Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm. And trying to do it right from the ground up is high impossible.
As a obligatory comment: are there any other in the HN-sphere that focuses on worker cooperatives?
Democracy is a horribly inefficient system of government. Its only redeeming quality is that it seems effective at (so far) deterring tyranny and abuse of power.
However, like I said, it's horribly inefficient. Changes that are easy to make under a dictatorship can be extremely hard to make under a democracy. Not exactly a quality you would want for a project or company, especially if you (the founder) have a vision.
IMO, part of the reason Linux and Python were so successful was that they had a "benevolent dictator" with a strong vision. Imagine the gridlock that would occur with Linux development if we had a 2-party system that polarized on controversial issues and got mired at every vote.
Democracy: Fewer macro, more micro, better decisions
Command-Control: More macro, fewer micro, terrible decisions.
EDIT: Another way to think of democracy is "distributed decision making" vs command-control which is "centralized decision making". When I talk about democracy, I mean distributed decision making.
TL;DR: It works for some (and we should have more of them imo!) but not all or even most.
I don't think I have ever heard, study or read about the claim of democracy making better decision (at the least, the common refrain about tyranny of the majority comes to mind), so I will have to ask for justifications of that statement.
Have you read studies that command-control hierarchies make better decisions?
Except for all others.
So why would "distributed decision making" be obviously worse than "command and control" like the way a corporation or tyrannical government is run?
Certainly if you're looking at tech jobs, the "population" is reasonably well educated.
The last thing you want is a bunch of smart engineers voting on business decisions they don't have the background to fully grok.
I don't think that's true. In order to manipulate lots of little people you have to manipulate a few big people first.
Look at the elite levels of nearly any group that comes with some kind of social status (e.g. celebrities, political parties, university faculties, media organizations) and you'll probably see remarkable levels of groupthink and political monoculture. I don't think that's because all the individuals in the elite group are more educated and enlightened and therefore all naturally came to the same correct conclusions about everything. Seems far more likely that most of the individuals are unconsciously or consciously (if they're Machiavellian, which many of them are) trying to "fit in" with whatever they perceive to be the dominant or "correct" ideas and behavior of the elite, so as not to be expelled from their number, and further that outsiders who wish (consciously or unconsciously) to join the elite group will tend to do the same.
The groupthink in itself might be resilient against attempts to manipulate the elite group's culture, and it definitely is when it comes to fast and/or drastic pushes, but you could reasonably hypothesize that groupthink is weak against gradual manipulation because it's ultimately based on consensus rather than any core principle or truth. And elite groups are, by definition, smaller than the overall population, so if your goal is merely to influence the culture of an elite group, there are fewer people you need to target. Vanishingly few, in fact, if you can identify the subset who are actually influential and not just following along.
So in a democracy, especially one with mass media and/or widespread social media, if you can influence the social status elites enough to change their perception of the correct way to "fit in" with each other, votes will tend to flow in the same direction simply because humans are naturally attracted to and desire social status.
Another way to look at "fitting in" is "wanting the right things." Get the elites to want what you want and the broader population will tend to follow. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard#Mimetic_desir...
The countervailing force is that some people, either by nature or circumstantially, hold a default skepticism of elites and authority.
Controlling a democracy (assuming you can't just flip votes) therefore requires two parallel efforts: you have to influence as many elite groups as possible (gradually, so they don't notice [assuming you can't just buy them off]) while simultaneously exalting them as noble and trustworthy to increase their visibility and tamp down skepticism. You have to buttress the overall system of social status hierarchy. Buy-in from the mass media helps, but luckily they're already fully convinced of their own importance.
The side effect is that you end up creating room for malevolent actors within the elite groups to commit heinous acts with impunity, often using gatekeeping as a coercion tactic, but if you're convinced that your ultimate goal is just, you'll probably still be able to sleep at night. (And maybe a Ronan Farrow will come along every now and then to help with that.)
The counter strategy is to undermine faith in the elites and/or the overall social status class system, e.g. through mockery, which happens to be both more persuasive and easier (and, arguably, true, in that many people occupying elite social strata are indeed ridiculous). But that damages the control mechanism and is thus unacceptable.
Point being: democracy doesn't really work as intended, not because of lack of education in the electorate, but because everyone, top to bottom, is prone to envy.
But unions have several significant downsides too, and for companies with a clean record, strong leaders with a vision, good pay and benefits, high morale, etc. I don't see any benefit to encumbering such with a union.
You really think it's worth it to encumber all companies with unions because of a few bad eggs?
Sure I do. What's the downside, someone might tell you not to plug in your own computer?
You think it's worth it to have people spending the majority of their life in an environment of tyranny, abuse of power, humilation and degradation, no democracy in the environment you spend most of your waking hours in -- because some unions might tell you not to plug in your own computer?
The benevolent dictatorship model works great when people can vote with their feet (or their keyboards, as the case may be) whether they support the dictator in the first place. The contributors to Linux and Python have more influence over the projects than the dictators do - they continually decide whether to endorse the dictator's vision. A dictatorship of a company is much more like an actual dictatorship of a country, where you control people's lives and decide who gets to join and leave. It's more efficient, yes - but it is both less just and less incentivized to point that ruthless efficiency in the right direction.
By all means, run technical projects at work like Linux and Python are run - but give people the freedom to vote no confidence in these projects without endangering their housing and their health insurance.
The majority of developers out there hold down "real" jobs like everyone else at giant faceless corporations where they have no say and no power.
Also some pregnant people, people who look like they could get pregnant, people with significant medical expenditures, .... Yes, obviously, the control that an employer has over these people is much less than the control a governmental dictator would have - but it's much, much more than the control Guido or Linus have over anyone.
You've got to think carefully about your metrics when it comes to government.
Look it's widely understood that, if the dictator or tyrant is good at his (or, very occasionally, her) job then things usually go well.
The old women of Bhutan cried when the King decreed democracy.
It's getting rid of the bad ones that's the big problem, and so: democracy. "The worst form of government except for all the others."
Edit to add: the ultimate government is "full consensus", but it's incredibly expensive in terms of the time it takes to get everybody's input and consensus. However, once full consensus is reached it's the most efficient at execution: everyone works together in harmony to achieve the ends of the group in the mutually-agreed fashion.
Needless to say, this form of government is very very rare on Earth, but hardly unknown.
But I would say even more importantly, democracy is very efficient at limiting internal bloodshed. It provides a well-defined, peaceful process for people to grab power. The power is limited, but you don't have to kill people to gain it, and in turn you don't risk getting killed yourself by the next upstart.
Personally I'm more concerned that the government remains responsive and, for lack of a better word, humble.
(That's part of why the Kingdom of Bhutan is so amazing: the don't measure GNP, they have a measure called Gross National Happiness that they take pretty seriously. Heh. They really seem to have their kit together. It's a Third-World country you can't emigrate to.)
=/
https://www.usworker.coop/home/
They hold conferences and workshops.
Edit: And if you're looking for a higher level approach:
Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.
It’s funny that we value democracy in name, but still enforce a rigid, top-down, and winner-takes-all hierarchy in most of our businesses.