Business unionism vs workplace democracy

by Wanda Pasz from New Unionism Blog. (I'm confused about authorship here. A note at the end of the article indicates that the piece was excerpted from a paper by Rune Kvist Olsen--which I also highly recommend reading. While skimming the latter's paper, I found that he liberally borrowed from Wanda's writings and I didn't find any material directly inserted into her article.)

This article provides an excellent, concise history of unionism, the functions that unions serve to support capitalism, and how today's unions have little to do with workplace democracy. Both the commentary by this Canadian author and Olsen's paper are must reads. I plan to print out the latter and study it further.

The hierarchical structure is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that it’s hard for people to think of the workplace without it. Even as we become more and more aware of the downside of hierarchical relations, we just can’t shake the monkey off our backs. We continue to try hard to wedge democratic practices into the autocratic system and hope that some good will come of this – participative management, employee centred management, open door policies and other human resources management innovations are all half-baked attempts at democratizing the cell block and making the prisoners feel a little bit free.