Quality of product improves along with morale. Moreover, workers return home daily with more energy and more inclination to exert themselves in political and social life further improving work conditions, for example. Home life, community life, and political participation are thereby greatly enhanced. A plant tour conducted a few years after participatory transformations would be punctuated primarily by descriptions of social relations and job complexes. We hear details of self -management.
Workers speak of the change in morale and participation attendant on innovations.
Product and technology are described with pride as well, but the emphasis is on why they were chosen, this having become the province of the workers rather than a distant planning elite. From a display of the benefits of independence from imperi alism, the island becomes a showcase for liberation from tech nocratic hierarchy. Organizing democratic workers' councils, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning was certainly difficult but not impossible in the absence of high technology. The point is that participatory organization can work wonders not only in work places with access to high tech methods, but also in plants with an excess of manual, dangerous, and debilitating labor, like those that still prevail in many parts of the U.S. and in most of the third world. To be sure, however, coordinators are likely to resist such changes that would undermine their privileges in the economy and in society as a whole.