>You have become a cynic from experience?

And from my own free will.

Being cynical is a sort of optimistic POV. A pessimist would say things couldn't be worse.

Being cynical also gives me a nice distance from things that affect me, so I don't waste the nerve and time complaining... a few remarks suffice. And then I can get back to trying to do my little bit to make things better.

> While it is not the same everywhere here in the U.S. and profit sharing and awards do not exist everywhere either, to be fair, in my previous employment I wrote the application that computed profit sharing and it was used regularly. Also, monetary and paid time-off awards were given out to employees no matter whose idea the cost saving (or time saving or quality improvement) measure was - it had nothing to do with convincing the boss that it was the bosses idea. Here at my current employment we have profit sharing also. I receive a check twice a year which is typically on average the equivalent of 2 weeks pay - sometimes more. It depends entirely on the company and how much the company values its employees and their contributions.

One thing I learned about USA is that nothing is done the same way everywhere. It all depends on where you are. So I'm not surprised that profit sharing exists in places, or that some forms of self-management exist in other places, or that there may be places where employees actually do have some power over the business.

Still, it's insulated places, not something that would raise a generation of independent thinkers across the nation.

My wife says I'm idealizing self-management. I probably am, remembering that it was never given a full chance, just pieces. At some point, someone calculated that the percentage of income a self-managed enterprise in then Yugoslavia was actually managing was about 3%. The rest was regulated, or just taken away this way or another. The Party was, of course, washing their mouths with stories of how the workers should "engovern the income surplus" (they did have their own newspeak) while making laws which actually reduced the thing to those meager three percent.

This leaves me imagining how it could have worked if it was allowed to develop, and if it was given some tools to fight abuse of it.