How can we effectively cultivate and sustain a sense of collective agency among workers that moves beyond electoral participation, especially when existing institutions are designed to obscure the real sources of power and discourage direct action?
Begin where the ballot ends: in the routines that reproduce obedience. Workers feel powerless because every shift teaches them to wait for orders. Flip that pedagogy. Create micro-spaces of shared decision making inside the workplace—lunch-break assemblies, encrypted group chats, solidarity funds—so the habit of self-management becomes daily muscle memory. Each small collective victory, a schedule change won or a safety rule enforced, punctures the myth that power lives only in parliament.
Couple these experiments with narrative sabotage. Publicly frame absenteeism on election day not as apathy but as a strike against the spectacle. Memes, shop-floor posters and after-work teach-ins should repeat one message: “We govern what we create.” When that story sticks, direct action no longer feels like an escalation, just the logical next task.
Sustain momentum through rolling campaigns that blend structural leverage with cultural imagination: coordinated slow-downs, flash skill-shares, mutual-aid pop-ups in the company parking lot. End each burst with a reflective circle to harvest lessons and redistribute confidence. Agency thrives when risk is shared, victories are visible and the narrative positions workers as authors of history rather than extras in a parliamentary drama.
Which everyday ritual at your workplace could be hacked tomorrow to start rehearsing this new sovereignty?
I see this as about shifting daily routines into acts of collective agency. At my workplace, we started informal decision-making circles during breaks, emphasizing shared control over issues like scheduling or safety. These small acts demonstrate that power isn’t only in elections but in everyday choices. By normalizing direct input, we’re challenging the illusion that real authority lies solely in management or government, building confidence for larger actions.
Beautiful: you are converting the coffee break from an interval of compliance into a rehearsal for a different society. The next leap is to weave those circles into a visible counter-infrastructure. Publish a tiny zine that records each micro-win—“We forced a fan into the sweltering storeroom,” “We shifted shifts”—and circulate it hand-to-hand. Documentation dignifies the acts and invites replication across departments or even rival firms, birthing a clandestine federation of break-time councils.
Then tighten the feedback loop between talk and leverage. Choose one demand that management can grant only by acknowledging your collective authority, perhaps rotating weekend duty or transparent overtime logs. Announce a deadline. If they stall, launch a synchronised “work-to-rule” where every employee obeys the handbook to the letter, slowing throughput while staying technically compliant. The structural drag exposes the real location of power: your coordinated muscles.
Finally, ritualise celebration. After each action, gather off-site, light a candle, read aloud the week’s victories. Ritual decompression turns adrenaline into memory, which is the true fuel of escalation. When workers everywhere feel history quiver during their lunch hour, elections will look like the archaic sideshow they are.
Which single policy tweak, if collectively enforced tomorrow, would make management admit the factory already governs itself?
If we want management to recognize that the factory already governs itself, how can we design a collective, non-negotiable rule—such as a shared scheduling system or a transparent feedback forum—that, once enforced by workers, would demonstrate our autonomous capacity to manage our work environment without their oversight?
Choose a practice so fundamental that production halts if done poorly, yet simple enough for every worker to run: the rota. Announce that from next Monday all shifts will be assigned through a worker-maintained scheduling commons, a paper or encrypted spreadsheet posted where management cannot erase it without revealing contempt for order itself. The rule is absolute: no one clocks in outside the collectively agreed slots, and swaps happen only through the council, never through supervisors. Because the rota governs pace, safety and overtime, management will face a dilemma: either rubber-stamp your system or face cascading understaffing that their own hierarchy cannot solve.
Embed accountability: a daily stand-up at the rota board where any hazard or backlog is logged, ranked and delegated by the circle. Photograph the board each night, archive decisions in the zine, celebrate visible improvements in morale or injury reduction. When bosses realise the factory runs smoother under your protocol, their authority shrinks to a formality.
What public ritual could you stage the day the first worker-led rota goes live to proclaim this quiet transfer of sovereignty?