AnarWiki/markdown/Workers'_Self-Management.md

**Workers' Self-Management** (also known as **self-management**, **labor
management**, **autogestión,** **workers' control**, *'industrial
democracy **and** democratic management*') refers to the democratic and
horizontal management of a workplace. In some variants, all the
worker-members manage the enterprise directly through
[assemblies](Democratic_Assembly "wikilink"); in other forms, workers
exercise management functions indirectly through the election of
specialist managers. It is a key component of [libertarian
socialist](Libertarian_Socialism "wikilink") philosophy, particularly
[syndicalism](syndicalism "wikilink").

## Frequently Asked Questions

This was taken from
[here](https://libcom.org/library/workers-self-management-faq).

### **What is workers self-management?**

Workers self-management is a way of running a workplace without bosses
or a fixed managerial hierarchy. Instead, the workplace is run
democratically by its workers. By democracy, we do not mean that workers
elect a manager to make decisions for them. We mean that the workers
themselves decide how they will do things as a group. No one in a
self-managed enterprise has control over any of the other workers -
decision making power is shared equally between all workers.

### **How does it work?**

Each self-managed workplace is managed by a face-to-face meeting of
everyone who works there – a workers’ assembly. The workers of each
enterprise collectively make all "management" decisions on a basis of
one-worker-one-vote or consensus. The workers of each department form
their own smaller assemblies, in which they make the decisions that
affect only their department, and so on to the smallest work groups.

### **Isn't that very time consuming?**

Not really. [Managers](Boss "wikilink") will often complain about how
time consuming their jobs are, but they spend most of their time doing
administrative work. Relatively little time is spent making big
management decisions. However, in great factories and plants there are
too many workers to gather in one meeting every day. The workplace-wide
assemblies might occur once a week, or once a month instead. They are
the focus of major "policy" decisions - i.e. those which the workers
DECIDE are most important.

### **So how will work be coordinated on a daily basis?**

The workers will meet in their department assemblies and work groups to
make the thousands of day to day decisions that crop up. Each department
sends a delegate to a "shop committee" to coordinate their activities.
Delegates are not professional managers: They are ordinary workers who
have been sent by their department assemblies with special instructions
(mandates); they return to these assemblies to report on the discussion
and its result, and after further deliberation the same or other
delegates may go up with new instructions. Once the shop committee
meeting is over, they return to their everyday jobs. Any compromises
reached at delegate meetings are subject to ratification by the
department assemblies, and delegates can be recalled and replaced at any
time. Therefore the shop committee does not tell the workers what the
official policy is - the workers tell them. They are not a management
board, but means of communication between the different departments.
Indeed, the shop committee is not even a permanent body, since different
delegates will probably be chosen for each meeting, so that everyone in
the workplace gets to serve this role.

### **Will there be managers?**

No. Workers’ self-management abolishes the permanent division between
managers and workers. Instead, the people who do the actual productive
work – making products, designing them, maintaining machinery,
collecting information and so on - will collectively manage their own
work. Workers self-management means that workers literally manage
themselves, and therefore there are no professional managers or
managerial hierarchy – just normal workers cooperating as equals. Note
that rejecting a fixed managerial hierarchy does not necessarily reject
leadership. If packing luggage onto an aeroplane needs a team leader,
then so be it. But there is no reason why it should be the same person
today as it is tomorrow. Similarly, a book may require a chief editor,
but there is no reason why that person should be in charge of all the
books published. Another member of his working group might edit the next
book they take on. And where a team requires a leader for a specific
task, she should be elected and removable by that team, and should work
within the democratic decisions made by the whole team.

### **But even if cleaners have full voting rights in plant decisions, how will they ever exert the same influence as those who develop budgets or design products?**

You are right. Despite equal rights, cleaners' work may not challenge
their intellectual capacities or provide them with information about
technological options or with skill at making decisions. One approach is
to rotate jobs regularly, so that engineers do some cleaning work and so
on. The most unpleasant jobs could be rotated between the whole
workforce, so that no one is made to spend their whole working life
doing degrading tasks. However, hierarchies of power will not be wholly
undone by temporary shuffling, if the quality and empowerment of
peoples’ day to day jobs differ largely. Instead of dividing workers
into brain workers and manual workers, it has been suggested that each
worker have a “balanced job complex”\*. Each worker has a set of jobs
composed of comparably fulfilling responsibilities. This does not mean
everyone must do everything. But it does mean that the half dozen tasks
that I regularly do must be roughly as empowering as the different half
dozen tasks that you do regularly. Everyone must have a comparable
balance of conceptual and rote tasks. So Instead of secretaries
answering phones and taking dictation, some workers answer phones and do
calculations while others take dictation and design products.

We are not suggesting that everyone has completely equal abilities,
although better education and less poverty would do a great deal to
equalize things. We won’t all do intellectual or manual jobs equally
well, but we will all do them well enough to bring our own unique
experiences and insights to bear on decision making. After all, good
ideas aren’t the monopoly of any individual or group. For sex or sports
we don't say that only the "best" should participate - the same should
be true for using one's head.

### **But what about relationships between workplaces?**

Well, this depends on how people wish to do things. Self managed
workplaces could compete in a market as
[capitalist](Capitalism "wikilink") workplaces do now. Others argue that
workplaces should join “[confederations](Confederation "wikilink")” –
free and equal associations of workplaces which replacing competition
with co-operation. These would be run through conferences of delegates
elected by each workplace, who come together to make decisions that
effect the economy as a whole. These would be controlled from below,
because delegates would be mandated and subject to instant recall by the
workers who elected them. All decisions made at conferences would be
subject to ratification by a vote of the workers’ assemblies in every
workplace. So in fact, decisions affecting the whole economy would be
made by everyone, with delegates being ambassadors rather than decision
makers. In these confederations, workplaces would agree a fair price for
each product, probably based on the number of hours they take to
produce. Or otherwise, workplaces might make a mutual agreement to give
their products away for free

## Famous Examples by Country/State

(Note: this refers to examples of workers taking over a capitalist
workplace and instituting workers' self-management. Not examples of
worker cooperatives which have been set up within capitalism.)

### Algeria

### Argentina

### Australia

### Austria

### Bolivia

### Bosnia and Herzegovina

### Brazil

### Canada

### Chile

### China

### Croatia

### Czechoslovakia

### France

### Germany

### Greece

### Hungary

### India

### Indonesia

### Iran

### Ireland

### Italy

### Mexico

### Poland

### Portugal

### Russia

### Serbia

### Spain

### Syria

### Turkey

### Ukraine

### United Kingdom

### United States

### Venezuela

### Yugoslavia

## See Also

  - [Anarcho-Syndicalism](Anarcho-Syndicalism "wikilink")

## References

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