this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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There isn’t an inherent value to making all businesses democratic because very often most workers have no idea how the larger company works as a whole.
I work for an import company. My union warehouse steward is constantly judging the financial health of the company based on the volume of boxes he is shipping. The problem is he has no idea the relative value of those boxes so while he’s bemoaning we sent out 1/4 of the number of boxes on Tuesday that we sent out on Monday he’s missing that the total value of Monday’s sales were 3x Tuesdays. In 5 years of working with the guy he has never wrapped his brain around this. Our company would be much worse off if he had a say in how it works because he simply cannot see the larger picture as those skills were never developed. This is not uncommon and I myself have been the guy who cant see that larger picture in other roles.
Should the janitorial staff have equal says as to the executives in how funds should be allocated? Do we recognize that not everyone has the same skill set and level of skill as others?
You can use all of these same arguments to argue against democracy in nations, too. The average person has no idea how the nation works, all of the ins and outs of government, to say nothing of the larger global stage. Clearly what we need is a monarchy!
That's a false equivalence though as private businesses and governments are not the same.
How so?
Given their propensity for allocating the funds to themselves, probably.
Yeah that's not as common as people who have never run or managed a company or budget think.
The reality is your maintenance staff isn't going to have the skill set to make rational judgements outside their expertise.
Lets be realistic here, the reality is that most of the managerial staff including the C suite people don't have the skill set to make rational judgements on the working of the company either.
And then when it gets big enough, all decisions get filtered through C-level, their hangers on, and a roughly "democratic" board. In the sense that multiple people vote on the best course of action, not that they represent the workers.
Oh, look, all of a sudden a diverse array of inputs is providing value. Weird.