NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Worker Democracy and Worker Productivity
This article by Henry M. Levin gives a research-based argument that teachers might find useful for developing a democratic school governance model.
Teachers who seek to collectively design and run schools will find Henry M. Levin’s “Worker Democracy and Worker Productivity,” published in Social Justice Research, to be useful as a research-based argument for developing a proposed school governance model.
According to the abstract:
“A major source of oppression in industrial and post-industrial society is the restrictive and highly authoritarian nature of the workplace. One response is to democratize the workplace by increasing the participation of workers in making decisions and choosing and evaluating managers as well as sharing in the ownership of the firm. These are not new ideas, and there are many examples of organizations pursuing various forms of democratic practices.
However, a major objection is that such participation would compromise economic and other types of organizational productivity. This article examines the empirical support for that argument over a wide range of types of organizations in which workers participate in important decisions affecting their welfare. The overall results of this survey across many different forms of work organizations suggest that the evidence supports the opposite conclusion: that worker participation increases productivity, particularly when workers share the benefits of higher productivity. The challenge is to ascertain ways of spreading these practices more widely.”