ager of the plant, with his fellow committeemen as his
executive committee or board of managers.

f. Each economic unit, whether shop or plant, would have its
engineers or experts, picked, like other workers, by the shop
committee or the plant committee, and responsible to that committee
for the particular tasks assigned to them.

All participation in the activities of this basic economic unit--hiring
and firing as it is called--would be determined by the shop committees
and by the plant committee, each with final local jurisdiction,
subject, of course, to a referendum of the workers in the department or
the plant concerned. By this means, the members of each basic economic
group would be made the sole judges as to those with whom they should
work. Each group would therefore have an opportunity to set its own
group standards and to build up its own group spirit.

The individual worker, in order to secure a job, or work place, must
therefore subject himself to the scrutiny of his prospective shop-mates,
perhaps even to work for a time on probation, and this to prove his
fitness to join the group and thus to participate in its activities.

Such a plan would provide a self-governing and self-directing economic
unit, capable of adaptation to the various phases of economic life, and
at the same time capable of generating its own social steam, and thus
driving itself forward on the path of its own activities.

Farming, hand-craft industries, and other occupations in which the
worker owns his own tools, and is worker, manager and business-man
combined, would be forced to organize a local unit more nearly
approximating the medieval guild or some of the modern organizations for
producers' co-operation. The general principles of organization would be
the same in the one case as in the other, power and control being held
locally by self-directing, autonomous groups.

This plan for the organization of a local self-governing economic unit
represents an attempt to apply the best principles of economic and
political science to the working out of an intelligently directed
society.

2. SUGGESTIONS FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF AN ECONOMIC DISTRICT IN A
GIVEN INDUSTRY.

a. The district would consist of a number of economic units in the
same or in an immediately related field of industry. For example, it
might be formed of steel mills alone, or of machine shops and steel
mills, or of machine shops, stee