplaces” for a couple of years now. While I have nothing against their mission, they misuse the word democracy when they mean participatory management. Only a handful of the companies on their list are co-ops or esops. In other words, they are honoring workplaces as “democratic” when the workers have no control over the governance of the organization. While I think that participatory management is a noble thing for a stock corporation to entertain, it isn’t democracy, it isn’t a right. It can be taken away as soon as the stockholders decide the experiment isn’t making them enough money. While I support World Blu’s efforts to humanize capitalism, I don’t think it will ever succeed on a grand scale but am glad that the workers in those business have a decent place to work.

A worker co-operative should abide by the values and principles of democracy. Participatory management should be another user principle for co-operatives even if it isn’t in the Identity Statement. It is the means by which the workers of the co-operative “use” their co-operative. Just as consumers use the products and services of a consumer co-operatives, workers use their ability to participate in decisions affecting their work life (roughly ¼-1/3 of our lives) as their right of membership.

Mondragon has created an excellent definition of participatory management. It isn’t simply deciding what type chairs to get for the office, it involves a complete involvement of the workforce in the operations and planning of the organization.

Note though, that the principle discusses the creation of “suitable” methods. Decisions have to be made and they have to be made in a way that enhances the organization in terms of serving their customers and succeeding in the market place. A restaurant can’t hold a membership meeting to discuss which person serves which table every time a customer walks in for dinner. A cab company can’t hold a debate about call assignment for each and every order. However, the co-operative can create methods of having these discussions about systems that ensure fairness and those methods should involve a wide range of voices from the membership.

Information has to be available to everyone or how can it truly run as a democracy. This isn’t on a “need-to-know” basis, but on the basis of ownership.

Another key point is that the co-operative needs to create bodies that will assist the worker-members in finding their voice. This might be a peer support program, a traditional stewards’ council, or even a labor union (although that is decidedly not what Mondragon is talking about). The bigger point being that management in a worker co-operative (whether run with a hierarchy or not) needs to establish means for worker’s to have a real voice in the discussion. Depending on the size of the organization (and the work week schedule) this will have different levels of formality. Rainbow Grocery is famous for its collectivist approach while Union CabMondragon models the labor movement through a stewards’ council and committee structure. uses a “social committee” in which elected representatives help provide input to the board and management as well as acting as a watch dog.

The last two points of the principle create an imperative of making participation systemic. As with the Sovereignty of Labour, this principle promotes the belief of internal promotion. The top end positions of a worker co-operative should generally not be hired from the outside of the worker co-operative movement. It is better for worker co-operative to create strong in-house training (and utilize professional development programs such as the Masters of Management: Co-operatives and Credit Unions) to develop the future leaders of the co-operative. One of the problems, in the United States, is that our co-operatives tend to be small and this limits opportunity for workers to advance and develop. It also limits the level of education and training that can be provided. However, we need to think beyond our stand-alone co-operatives. Just as Mondragon is a system of 180 or so co-operatives, we should start thinking of US Worker Cooperatives existing as an economic base.

Ormaechea chose this particular quote from Don José: “Co-operation brings people together in a collective task, but it gives each one responsibility. It is the development of the individual, not against the rest, but with the rest.”

By creating a base of strong management of our co-operatives we build the capacity for the movement to grow. We create the means for our co-operatives to cross-pollinate, to occasionally go outside of our stand-alone co-ops and we also create the means for the rank-and-file members to expand themselves, to develop themselves as people.

[PDF] The Evolution of Management in the Mondragon Cooperatives

SUPER IMPERIALISM : The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance

http://us.macmillan.com/Book.aspx?isbn=9780745319902

Michael Hudson's brilliant shattering book will leave orthodox economists spluttering. Classical economists don't like to be reminded of the ugly realities of Imperialism. Hudson is one of the tiny handful of economic thinkers in today's world who are forcing us to look at old questions in startling new ways. Alvin Toffler, best-selling author of Future Shock and The Third WaveThis new and completely revised edition of Super Imperialism describes the genesis of America's political and financial domination. Michael Hudson's in-depth and highly controversial study of U.S. financial diplomacy explores the faults built into the core of the World Bank and the IMF at their inception which -- he argues -- were intended to preserve the US's financial hegemony. Difficult to detect at the time, these problems have since become explicit as the failure of the international economic system has become apparent; the IMF and World Bank were set up to give aid to developing countries, but instead many of the world's poorest countries have been plunged into insurmountable debt crises. Hudson's critique of the destructive course of the international economic system provides important insights into the real motivations at the heart of these institutions - and the increasing tide of opposition that they face around the world.

Biography
Michael Hudson is an independent Wall Street Financial Analyst. He has taught in the New School of New York and at the University of Kansas Missouri. He has published widely on the topic of the US’s financial dominance.He has held the position of financial analyst for the Vatican for three years, and has also been an economic advisor to the Canadian, Mexican, Japanese and S Korean governments.

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. " 
- Paulo Freire

"Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress."
- Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

"… Without a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle…"
- Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

Fonte: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/41108.Paulo_Freire

Citas (2): Combate de valores

"No somos objetores del crecimiento a falta de algo mejor o por despecho, los somos porque no es posible continuar como antes. Incluso y sobre todo si un crecimiento infinito fuera posible, esta sería a nuestros ojos otra razón de rechazo con el fin de poder seguir siendo simplemente humanos. (...) Nuestro combate es, sobre todo, un combate de valores. Rechazamos esta sociedad de trabajo y consumo en la monstruosidad cotidiana y no solamente en sus excesos"
- Paul Ariès

Fonte: http://innovacionydecrecimento.blogspot.com/

Richards and Gilligan discuss new book on patriarchy and democracy

David A.J. Richards, Edwin D. Webb Professor of Law, and University Professor Carol Gilligan gave an informal talk on their new book, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future, on March 4 as part of the Brown Bags & Books series. The project grew out of the seminar they coteach on gender issues in the politics and psychology of democratic societies. Richards, with his expertise in the ethical and political aspects of law, and Gilligan, with her psychology and gender studies background, found new inspiration in their intellectual discourse. But it was Eva Cantarella, a Milanese classicist who participated in the seminar one semester, who convinced them that they couldn't fully understand the role of patriarchy in Western culture without taking a closer look at the culture of ancient Rome and the stories of Roman women who resisted that culture.

The resulting book examines Roman patriarchy and its inherent violence, expressed through imperialist war and the aggressive pursuit of political power. “We began to see a connection between the traumatic breaks in intimate life in the Roman world and the capacity for almost illimitable violence by Roman men," Richards said. "There is a psychology of violence which links the disruption of personal life to violence in public life.” The authors argue that, while the Roman Empire may have collapsed, its psychology infected Western religion, thus perpetuating its latent violence. "Because religion shapes political culture so deeply," Richards said, "you begin seeing how patriarchy has been deeply imbedded in the structure of not only Western religion but its politics."

The Deepening Darkness then turns to sources of patriarchal resistance, including religious thinkers, civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., and novelists including Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, before considering the political movements of the 1960s and other, more recent indications of anti-patriarchy. "Our psyche is aligned with democracy," Gilligan said, "because we are born with a voice and interrelationship.... If you’re going to set up a patriarchal society or any kind of tyranny, you have to deform human nature."

Observing that antipatriarchal movements have often invoked sexuality, most succinctly in the slogan "Make love, not war," Gilligan explained, "If you want to follow the struggle between democracy and patriarchy, just keep your eye on the love laws—the laws that says who can be loved, and how, and how much. As patriarchy rises the love laws get tightened. What become lightning-rod issues in American elections under the resurgence of patriarchy in the Bush years? Gay marriage, abortion.... When you’re overriding human nature, one way to do it is to ban love, or channel it only into very specified things.... What was registering politically as injustice was registering psychologically as pathologies—dissociation, all kinds of deformations of human nature.”

"The patriarchal distortion of democracy...is alive in the United States in the resurgent fundamentalism which George Bush massaged and drew much of his power from," Richards said. "How is it in an advanced country like the United States that you can create democratic majorities on the basis of the hatred of free women and gay men and lesbians?... To us it shows the continuing power of patriarchy, which has never been questioned the way it should.... Not to take it seriously is not to understand where the real threats to democracy lie, not just abroad but here at home—all too intimately at home, inside us as Americans to the extent that we can’t see these things, so we can’t face them.”

«O dinheiro é uma nova forma de escravidão e distingue-se da antiga pelo simples facto de que agora a escravatura é impessoal, ou seja, não existe uma relação humana entre o senhor e o escravo»

 (“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, that there is no human relation between master and slave.”)
- Leo Tolstoi

Fonte: http://pimentanegra.blogspot.com/