What Is Empowerment?

Doctor,

I've recently become more interested in the concept of empowerment, could you give me some information. I do not speak English very well so perhaps you could just give some background on what the term means.

Sincerely,

--South Of The Border (Sonora, Mexico, That is)

Dear South Of The Border:

It is so good to hear from you and I'll do my best to briefly answer your request to provide more information about empowerment. I'll be brief because you asked that I pardon your English, and I imagine you do not want to have to read a long letter.

Empowerment is a word that stands for having a good amount of control over one's own life and work. The way that comes about in most work situations is by (1) developing one's own job skills so that you are a valued employee and (2) by joining in the collective action of a union or cooperative.

In some workplaces, management realizes how important it is to encourage their employees to develop job skills and to have a say in the way their jobs are performed. This is called employee involvement, and ranges from simply being invited to make suggestions about improving production and delivering quality to customers to becoming a member of a self-managed team which plans its work and is allowed to hire and fire.

If a company really believes in empowerment, it will help employees to become significantly vested in it through stock ownership and to have employees at every level represented on management committees. Some businesses are genuine employee-owned co-operatives in which the employees hire their own management.

In Spain's small Basque city of Mondragon, in 1956, Father Jose Maria Arizmendi, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, helped found what has become a very successful industrial cooperative. This cooperative made industrial democracy come alive in several ways: by keeping the wage gap between management and workers very small (at first no one earned more than three times what the bottom employees were paid) and second by educating its employees to understand the business of business.

I do not know about your work situation, but I imagine that in where you live and work it is generally accepted that those who own and or manage have the right to make the decisions, give orders, and to run the workplace. In the U.S., this also means that those at the top, who can downsize their workplaces by the thousands, will still average 150 times the pay of the average worker. This is not industrial democracy!

Genuine Empowerment means doing the hard work of hammering out the rules that give employees a say in how their workplaces are managed, and it means sharing in the responsibility of making their workplace profitable and one that invests in its long-term success.

We each must start where we are to be responsible workers who do not fear to add our voices to making our workplaces function as we think they should, both as individuals and collectively as members of unions or as employee owners.

It is then that empowerment will become more that another word that is mere rhetoric.

WEGO works to make empowerment workplace democracy in action.

Do write again,

Bill Gorden

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