Industrial democracy, or industrial participation, embraces a wide range of alternatives and is espoused in a surprisingly wide range of ideological positions. Essentially, all variants aim to break down the line-of-command hierarchy which characterizes modern industry, and in particular to remove the class/power distinction between work-force and management. The motivation for such plans can be the elimination of work alienation, a desire to link the interests of the work-force more clearly with those of the industry or company, the increase of overall human freedom, or more far-reaching intentions to restructure either just the economy or the whole polity on egalitarian and democratic lines. Just as the motives vary considerably in ambition, so do the techniques suggested. At the lowest level of ambition, industrial democracy may mean nothing more than profit-sharing schemes, or an encouragement and facilitation to workers owning shares. It may imply, instead, trade-union representation on boards of directors, as is the case in Germany, and as was planned for the United Kingdom by the Bullock Report (1976). Some firms are entirely owned by the work-force, and have management decisions made by meetings of the worker-owners, though these are rare and have seldom proved successful in capitalist societies; however, a hierarchical management structure generally proves essential in an enterprise of any size.
The full-blooded theory of industrial democracy, however, is an entire rival theory both to capitalism and to communism’s system of state ownership. Developed by such thinkers as, in Britain, G. D. Cole (1889–1959), it imagines the replacement of ordinary representative democracy with direct democracy, not only in the community but in the individual factories and firms. In these workplaces the workers would be entirely independent and would make all decisions of production, pricing and sales, as well as salaries, themselves. The firms would only loosely be grouped in representative bodies, and there would be no more state control of the economy than of any other aspect of life. The problems of co-ordination raised by such theories are legion, and the approach really belongs within the theory of anarchism.
With the radical transformations of the structure of employment in the Post-industrial Western economies, especially the growth of part time work and consultancy arrangements, the core ideas of worker participation and industrial democracy may no longer have anything to which they can be applied.
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