There are some even more nuanced ways of seeing balance in this labour-management subsystem within our society. One truth is that while most smart business leaders secretly hope they can achieve a modest settlement with their workers, they also hope the rest of their society’s workers will get generous new contracts. That will mean more disposable income in the economy, money that workers, who are simply consumers during their time off, can spend on the smarter business leader’s goods and services.

The corollary is that while any one group of workers wants generous rates of pay in their new contracts, they don’t want to see generous pay packets being handed out in all the contracts signed in other sectors of their society. If settlements in general are modest, workers know that goods will be cheaper, relative to their wages, than those goods were just a few months ago. If they are honest, most workers will admit to wanting their own company to succeed above others. Their jobs depend on it. Some of the leaders of their company may seem unsympathetic and unyielding at times, but smart workers know that managers who watch the bottom line, as long as they also know how to adapt to innovations and to market their goods in creative ways, are the ones the company needs if it is to stay in business and keep workers employed.

In short, in the modern business world, smart business people don’t espouse Social Darwinism and smart workers don't espouse Marxism. Democracy in all its sectors runs by maintaining interactions and tensions between complex, balanced systems of values and concepts, or, to put the matter more exactly, between the groups of people who carry those concepts and values in their heads and then live by them.