5 ms·
What would your preferred alternative look like?
by rootusrootus 2mo ago
What would your preferred alternative look like?
- shimman 2mo agoFor the modern American tech corporation? Full throated workplace democracy, with an emphasis on small d: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy Corporations are the last authoritarian forces we willfully allow to dictate how we live our lives, I think anything to dismantle their power is worth pursuing. If democracy is good enough for states, it should surely be more than good enough for the economy. As someone who is a big fan of consensus and voice, I don't see how current corporate leadership could get worse if more workers inside the company had more opportunities to direct its future. It's their future too, they need a say and telling people to just leave goes back to the neoliberal decaying value of money above all us.
- Xirdus 1mo agoAt the risk of being accused of reductio ad absurdum - do you want companies to be run like American HOAs? If so, do you expect the results to be the same or different than with HOAs?
- wredcoll 1mo agoThere are, if not millions of HOAs, surely at least one hundred thousand, but you only hear about the ones being silly. It's a bit of a lazy punchline, especially because HOAs are one of the purest forms of democracy, they really only exist (barring certain corporate controlled ones that I don't think count) because the people there want them to.
- Xirdus 1mo agoIt's not a punchline at all. If HOAs are pure democracy, and businesses should be as democratic as possible, then naturally the ideal structure of a business is very close to HOA, if not identical to HOA. As far as I know, the vast majority of HOAs fall into "exists only on paper" category, where they have virtually no rules and do virtually nothing except the basic necessities, sometimes they also maintain shared spaces and that's it. They don't even have regular meetings most of the time, only special ones. This is obviously not how a sustainable business can be run. Of the remaining ones (which is a tiny minority of the grand total), the vast majority are exactly like the horror stories you hear - corruption, nepotism, stupid rules with selective enforcement, interpersonal politics getting in the way of actually getting things done. If a business was run like a HOA, since it cannot be the first kind, I predict it would usually devolve to this within a few years. I honestly never heard of a single case where HOA 1) does a lot, 2) has comprehensive rules, 3) actually enforces the rules, and 4) isn't a horror story. So I really don't know how such a HOA would operate, what the governance structure would be, how enthusiastic people would be to participate and exercise their voting rights, or how it all would translate into a business. If you know of a case like this, or have a theory how it would play out, please share!
- wredcoll 1mo agoI think HOA discussion is rather getting away from the original point. Presumably if you were running a corporation as a democracy you'd just go through the same basic stages as a city-state where you rapidly end up with representatives serving terms. This sort of thing depends wildly on the size/number of people involved of course. A 5-10 person company doesn't really need much in the way of a power structure, presumably everyone knows what needs to be done and you probably have different specialties anyways so you consult each other when required and then each person does their thing. Perhaps occasionally you need some kind of tie breaking vote. A manufacturing company employing 50,000 people at every level from (ceo of 50,000 person company) to (effectively minimum wage bolt tightener) is going to need more authority explicitly defined and delegated. Spending 5 minutes thinking about it, you'd pass the equivalent of a law saying "everyone in this class of (bolt tighteners) must work 20+ hours a week and gets paid $xx.00 an hour and so on and so forth and if they fail to adhere to this then x, y and z happens then get fired". This law could be passed either by a direct vote or more likely created by a body of representatives. I don't know offhand of any business that runs this explicitly as a democracy, there's various co-op businesses that do exist but I've never investigated how exactly they run these things. I don't see anything stopping you from having a company that elects its ceo though.
- Xirdus 1mo agoCooperation is easy when everybody cooperates and has the same goals. Even in a 100% privately owned company with strict hierarchy and egomaniacal CEO. The problems start when the goals stop aligning or people stop cooperating. And it doesn't sound like you paid any thought to what happens then in a democratic setting. For example, those bolt tighteners. The joint vote by the tire balancers, CNC operators and facility maintainers has beat the opposition and a resolution was passed that excludes bolt tighteners from annual bonus. Or the bolt tighteners have joined with delivery drivers and passed a rule requiring a certain number of bolts in all new designs whether they make sense or not. Or a hundred other ways in which people can use their vote to put their own self-interest above the shared good. What are the main forces that keep a democratic workplace like the one you described from collapsing due to bad votes and bad rules?
- shimman 1mo agolol if you got HOAs out of that link IDK what to tell you. Workers should be able to vote for their leadership full stop, poor leaders can easily make their lives bad. Voice needs to have more place in the economoy, relying on just monetary incentives has created our current decaying society. It won't fix everything but it will give people a chance to dictate more of their lives through means of mass consensus while experiencing less authority.
- Xirdus 1mo agoAble to vote for their leadership - check. Voice has a place - check. Incentives other than monetary - check. Chance to dictate more of their lives - check. Mass consensus - check. Maybe I'm missing something but I really don't see how HOA doesn't fit here. How would workplace democracy solve the problem of office politics and the associated corruption and nepotism dominating the leadership elections? Or do you consider workplace democracy to be better than the current system even if that problem stays unsolved?
- shimman 1mo agoSure, you're assuming that workers would want to form an HOA. I don't think this is true. Like other commentators, some guess that they would form representative republics. I also don't think this is true. What I do think is that by giving people the ability to shape their world, they may very likely shape it in ways that are beneficial to more than the few. How they do that is their prerogative, but surely you can see how this would be more beneficial than the oligarchies or dictatorships (the version of HOA you're thinking of, where the tyranical minority selected few harass the many) that form the vast majority of working corporations. We already know that centrally planned economies are extremely inefficient and some of the worst ways to foster collaboration, so why should we accept the same system in our working lives? I'm not saying I know how things will be better, but surely letting workers decide their fates is better than the current reality. You're acting as if workers don't know what's in their best interest to have sustainable careers. Give people a chance, they're way more imaginative than you think.
- inigyou 1mo agoIsn't most of the problem with HOAs that people never vote, making them oligarchies in practice?
- Xirdus 1mo agoAnd you expect democratically run companies to have higher voter participation why exactly?