Image Via flickr User Sweet One

Could a corporation function without any executives at all? Thousands of workers around the world are saying “Why not?” and are willing to bet their livelihoods on it. In this era of hyper-capitalism, as French President Jacques Chirac calls it, companies are bigger than countries. They make decisions that affect everyone on the planet and are themselves detached from most of the consequences. Workers are just cogs in the machine. The shareholder reigns supreme.

Someone forgot to tell 83,000 Canadian workers. They are Canada’s contribution to a rising class of modern workers that has spawned the Self-Managed Enterprise, an entity in which the worker is the most important stakeholder.

Self-Managed Enterprises are organizations that exist first and foremost for their workers. They are not social experiments; they are businesses like any other. They operate in a competitive marketplace, where prices are set by supply and demand; they sell products or offer services; they make profits; they pay dividends and they invest; when they spend more than they make, they fail and go bankrupt; and they fire and hire.

The difference between a Self-Managed Enterprise and a Royal Bank or a Wal-Mart is not in what they do, but for whom they exist. Self-Managed Enterprises are, in two words, economic democracy, a form of organization that meets the highest aspirations of democracy and capitalism.

Self-Managed Enterprises are not new, either. The kibbutz (co-operative farm) is a Self-Managed Enterprise. Self-Managed Enterprises have even been attempted on a nation-wide scale. In terms of producing pure economic growth, Tito’s Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1975 was more successful than the red-hot Chinese economy of the past two decades.

Self-Managed Enterprises put the decision-making powers in the hands of the workers. To some, such radical change would only spell doom for a corporation. It would mean taking power away from those with the “know-how” and allowing those with insufficient skills to tamper with the structure of a thriving corporation.

But to others, such changes to the traditional top-down business model would not only create more productive and profitable enterprises, they could also serve as a major force for social change, ecological sustainability and human rights. The infusion of more democratic principles into the market economy would serve everybody in the long term.