Inspired by Osita Nwanevu talking about his book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding
An internet search for “a strategy framework for Just Transition” brings up a diagram with a bunch of circles. This diagram is a touchstone for GWI. As I sat this past weekend absorbing the conversation Micah was having with Osita Nwanevu about his book, The Right of the People, this diagram came to mind.
Osita pointed out that we take it for granted that we lack democratic agency at work. He talked about the importance of worker power to political democracy, and spoke about democracy as an ethic rooted in human dignity and equality that requires habits of behavior and mind. An audience member asked how we teach cooperation.
In the diagram that appeared in my mind’s eye, the word “cooperation” appears under a circle depicting work that is at the center of some other circles titled “living economy”. The diagram was developed by Movement Generation with Climate Justice Alliance.
A starting point for answering the question of how to teach cooperation comes from this Movement Generation phrase: what the hands do, the heart learns. As the talk wrapped up, what Micah named aligned with this thinking: in order to learn democracy, you need to practice it, to embody the ethic. At the end of the day, a living, breathing democracy is neither theoretical nor outside ourselves. It’s an inner orientation of being / becoming and external communication and action that infuses our interactions and relationships.
The experience of practicing democracy at GWI has taught us about some of the things that support it:
- Clear mandate and roles: Democracy at work is not about everyone making every decision together. A starting place is to define domains of decision making where mandate and roles are clear.
- Trust in shared practice: Making the implicit explicit is an essential component of workplace democracy. When organizational rules / policies, agreements / practices are discussed, written down, and able to evolve, workers can develop confidence in exercising voice and influence.
- Willingness to engage in a dynamic process of influencing and being influenced: Organizational culture – both an inner sense and an observable quality of how we do things here – evolves from policies and practices. Culture must align with stated democratic aspirations for workers to show up as their full selves to engage in the dance of sometimes leaning in to shape workplace conditions and decisions and sometimes leaning out to allow others’ ideas to hold greater sway.
Toward the end of the conversation, Osita referred to people as not just passengers. Democracy reduced to “passengers” who engage in an occasional act of voting seems rather shallow, passive, and even disempowering if we can instead be “drivers” with agency. I am reminded of the road trip metaphor GWI sometimes uses (read more here). Once you’ve experienced the adventure and connection of a co-created road trip (embodied democracy), buying a ticket (voting) to board the bus to travel the same route to the same destination pales in comparison.
