Joseph Wanzala wrote:
>Like Moran, Wanzala stressed that any investigation should go beyond
>Campanella. "I thought we needed an institutional audit," he said. "There's
>a pattern of the staff resisting efforts by the general manager ... It's
>not a question of getting the right person and all will be well."
-How do you feel about workers at other -institutions selecting their manager and having -control over the workplace? Would that be a good -model for a ball-bearing factory, but not a radio -station? Or should the ball-bearing workers just -yield to management too?
But Doug you are talking about apples and oranges. A ball bearing factory is owned by a tiny slice of the richest people in the population and operates for their benefit. Of course, the workers should resist transferring their labor to those wealthy shareholders and we should all be sympathetic to that.
But in the case of non-profits and government employment, the situation does get more complicated. While worker interests are important and deserve representation, the public also has significant interests and deserve consideration, in some cases winning out over employee interests, especially when those latter interests are not about pay and benefits but about the substance of the benefits delivered to the public.
In the case of public radio, should the staff always get to decide what goes on the air? If management is elected by the listenership, they may better reflect those interests than the staff. In practice, that may not be true, but in the abstract there are many cases where the employees should yield to management where the interests of the public are involved.
Nathan Newman