Another Potential Walker Victim: Workplace Democracy

My UW-Madison colleague Greg Downey has a great blog, The Note On My Door. He explains the blog's title: "In the old days professors might tape brief notes on their office doors. Welcome to the future."

Greg recently posted a thoughtful essay: "On public employees and the right to organize," wherein he takes aim at the important, but mostly overlooked issue of worker participation in organizational decision-making. As unions get weakened or eliminated, top-down management is strengthened to the detriment of good decision-making. (This is one of Paul Soglin's major arguments about both the role of unions and of citizen groups in local government.)

Here's the meat of Downey's concerns:

Over my decade of paid service to UW-Madison, I've seen democracy in action every single day on campus. In every unit and every discipline, our faculty and staff are able to collaboratively prioritize, discuss, debate, and decide issues about the proper course of university education, the proper administration of always scarce funds, and the proper rewards to hard-working peers. It's not always pretty, and it's never easy, but it's something that the whole organization holds dear; and in the end, it works. It works not because it's the most efficient way of making decisions, but because it's the most transparent and legitimate. It works because it forces those holding opposing views to express and defend them in civil and evidence-based ways. And it works because it brings a basic dignity to a process where, all too easily, those with greater power or fancier credentials or higher salaries could simply have their way. That's what I think we will lose if, as an unrelated side-effect of changing the benefits payment structure of state workers, we throw out the very possibility of collective decision-making. We will lose an important mechanism to preserve the serious and honest participation of state workers, not only in shaping the character of the organizations that they serve, but in shaping the legacy that this state leaves to its next generation of civil servants -- and citizens.

 

- Barry Orton

 

Comments

[Brian]

Mr. Expert,

Are you going to have a follow up post or article about this anytime soon? :)

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