A balanced job complex is a way of organizing a workplace or group that is both directly democratic and also creates relative equal empowerment among all people involved.
Specifically a balanced job complex is a collection of tasks within a given workplace that is balanced for its equity and empowerment implications against all other job complexes in that workplace. It was developed as an alternative to the corporate division of labor.
Each worker must do a share of rote tasks (unskilled work) for some time each work day or each week. All workers also share the most rewarding and empowering tasks in the workplace so it is coordinated with everyone's involvement. In this way workers share the burdens and benefits of work that impact each persons ability to participate in democratic decision-making within the workplace.
Balanced job complexes imply a lack of owners or formal managers involved in the workplace, as all tasks are balanced for empowerment.
Balanced job complexes are central to the theory of participatory economics which emerged from the work of radical theorist Michael Albert and that of radical economist Robin Hahnel.
The concept of the balanced job complex was developed and put into practice at South End Press in the late 1970s.
In the 1990s, a series of worker-run collectives in Winnipeg, Canada were founded using parecon-inspired principles, including balanced job complexes, as part of their internal structures. Most notable in this regard have been Mondragon Bookstore and Coffee House, G7 Welcoming Committee Records, and Arbeiter Ring Publishing.
Famous quotes containing the words balanced, job and/or complex:
“With a balanced combination of the two principal energies from mother and father, a girl can both be in touch with her womanly strengths and be a powerful force in the world—strong and nurturing, decisive and caring, goal- oriented and aware of the needs of others. She has the courage to voice what she thinks and feels and the strength to follow her destiny.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous, involving and utterly tedious, all at the same time. The world is full of women made to feel strange because what everyone assumes comes naturally is so difficult to do—never mind to do well.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)