How do I find a job? What will my duties be?

This article is part of a series of short pieces on the theme of what it would be like to live in a Participatory Economy. 

How do I find a job?

You will go about finding a job just as people do now. You will look for a worker council you want to become a member of and apply. You can apply to any worker council you wish, and the personnel department of the worker council you apply to will review your application and decide if they want to accept you as a member. In all these ways it is like how people find jobs today.

So, what is different?

The main difference is that in capitalist economies one is applying to be an employee of a company owned by someone else. In a participatory economy one is applying to be a member in full standing of a self-managed worker council. New members have equal standing and rights as those who have been members for years.

However, some worker councils may decide to have a provisional period for new members. For example, when I was in my twenties I worked at a steel mill in Granite City Illinois where there was a union. The union contract specified that there was a ninety-day period for new hires during which they could be dismissed without cause. We even wore different colored helmets so everyone in the plant would know who we were. However, after ninety days all employees were protected by provisions in the union contract designed to prevent arbitrary and unfair treatment of employees, including unfair dismissal… and got new helmets to wear.

What will my work duties be?

Another difference is that job descriptions in worker councils will likely be quite different from what we find in capitalist firms today. There is a broad directive in a participatory economy for worker councils to try to restructure jobs, so they are more balanced for both empowerment and desirability than jobs typically are today.

In most capitalist firms a few jobs contain tasks which increase people’s ability to take meaningful part in economic decision making, are generally more agreeable to perform, and pay far better as well. While most jobs contain few if any tasks which increase someone’s ability to take part in decisions about what the firm should do, more tasks which are generally less desirable to perform, and pay far worse. In a participatory economy we want to eliminate this. However, how best to achieve this goal in different kinds of workplaces will often vary greatly, and what we have proposed is to leave up to the members of individual worker councils how best to implement this “broad directive” in their workplace, or even whether they choose to do so at all.