Summary February 2001

by Hans Harms
(Facilitator for the topic)

So far there have been three contributions to our working group, commenting the "launching of the discussion" text

The 1st by Hugues Puel co-facilitator of the group - who expresses his general agreement with my proposal of structuring the debate. Additionally he refers to some of his publications related with this topic and expresses his scepticism with the basic income debate.

The 2nd by Jean Clement stresses the importance to discuss on participation of workers in the decision-making processes in the companies they work or even in their capital - the role of the shareholding workers. I agree very much with the importance of this topic and my intention is to include debates on ethic of the future enterprises and on experiences of social economy, especially the experience of the Mondragon-Cooperative.

In the 3rd contribution by Pierre Caro declares his general agreement with the proposed structure. He stresses the importance of labour as powerful mechanism for social organisation in the past and present and seems to be sceptical about the need of alternative or complementary mechanisms. I think, this will really be the crucial point of our common debate. For the future, can we still rely on labour as the unique mechanism for social organisation or would this mean to overload it and do we -consequently- have to reflect on others?

I thank those three colleagues for their contributions and would like to stimulate the rest of you to contribute as well. I realized that there are quite a lot of participants who are registered but so far did not introduce themselves via e-mail. I would like to ask them to do so as soon as possible.

Thanks for your attention and please come up with your proposals.