International Workers' Day with Richard Wolff
Excerpt from the video:
"If democracy is a value that we claim in modern society to uphold, then we have to realize
that the first place it should have been installed is the workplace,
because that's where adults spend most of their time. Five or six days
out of the week, nine to five, you're at work and therefore the
democratization of work, one worker one vote, to decide what? What to
produce, how to produce, where to produce and what to do with the
profits. That would be an alternative. Every worker is both an employee
and the employer. The end of the division of work into master/slave,
lord/ surf or employer/employee.
My guess is that the socialism of the 21st century, the new direction,
which is something neither the Soviet Union nor the People's Republic of
China tried, is an economic system based on the democratization of the
workplace. And let me just add why that would be a solution. If all the
people democratically in an enterprise decide who gets paid how much
money, do you think they would give a handful of executives tens of
millions of dollars in salary while the average other worker couldn't
put there kid through college?
I don't think so. If the workers
together decided whether or not to use a technologically dangerous new
technology, would they do it because it enhances profit? I don't think
so. Because they, their wives and husbands, their children, their
neighbors would have to breath the bad air, drink the bad water and so
we would begin to have the rational basis to not go in dangerous
directions because the people who suffer will be the ones who make the
decisions. Today we have executives who make those decisions and live
far away in gated community with filtered air. Well, that's the problem.
Again, the decision of the few imposed on the many.
Do you think
factories would leave? The workers would never move the factories to
China because it would be the end of their jobs and their communities.
And finally and most importantly. the distribution of the profits would
be undertaken to benefit everybody. Everybody who works there. Everybody
in the surrounding communities with which every workplace interacts.
It's an alternative and it says that every human being will now be both
employer and employee. And the split that destroys us between the two
will finally be overcome."
