CONCEPT
Industrial Democracy
The Webbian proposition that the people who perform the work should have a voice in determining the conditions under which they perform it — the factory as a political space, not merely an economic one.
Industrial democracy is the political theory that the workplace is a site of governance as well as production, and that the absence of democracy in the workplace is as corrosive to human dignity as the absence of democracy in the state. The Webbs developed the framework in their 1897 book of the same name, arguing that workers have the right to organize and bargain collectively, to participate in the governance of the enterprises that employ them, to be consulted on technological changes affecting their work, and to share in the prosperity their labour helps to create. The theory rests on a claim about the quality of democratic citizenship: a society whose workplaces are authoritarian cannot sustain a genuinely democratic public life, because the skills of deliberation and compromise atrophy from disuse.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Industrial democracy encompassed three methods, each of which Webb examined in detail: mutual insurance, the pooling of resources against unemployment, illness,