Workers' self-management

Workers' self-management is the collective governance of a workplace by its workers, who make decisions about production and working conditions rather than leaving them to outside owners or managers.

Workplace democracy: A system in which workers participate in decisions governing their workplace. It describes the decision-making principle that gives self-managed workplaces their authority.
Mondragon Corporation: A federation of worker cooperatives founded in the Basque Country in 1956. Its large cooperative network demonstrates how worker ownership and governance can scale.
Capitalism: An economic system in which productive assets are predominantly privately owned and used for profit. It commonly places workplace control with owners and managers rather than workers collectively.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A French socialist thinker who criticized property and advocated mutual association among producers. His proposals for worker associations helped shape traditions of cooperative self-government.
Labor productivity: The amount of output produced per unit of labor input. Shared authority can change incentives, coordination, and the measurement of workplace performance.
Workers' council: An elected or directly constituted body through which workers deliberate and make collective decisions. Councils can coordinate decisions across teams while remaining accountable to workers.
LIP factory: A French watch factory whose workers occupied and self-managed production during a major 1973 labor conflict. The workers' continuation of production made self-management central to the dispute.
Scientific management: A management approach that uses systematic measurement and task design to improve labor productivity. Its separation of planning from execution contrasts with workers directing their own work.
Mikhail Bakunin: A Russian revolutionary anarchist who advocated federated, collectively governed associations. His anarchism connected workers' control with opposition to centralized state authority.
Worker cooperative: A business owned and democratically controlled by the people who work in it. Worker cooperatives are the principal organizational form associated with self-managed workplaces.

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