There have been several in-company debates over the years, resurfacing repeatedly, over who bears the responsibility for decision-making within key organisations, including privately established bodies, city and regional corporations such as Tunapuna, on privately donated lands.

Is it those who set it up in the financial sense? Or the people who run the place, in the operational sense?

There was a strong movement in the post-war 1960s and 70s called Workers’ Participation in Management when socially-minded governments, starting in Germany, promoted the involvement of workers in management decision-making in all business organisations.

It took various forms. One was the appointment of worker directors on organisations’ boards. Another was appointing technical or, in other cases, management committees to control decision-making in various aspects of the organisation: marketing, production, discipline and grievance handling; safety and health and, of course, industrial relations.

There was also a movement toward worker ownership of businesses, which took different forms and different modes of ownership, some of which still exist, such as family-owned and -run businesses, union-owned and -run businesses, NGO, CBO or faith-owned and -run businesses, workers' co-operatives, and, at the beginning, credit unions which morphed into financial organisations mainly run by professionally qualified managers chosen by the board of directors.

Next week’s article will deal with these.

Some became the highly successful local corporations of today. Almost 80 per cent of those corporations, in fact, began as mom-and-pop small entrepreneurships or family businesses, and through strict discipline, hard work and sacrifice, moved from family businesses to profitable manufacturing, service and commercial organisations.

The formal definition of a family business is not a sole ownership or a “one-man show.” Those can be successful, but cannot last past the life of the sole owner. They can be sold and evolve under someone else, but the truly spectacularly successful are ones in which the business is actively owned, operated and managed by two or more members of a single family. Members may be related by blood, marriage or adoption.

Basically, in a family business there is the involvement of multiple generations of the same family. There have been many studies of family businesses throughout the international trade world, and the resulting success indicators are remarkably similar when it comes to family involvement.

I am always bemused by the resentment reflected in press and cultural comments attached to what is termed to the “one per cent.”

It is a term which Trinis think we have invented, when it has actually been around since the 1960s.

Words change meanings over the generations. Originally it referred to a Hell’s Angel who had injured someone fatally; then it just meant anyone with an IQ over 200, or an income or a status at the top of the community they belonged to (which included most politicians, MPs and trade-