How does the government make employee owned enterprise unduly difficult?
I’m not aware of anything that makes it hard to form such a company. Maybe it’s a lack of knowledge on my part, so I’d like to hear your perspective.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
In much the same way that voter ID laws are, on paper, a neutral requirement that everybody has to abide by, but in reality are intended to restrict the voting abilities of a specific category of people, many policies enacted ostensibly for other reasons have functioned to skew the economic playing field away from workers' self-management. I'll give a few broad examples.
For one thing, in a workers' self-directed enterprise (or WSDE), no single individual or group is a concentration point of wealth or power. To the extent that concentrated wealth or power in a corporation enables one access to the upper echelons of society where CEOs can have private meetings with senators, this opportunity is not afforded to WSDEs. This may be a minor point, but I think the culture of material wealth carries with it a certain privilege that simply wouldn't arise in democratically organized firms.
Secondly, an advantage of creating WSDEs to replace top-down structures is to allow for a diversity of goals. In a capitalist enterprise, there is one primary goal, profit, to which the others are subservient. In a WSDE, depending on its composition, profit may be a secondary goal, behind others such as work satisfaction or the quality of the final product. Where traditional companies would perhaps be unwilling to settle for less profit in exchange for, say, more leisure time, more domestic jobs staying in the country, better components manufactured locally, and so on, this can largely be traced to the fact that a single individual or board of directors (who do not actually perform the duties involved in production or provision of services) has complete dictatorial control over the surplus value generated by the workers and total ownership of their productive output. This tendency would be attenuated in WSDEs, and as such, they would probably not contribute as much to the GDP as a high-powered capitalist enterprise. There have been some exceptions to this rule, such as the Mandragon cooperative in Basque, but in general there is less incentive to value profit above all other considerations where everyone who has to shoulder the burden of generating the profit is equally in charge of deciding how much to make and what to do with it. As government policies tend to prioritize GDP as a measure of prosperity, WSDEs would be less benefited by these policies to the degree that they are less focused on profit.
Another way that governments act in a manner antithetical to worker control is by weakening the power of unions and directing funds away from the public sector, where unions are more common. This is what happened in India according to the article, and is partly what sparked the outrage among workers (though incidentally, it has come out that the numbers of strikers were vastly exaggerated). Unions are not themselves WSDEs obviously, but they are important institutions of worker influence over the pace and conditions of their jobs, and depowering unions functions as a way of making cooperatives less likely to spring up and flourish.
Finally, the obvious thing that governments could stop doing is to stop violently overthrowing economies that operate on the principle of democratized work. Revolutionary uprisings in which workers seized workplaces, occupied them, and created assemblies and committees to run them democratically, have arisen in Russia, Argentina, Algeria, Greece, Spain, and France over the past couple of centuries, and the usual response by states has been to squash them militarily or economically.
In short: the larger purpose of workers' self-direction is itself a threat to capitalism, and the most powerful states are all committed to furthering capitalism.
