Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel Go to Table of Contents 2.Participatory Workplaces

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior. -Walt Whitman

Simon Bolivar Press - The Participatory Version Assuming no change in level of economic development, what innovations would participatory economics bring to Simon Bolivar Press? By now the answers should be fairly obvious. Just as throwing out capitalists and eliminating poverty, starvation, disease, and corruption were priorities of the anti -imperialist revolution, introducing workplace and consumer councils, egalitarian consumption, equitable job complexes, and collective self -management will be the goals of a participatory economic revolution. Simon Bolivar Press would begin by rotating dangerous and debilitating tasks, reducing income inequalities, and increasing job training. But the goal of training would no longer be for trainees to escape undesirable jobs left behind for others to do, but to allow job complexes to be balanced with little or no loss of efficiency. Temporary disparities would persist only because of disparities in skills which would be steadily reduced. Plans for plant operations would be regularly distributed to the entire work force, whose proposals for alterations would be seriously considered before projects were undertaken. Workers at council meetings would propose projects and policies to be debated and voted on. Similarly, the plant's relationship to the island's planning board would change as plans from above were questioned, alternatives proposed, and finally, once enough experience and skill developed, Simon Bolivar along with other units would undertake decentralized participatory planning, first as an experiment running alongside traditional procedures, then as the main means of developing plans for the island. The plant might still have a horribly smelly room for preparation of plates. But fans would improve things and all would work only short shifts in the smelly environment. Loading magazines onto trucks remains back-breaking work. Typesetting is still onerous. But employees who used to do one of these jobs all day long now spend somewhat less time on these tasks and more time on creative work or training. Mario spends more time not only in the plate preparation room, but on the presses and loading dock. He continues to do some managerial work, though without unilateral authority. The impetus for plant improvements, whether in the form of adjustments of job complexes, inexpensive innovations, or largescale new technologies to eliminate burdensome and/or dangerous jobs, is greatly increased. Since work at Simon Bolivar is less desirable than average, its workers work thirty-five hours there, putting in five hours in other plants or in their communities doing more enjoyable tasks like helping with day care and children's centers or community gardenmg. At more modem printing plants, job complexes are more pleasant than average. There, as a result, workers labor only thirty hours a week, putting in ten hours in agricultural and other hard labor in the vicinity. Job balancing committees had to make the initial calibrations, and now revise them on a continual basis taking note of disparities in job applications. The result? In the transition from coordinator to participatory economics, incomes rise significantly for the lower -paid two -thirds of the Simon Bolivar work force. Quality of work life increases dramatically for those who previously did the lowliest tasks and considerably for most others. The quality of life drops materially but not psychologically for a relative few. Quality of product improves along with morale. Moreover, workers return home daily with more energy and more inclination to exert themselves in political and social life further improving work conditions, for example. Home life, community life, and political participation are thereby greatly enhanced. A plant tour conducted a few years after participatory transformations would be punctuated primarily by descriptions of social relations and job complexes. We hear details of self -management. Workers speak of the change in morale and participation attendant on innovations. Product and technology are described with pride as well, but the emphasis is on why they were chosen, this having become the province of the workers rather than a distant planning elite. From a display of the benefits of independence from imperialism, the island becomes a showcase for liberation from technocratic hierarchy. Organizing democratic workers' councils, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning was certainly difficult but not impossible in the absence of high technology. The point is that participatory organization can work wonders not only in work places with access to high tech methods, but also in plants with an excess of manual, dangerous, and debilitating labor, like those that still prevail in many parts of the U.S. and in most of the third world. To be sure, however, coordinators are likely to resist such changes that would undermine their privileges in the economy and in society as a whole.