and a democratized workplace if you're going to do something like this. I'm sure many here on /. (which leans a bit conservative) don't agree with these protestors, but think a little ahead to a time if/when there *is* something you agree with.
Having a say in how the company you work for is run is something we should all desire, at least if you don't believe in Divine Command Theory.
Just because you work for somebody doesn't mean you get to get a say in how the organization is run. It just plain doesn't work unless it's a really small organization. Even if you worked a government job, and it was for the most democratic government in the world, you still don't get to do that. At best you get to vote for politicians that will then dictate how it's run. You and several others here talk about these mythical "very democratic" co-ops but you guys can't ever seem to name any. Every co-op I've ever seen is run just like any other business.
Nevertheless, many of us already do have a say in how our organization is run in various ways. But it's not based on votes, it's not based on how many shares you own, nor is it based on seniority or rank. Any well functioning organization is going to have a well defined mission, and nearly everything they do will somehow be in furtherance of that mission. In fact, many jobs that aren't even leadership positions even reward you for contributing to strategic decision making as long as it's in furtherance of that mission. I myself have seeded more than a few strategic initiatives without being in a leadership position. You know how people like me do that? When we have ideas, we roundtable them in meetings. The manager doesn't make all of the decisions, rather we introduce our ideas, talk about the pros and cons of them, and if we have a consensus that it will advance our mission, we begin working on it. We might even be at odds with the manager on a few implementation details that we make, but we're free to do them anyways if we can prove that they work.
Literally for a project I was working on earlier this year, I proposed adding a feature that the manager was always strictly against, yet when I mentioned it to the team, several were on board, so he let me implement it and see what it would bring. After I was done and deployed it to the field, it ended up resulting in sudden and very widespread user acceptance and adoption of our security tool throughout the organization that we had already been pushing users to switch to for quite a while earlier.
And that kind of thing isn't even remotely a first for me. And when you are such a person, you'll inevitably be more valued and thus better compensated. When I left my last job, my boss literally told me that it was a huge loss to the company and that I was welcome back if my new job didn't work out. Nearly two years later I'm still in regular contact with him and I didn't even know him before working there.
The reason you've never experienced anything like this is because you basically expect everybody around you to understand your perspective, but you never take the time to understand the perspective of those around you, except within your own narrow (and really, quite bonkers) definition of fairness. You don't bother to learn what makes an organization actually work, thus you push democracy as the solution to every problem even in cases where it very obviously will not work. Like Powernctl said once, and I've already observed many times: You never see the bigger picture, instead just putting whatever the hell you want ahead of everything and everyone else. If anything I said here was not true, you'd have already experienced exactly what you're asking for and you wouldn't be here complaining about it.
As for unions...well put it this way: Mafia tainted unions like what we have in the US are what companies end up with when THEY fail to see the bigger picture. The reason fewer people join them now is basically because of RICO.
