We need new ways of working

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/01/newe-ways-of-working

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Jackie Ashley's piece on the need for a clear economic alternative (Neither Keynes nor the market will save Labour, 29 October) is both timely and important. Two phrases, in particular, stand out from the essay by Lothian and Unger to which she refers. Describing the poverty of ideas shown by left-leaning politicians these authors say: "The project of the left in the US and Europe has basically been reduced to sugar-coating a reality [austerity measures] that it despairs of re-imagining or reshaping. The humanisation of the inevitable is the leitmotif of their politics."

In contrast, Lothian and Unger call for a "relatively decentralised and flexible production of non-standardised goods and services, knowledge-intensive labour, the softening of contrasts between supervision and execution, as well as among rigid specialities at the factory or office floor [and] a more thoroughgoing mixture of co-operation and competition". In other words, commercial and industrial activity should be reshaped around small and medium enterprises employing well-educated, imaginative teams working co-operatively, moving away from big factories with a conveyor-belt approach to producing a fixed range of goods and, in the process, providing only mind-numbingly boring jobs. Government policy should be reformed as to support and promote these changes.

One might add that industrial redesign of this sort was proposed by the Liberal party 40 years ago but was ignored by Labour; is it possible that, after all this time, somebody might listen? Roger Fisken Bedale, North Yorkshire

• Ashley singles out small white-collar enterprises to demonstrate their value to the economic recovery, because she believes they demonstrate "effective" workplace democracy as opposed to the practices of corporate giants. Perhaps she's had the wool pulled over her eyes by a few small companies that appear as little islands of Owenism, but the reality in the majority of small firms is a culture of long hours, pay on results, acceptance of short-term contracts and hostility to unionisation. It's akin to jumping back 150 years in labour history. Does she think these "niche companies" offer a way forward for Labour? Richard Kramer London

• Democratising business makes a lot of sense. But why doesn't Ashley, or the Labour party, use the "c" word? Co-operatives are the original democratically owned businesses, with one member one vote. If the UK economy as a whole had performed as well as the co-operative sector, we would not be just "coming out of the recession". While the real level of GDP in the UK in 2011 was 1.7% lower than in 2008, when the financial crisis kicked off, the turnover of the co-operative sector had grown 19.5% over the same period.

This week thousands of people from all over the UK and the world have been in Manchester celebrating the end of the UN's international year of co-operatives. This business model is just as relevant as when Robert Owen first proposed "villages of co-operation" nearly 200 years ago. We are never going to have a UN international year of Tesco or Walmart – and for a good reason. Co-operatives should be natural territory for Labour. It's a mystery why they don't occupy it. Stirling Smith Bolton

• The clear economic alternative for Labour remains massive Keynesian state spending on infrastructure and the public services, any inflation to be scalped in a tax on increased land values consequent on the increased money supply.This would make the infrastructure, such as Crossrail, self-financing and at the same time stop Keynesian measures setting off house-price bubbles, as Keynes himself should have realised had he taken over his idol Silvio Gesell's complete programme instead of dismissing the land-price part as "…of altogether secondary interest". DBC Reed Northampton

• Small companies depend on big businesses and so long as companies like Ford can up sticks, the viability of small enterprise, no matter how innovative, is in doubt. It is not "a sense of ownership" that workers need but the reality. Or, as Labour used to assert, "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange". Nick Wright Croydon, Surrey