Richard Wolff US taxpayers subsidize continued operation of General Motors despite the companys bankruptcy and neglect. Ex: The major lesson of GMs failures is that we cannot afford to leave such corporations in charge of producing the goods and services we all depend on. Similarly, can we allow that system to keep purchasing our major parties and politicians to secure its immunity from real accountability? The answer is that we can and should do better than a system so obviously failing. What is to be done? One basic problem is the link between jobs and incomes. The layers of GM bureaucracy looked the other way, did not pursue what they knew, avoided making waves inside the company etc. because they feared for their jobs and incomes. Especially in an economy with high unemployment and job insecurity, acting in socially responsible ways becomes too risky personally. If employees knew that their companies failures would not necessarily jeopardize their personal incomes, we could expect far more socially responsible behavior from many more of them. If government guaranteed personal incomes even when individuals had to move from one job or enterprise to another, those individuals could better face and fix the failures where they work. Making families incomes depend on their jobs pressures job-holders not to rock the corporate boat even when they know they should. We ought to disconnect our citizens incomes from their particular jobs (national discussions of this idea have increasingly engaged the Swiss and others in Europe over recent years). Another lesson from GMs failures is the need to broaden the community of people making key economic decisions. If the citizens of Detroit had had real participatory power over GM decisions, GM might have kept more facilities there and thereby avoided urban collapse. If GM customers had more institutionalized participation in corporate decisions, concerns about faulty ignition switches might have gained hearings sooner and so saved lives and avoided vast financial losses. Here lies yet another argument to shift from private, capitalist corporations (governed by major shareholders and the boards of directors they select) to cooperative enterprises (governed democratically by workers, surrounding communities, and customers/consumers). Such cooperatives would democratize enterprises in ways likely to make their economic decisions far more socially responsible.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 11:08:09 +0000
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