Letter: How worker participation would benefit the bosses

NEAL ASCHERSON ('Made in Europe, wherever the workers are cheap', 7 February) is right to draw attention to the lack of participation by British workers in the daily running of their companies. He could have extended the comment to the public sector, where the same 'them and us' mentality prevails between management and workforce with equally unprofitable results.

There is more to gain from improving employee participation than a mere defence against multinationals, such as Hoover, dividing and ruling the European workforce. The main benefit is improved job satisfaction. While this may not be at the top of every employer's list for the current financial year, they should stop to consider its consequences: less obsession with pay, decreased likelihood of a strike, improved efficiency and productivity, more suggestions from the workforce on how to improve production and so on. Almost as a by-product, the quality of life of everybody is improved.

This is not to say that every work organisation should become, like my own, a workers' cooperative, nor even that all companies should necessarily have workers on the board, but simply to plead for recognition of something that the Japanese have known for many years, namely that letting people make decisions about how they organise their own work, pays dividends.

Andrew Hibbert

Daily Bread Co-operative

Kings Hedges, Cambridge