From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Nov 03 2002 - 11:20:17 MST
On Saturday 02 November 2002 18:46, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> --- Charlie Stross <charlie@antipope.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 12:22:42PM -0500, Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> >
> > "Worker control of the means of production" means, basically, that
> > when
> > the enterprise makes a profit, the workers share in it. Nothing more,
> > nothing less. If you worked for a dot com and had stock options, you
> > were participating in a socialist scheme.
> >
> > (With me so far?)
>
> No, because ONLY a dot com where ALL stock is owned ONLY by employees,
> and their ownership is entirely in proportion to their contribution to
> the company, minus salary and benefits used for living expenses or
> otherwise taken out of the enterprise.
>...
More importantly, one of the things that "control of" means is that you choose
how it will be employed, and by whom. If the workers don't own voting stock,
then they don't have control in any sense. If they do, but they can only
exercise control via voting for the boards of directors, then they don't have
much control. If "workers councils" micromanage, then they have maximal
control.
The "best answer" from the worker's point of view is probably somewhere in the
middle. It every management "decision" can be pre-judged by the worker's
councils, then the reaction time is going to be quite long. This could also
be a quite expensive process. If managers are allowed to keep their level of
compensation secret, then this is clearly unfair to the "share-holders".
I don't have names for these various gradations, but I don't expect that any
one term can reasonably be applied to all of them. Not given the way that
people tend to reason with generalities.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:57:56 MST