Business Week of June 29, 1981 carried two accounts of "worker participation" which illustrate quite well the divergent forms worker involvement can take. The first had to do with federal government approval of a plan whereby employees will purchase 51% of Continental Airlines stock and thus "participate" in ownership control. The second described developments in the U.S. steel industry and the initiation of experiments to form worker participation teams on the mill floors of several major producers. In these cases groups of rank-and-file workers and their supervisors will address workflow problems, safety and health issues, absenteeism, product quality, incentive pay and other everyday concerns.

These two accounts both appear to satisfy Schweikart's meaning of the term "worker participation" and therein lies the first difficulty with leis thesis. Ownership leverage at the corporate summit is a far different order of influence than that applied to shop-level events. Significant distinctions also apply at intermediate levels, such as at individual plant sites, office locations or functionally specific departments. Homogenizing these various possibilities makes for a shaky starting point.

Even greater difficulty attends Schweikart's two-tier argument that worker participation leads inexorably both to worker control and to worker participation in all parts of the economy. Even if we accept as accurate his statement that there are about 1,000 worker-owned companies in the U.S. today, this number is a tiny fraction of the approximately three million firms. Further, it is very unusual for worker-owners to actually manage these enterprises. Typically, employee-owners retain professional managers to look after their affairs. Turning to instances in the U.S. of "participation" where ownership is in no sense an issue (variously estimated as from 200 to 500 cases) employee involvement in work-level problem-solving and decision-making appears uniformly to follow from management initiatives. Now generally labeled as "Quality of Work Life" projects or programs (QWL), these activities are taken to task by critics precisely on the grounds that worker control is illusory ("what management giveth, it can take away"). Actions taken to improve QWL may well allow exercising in the work place the individualism and freedom so highly valued away from it, but the intent of worker-participants seems clearly reformist, not radical. Accordingly, one can question whether worker participation naturally tends to develop into worker control.

As to the inevitable spread of participation throughout the economy, this argument lacks a structural vehicle capable of getting the job done. To date the logical contender, organized labor, has been notably suspicious of QWL and downright hostile to "becoming part of management." Government as the vehicle, so Omnipresent in European-style "industrial democracy," would be rejected here by managers, owners and workers alike. To date all public accounts of QWL activities have been voluntary. Finally, the movement of the U.S. economy away from one centered on manufacturing to one heavily white-collar staffed and service-oriented, has severely shrunken the natural habitat for worker attitudes which incline to take-over end control.