utional conflicts can often be resolved very easily. If everyone within the institution shares power to resolve conflicts, and everyone wants the conflict to be resolved, everyone will work with others to help restructure the institution.
What happens, however, when the institution is restructured to promote the empowerment of all workers, but some feel others in the organization are manipulating them or otherwise taking unfair advantage? Or suppose there are people who just aren’t getting along with others or with the institution as a whole?
This is the second type of conflict, personal conflict, and it is sometimes the most difficult to resolve. It most often results from a feeling of powerlessness, which isolates people from their co-workers and others in society.
Traditionally, leaders and managers have often tried to resolve personal conflicts informally, on a one to one basis. This can sometimes work . . . but don’t count on it. When someone with power relates to someone without power, someone is going to feel as if he was imposed on . . . and it won’t be the one with power.
It is much better that there be some “institutional mechanism” in place to deal with personal conflicts. This must be a part of the system itself, to deal with this kind of conflict effectively — or at all.
The specific structuring of a means of dealing with personal conflict within an organization must be carefully considered. It is, after all, far too easy for people with the wrong kind of power to manipulate a grievance committee or arbitration board and use it to get rid of people they don’t want, cover up their own incompetence, or even seize even more power and concentrate it in their own hands to the ultimate detriment of the organization.
Any such mechanism must be objective, fair, and — especially — it must be perceived as such. An arbitration board or committee can be objective and fair, but if people do not think so, it is useless.
In a “typical” company in which there are owners, managers, and workers, and never shall any of them meet on common ground, the perception of fairness, much less actual fairness, is virtually impossible. No one is equal in status, so fairness and justice, which can only truly function among equals, are out of the question.
There is, in fact, only one proven method to provide a foundation for fairness and justice in the workplace, and to lay the groundwork for effective conflict resolution. And that is to make sure that every worker has power, and the only way to do that is to ensure that every worker has the equal opportunity and effective means to become an owner of that organization.
Capital Ownership Within a Business Enterprise
To many people it seems as if expanded capital ownership is touted as a panacea as a result of all the problems it has the potential to solve. That, however, is a misleading way to look at it. Expanded capital ownership has the potential to solve so many problems because having ownership — and thus having power — is an inherent part of what it means to be human.
To deprive people of ownership (and thus power), or the means of acquiring and possessing capital, is to deny human nature. And that causes more problems than anyone ever thought of solving by abolishing private property. Nature is unforgiving, and always takes revenge.
True conflict resolution depends on people meeting together as “power equals” and getting matters settled, not only with fairness and justice, but with the perception that fairness and justice are the guiding principles. And that is one reason why having worker-owners, instead of mere workers, is so important to build solidarity and get everyone pulling together in the same direction.
It is, after all, an ancient dictum that “Power naturally and necessarily follows property.” In order to have the power to change the institutions of your organization or institution, or to resolve conflicts between individuals in a just and fair manner, you must have the power to do so and the right that comes only from ownership.
That is why any system that conforms to the