When you cross the threshold into a workplace (a factory, an office, a store, it doesn't matter),
you in effect leave one part of the world (let's call it the city, the town, the village, where you
live) your area of a residence, and you enter instead the workplace the area of your labor,
if you're a working person, as most adults are. Now, when that happens
you leave whatever democracy might exist in your residence and you enter a workplace from which
democracy is excluded and always has been. What do I mean? Very simple. In your workplace a very
small minority of the people involved, the owner of the business, the family that runs or owns the
business, or if you work in a corporation which is the major form of business in the United States
it's a board of directors and that's usually 10 to 20 individuals. The vast majority of the people
in every enterprise, except a few of the very smallest, are the employees. So now the question
presents itself: is the majority (the employees) in a position to participate in the decisions that
affect their lives? Is it a democratic system? And the answer is an unambiguous no. The owner, the
family that owns, the board of directors, whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system,
makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology the enterprise uses,
where the production will take place, and what gets done with whatever profits or revenues or
income the enterprise generates. Those are the four big decisions the owner, the family, the
board of directors, they make that decision. The employees are excluded from that decision. They
do not participate. But they are required to live with the consequences which affect them deeply.
Let me give you some examples. If the people who run the business decide to close it,
you're out of the job. If they decide to fire you, you're out of a job. If they
decide to use a technology that hurts your lungs you've got a simple choice:
take it, suffer it, or quit, and go work in another business that's run in the same way,
which is why a lot of people stay when they get abused because where are they going to go
where they're not at risk of being abused? And abused in what way? Abused by the lack of
democracy in the workplace. So when capitalist societies like the United States, for example,
right now refer to themselves as a democratic society what must they mean? Well, they must
mean something other than the workplace because that isn't organized in a democratic way,
never was. The people who make the decisions are not accountable. The employees who live with those
decisions are not in a position to vote them in or out of office. They're not in a position
to have some power over the people who have such extraordinary power over them.
So whatever the word "democracy" means it doesn't apply to the workplace in capitalism. And that's
a very big statement because that's where most adults spend most of their lives in our society.
Five out of seven days, the best hours of those days ,you're in the workplace. You've got to add
a couple more hours in terms of preparing for and getting to and from the workplace. It's the center
of your life, as you all know, for much of that life. So if you're going to call yourself a
democracy you would have had to have a democratic workplace from the beginning. We never did.