The Future of the Workplace - Workers’ Self-Management?

“On cooperation vs. competition, I would check out the book, No Contest: The Case Against Competition. The author debunks the myth that competition is better than cooperation by going over 500 studies and showing that in almost every case, cooperation is much better.

One thing I didn’t cover was how to start a Workers Managed company. Obviously, there is no huge incentive to start one. In a Left-Libertarian society, communities and workplaces are highly linked to each other so starting a cooperative would be no problem. Of course, we dont live in this type of society. There are a number of ways to proceed. Anyone can start one of these companies which is a start but again, no incentive, except for humanitarian reasons. Some people have suggested anarcho-syndicalism. In a nutshell, anarco-syndicalism uses unions in a grass-roots fashion. Basically, unions connect with other unions and form a federation. At some point, the unions go on strike driving the companies out of business. After that, the workers start running the workplace on their own. This is pretty much what happened during the Spanish Civil War.”

On the wake of the Bangladesh fire that killed more than 100 people in the Tazreen Fashion sweatshop and injured many others, we need to re-think how the workplace is run - all over the world.

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