worker self management

Worker self-management (sometimes called workers' control or autogestion) is a form of workplace decision-making in which the workers themselves agree on choices (for issues such as customer care, general production methods, scheduling, division of labour) instead of an owner or traditional supervisor telling workers what to do, how to do it and where to do it. Examples of such self-management allegedly include the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, TitoistYugoslavia, Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella, the fábricas recuperadas movement in Argentina, the LIP factory in France in the 1970s, theMondragón Cooperative Corporation which is the Basque Country's largest corporation, AK Press in the United States, etc.

Argentina's fábricas recuperadas movement, which emerged in response to Argentine's 2001 economic crisis, is the current most significant workers' self-management phenomenon in the world.

English-language discussions of this phenomenon may employ several different translations of the original Spanish expression other thanrecovered factory. For example, recuperated factory/business, reclaimed factory, and worker-run factory have been noted. The phenomenon is also known as "autogestion," which comes from the French word for self-management (applied to factories, popular education systems, and other uses). Worker self-management may coincide with employee ownership.

Workers' self-management is often the decision-making model used in co-operative economic arrangements such as worker cooperatives, workers' councils, participatory economics, and similar arrangements where the workplace operates without a boss. This model of decision making does not involve consulting all employees for every tiny issue in a time-consuming, inefficient and ineffective manner. Real-world examples show that only large-scale decisions are made by all employees during council meetings and small decisions are made by those implementing them while coordinating with the rest and following more general agreements.