Democracia Operária

Worker democracy works, por Chris Dillow:

Here’s some laboratory evidence that workplace democracy raises productivity:

We report evidence from a real-effort experiment confirming that worker performance is sensitive to the process used to select the compensation contract. Groups of workers that voted to determine their compensation scheme provided significantly more effort than groups that had no say in how they would be compensated. This effect is robust to controls for the compensation scheme implemented and worker characteristics.

This is especially impressive because it focuses upon only one channel through which democracy raises productivity, and ignores others - for example that workplace democracy increases workers’ monitoring of co-workers, or increases motivation over longer periods than can be measured in laboratory experiments.
One message I take from this is that a government that was serious about wanting to increase the efficiency of the public sector would consider ways of empowering workers.(...)

The best forms of democracy don’t ask; “what do you think?” This just invites speak-your-branes drivel. Instead, it asks: what do you know? Workplace democracy does this.

In this sense, workplace democracy does what Hayek attributed to markets: it mobilizes dispersed, fragmented knowledge (this is a separate virtue from maximizing efficiency). My enthusiasm for worker democracy probably owes less to Marx’s influence  than it does to Hayek’s.