Twenty or more years ago (I think) I read articles about two different companies. I say 'different' but they were really rather similar in important ways. I can't tell you any details about them because this was before we had cds and dvds as archival devices, so what I tried to save got lost.

One of the companies was a factory in Indiana (of all places--I remember that much). The employees there set their own pay, and the turnover was zero with a long waiting list. The owner would lay out the figures each quarter and say here's the pool for pay, divvy it up. And the employees, about 100-150 people all told, would get together and do that. And everyone considered that the result was excellent. Some people didn't want to work hard and were happy to take less, others had extra expenses and worked more, etc. And it wasn't a new, untried thing either; that's the way the owner had run the place for years. It completely gave the lie to the capitalist assertion that labor is greedy and stupid.

The other place might have been in Mass or NY, I can't remember. But it was another factory and the owner put up a big board out in plain sight to everyone on the floor. On the board was all the company's financial and performance information, kept updated scrupulously. One of the items was a big slice of the profits that would be shared out every quarter or whatever. It took the people on the floor almost no time at all to make waste go to near-zero, quality up through the roof, shipping on time, etc. They didn't even need to discuss it much. They could each do what they thought might help, and watch to see what happened. It was brilliant: the pool positively bulged. And, as I recall, the owner increased the percentage as the absolute value of the pool got larger (which is exactly opposite to what bean-counters tell bosses to do). So the people on the floor drove the company to astronomically high productivity without management involvement except as suppliers of fresh information. It was a game, and they enjoyed playing it.

Are those outcomes relevant for our problem at all?

I have been involved in a number of work situations very similar to what you describe.

In farming, almost everyone is a free agent and independent contractor in many ways. All sorts of arrangements and easy transitions between worker and management, owner and employee are the rule. Even the immigrants from Central America - naivety seen by many liberals as a homogeneous and static class of people, exploited and presumably mistreated - have much upward mobility and represent the fastest growing group of new farm owners. This is true where small family farms and cooperative rural communities still survive, and not so true out on the West Coast and on the corporate farms.

A digression, if I may - the penchant for the liberals to see the immigrants as a monolithic group is not much different that the way the rabid racists see the immigrants. In both cases, the people are talked about as though they were pet dogs. The liberals think that the pet dogs should be treated kindly, the right wingers think they should be treated with discipline and threats. In both cases, though, the people - the human beings whose fate we presume to be deciding - are seen as pets.

I say "even" because what many people fail to see is that most of the immigrants from the South are uneducated and illiterate. That is an enormous handicap. This business of them being "illegal" because they don't have the right paperwork is so absurd. What does "paperwork" mean to people who have never seen paper and who can't read and write and who never had documentation and who were never “legal” anywhere, even where they were born?

How does that apply here? I would say that in farming there is a “get the job done” ethic, and anyone willing and able to contribute to that is welcome, regardless of who they “are.” Fairness, equality and justice are the best way to get the job done. There is no need for conflict between the two. Focus on the challenge, and everything else falls into place.

I envision the “job” here as being creating and maintaining a board where the Left can happen, not a gathering of like-minded individuals. The Left happens when people understand what the Left is, and that happens through discussion. I have complete confidence that the Left will always prevail on a level playing field. The Left is not happening anywhere, is not being discussed. It doesn't require some sort of special people, or some sort of advertising or promotion or gimmicks.


On edit - Liberal and Democratic party groups chronically focus on the dynamics of the group, rather than upon the shared task. That is one reason that the right wingers ran circles around the Democrats on recent years. As a person with some verbal and graphic skills, I could walk into the offices of a right wing organization, without any credentials, or connections, without passing any litmus tests and soon be put to work and well paid. All they care about is getting the job done. Liberals have a whole bunch of other considerations - credentials, connections, presumed success or fame, politically correct behavior and language and thousands of little social cues that tell them you are one of the elite. Most Democratic party and liberal organizations won't even accept help for free.

I talked to dozens of artists, writers, and musicians who tried to volunteer or hire on to the Dem party to help out during the last presidential campaign, and they were all told to canvass or get on the phone banks. Yet at the same time. those who did canvass said that they got very little support and were not treated well by the party. Both the phone bank and canvass workers said that almost no attention was put on what message we should be communicating or how - just get out there and rah rah Dems and anyone resistant to that pitch is too stupid to be concerned about.

That wouldn't have been so bad, were it not for the terrible quality of the graphics and literature used on the campaigns, and the garbled and ineffective message delivered to the public. It wouldn't rankle so much that there was no money to support writers and artists, were it not for the fact that many connected high muckety mucks in the party enjoy six figure salaries thanks in part to donations from the little people.