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WORKING DEMOCRACY
Best standard of living Even though America’s 130 million workers produce greater amounts of goods and services each year through their rising productivity, most today struggle just to maintain last year’s standard of living. The reason is that workers don’t own those goods and services they produce. Their employers own the product of their labor, in exchange for the wages and salaries paid to workers. But wages and salaries represent only a fraction of the market value of the total product. A large percentage goes to nonproductive business owners, stock and bondholders, financial institutions, landlords, and top corporate executives and government bureaucrats. The economic system thereby sets up a conflict between the productive workers and the nonproductive class of owners over the division of the product of labor. (See the parody How to Get Rich!! to learn how labor is exploited under capitalism and state-capitalist “communism.”) Working Democracy guarantees workers the full product of their labor, and thus the full benefit of their rising productivity. Because Working Democracy operates as a market-free system, where workers own their own product and distribute it among themselves on a fair and equitable basis, all the nonproductive jobs required by the irrational market system will be unnecessary. All the people now doing nonproductive work will be able to join in doing useful labor — in education, health care, entertainment, etc., as well as manufacturing, transportation and distribution — for the improvement of the living standards of all. |