*** Welcome to piglix ***

Workers' council


A workers' council is a form of political and economic organization in which a single place of work or enterprise, such as a factory, school, or farm, is controlled collectively by the workers of that workplace, through the core principle of temporary and instantly revocable delegates.

In a system with temporary and instantly revocable delegates, workers decide on what their agenda is and what their needs are. They also mandate a temporary delegate to divulge and pursue them. The temporary delegates are elected among the workers themselves, can be instantly revoked if they betray their mandate, and are supposed to change frequently. There are no managers, and all decision power and organization is based on the delegates system.

On a larger scale, a group of delegates may in turn elect a delegate in a higher position to pursue their mandate, and so on, until the top delegates are running the industrial system of a state. In such a system, decision power rises from bottom to top from the agendas of the workers themselves, and there is no decision imposition from the top, as would happen in the case of a power seizure by a bureaucratic layer that is immune to instant revocation.

Several times in modern history, the idea of workers' councils has been attributed to similar forms of organization, although in most cases the workers didn't actually have full power control and were subdued to some external authority. Examples include Russia in 1905 and 1917, where councils were called "soviets";Germany during 1918 (Räte); Poland in 1905, 1918 and 1956 (rady robotnicze); Turin, Italy during 1919–1920; rural Ireland during 1920–1921; China during 1926–1927; Spain during 1936; Hungary during 1919 and 1956; France during 1871 and 1968; Chile in 1973 (cordones); Iran during 1978–1979 (shoras); Yugoslavia from 1952 to 1988 (workers' self-management radničko samoupravljanje)


...
Wikipedia

...