The summer of 2018 was a trying one for Google, Tesla, and other members of a celebrated Silicon Valley cohort that was supposed to have re-written all the rules. These companies continue to amaze with what they do well. But their attempts to revolutionize corporate culture--to create what could be called a utopian workplace--have run into certain basic truths they were never going to escape. Like the industrial corporations that preceded them, these newer companies are confronting challenges not just from the marketplace but from within. In order to meet those challenges, they must dig deeper than their predecessors did and move to structurally empower their most valuable resource: their employees. In doing so they should embrace a movement toward a democracy of work. -- Christopher Mackin
This article in the New Republic says you can't paper over the essential logic of capitalism. The contradictions won't be resolved until employees are part-owners in their workplace.
Into these [larger scale businesses] we have brought together larger amounts of capital and larger numbers of workers than existed in cities once thought great. We have been put to it, however, to discover the true principles which should govern their relations. From one point of view, they were partners in a common enterprise. From another they were enemies fighting for the spoils of their common achievement. ... I hope the day may come when these great business organizations will truly belong to the men who are giving their lives and their efforts to them, I care not in what capacity. ... Then we shall dispose once and for all, of the charge that in industry organizations are autocratic and not democratic. Then we shall have no hired men. -- Owen D. Young, CEO of General Electric (1927)
