Given the anarchist desire to liberate the artist in all of us, we can easily imagine that a free society would transform totally the working environment. No longer would workers be indifferent to their workplaces, but they would express themselves in transforming them into pleasant places, integrated into both the life of the local community and into the local environment. After all, "no movement that raises the demand for workers' councils can be regarded as revolutionary unless it tries to promote sweeping transformations in the environment of the work place." [Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 146]
A glimpse of the future workplace can been seen from the actual class struggle. In the 40 day sit-down strike at Fisher Body plant #1 in Flint, Michigan in 1936, "there was a community of two thousand strikers . . . Committees organised recreation, information, classes, a postal service, sanitation . . . There were classes in parliamentary procedure, public speaking, history of the labour movement. Graduate students at the University of Michigan gave courses in journalism and creative writing. [Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p. 391] In the same year, during the Spanish Revolution, collectivised workplaces also created libraries and education facilities as well as funding schools, health care and other social necessities (a practice, we must note, that had started before the revolution when C.N.T. unions had funded schools, social centres, libraries and so on).
Therefore the workplace would be expanded to include education and classes in individual development (and so following Proudhon's comment that we should "[o]rganise association, and by the same token, every workshop becoming a school, every worker becomes a master, every student an apprentice." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, pp. 62-3]). This would allow work to become part of a wider community, drawing in people from different areas to share their knowledge and learn new insights and ideas. In addition, children would have part of their school studies with workplaces, getting them aware of the practicalities of many different forms of work and so allowing them to make informed decisions in what sort of activity they would be interested in pursuing when they were older.
Obviously, a workplace managed by its workers would also take care to make the working environment as pleasant as possible. No more "sick building syndrome" or unhealthy and stressful work areas. Buildings would be designed to maximise space and allow individual expression within them. Outside the workplace, we can imagine it surrounded by gardens and allotments which were tended by workers themselves, giving a pleasant surrounding to the workplace. There would, in effect, be a break down of the city/rural divide — workplaces would be placed next to fields and integrated into the surroundings:
"Have the factory and the workshop at the gates of your fields and gardens, and work in them. Not those large establishments, of course, in which huge masses of metals have to be dealt with and which are better placed at certain spots indicated by Nature, but the countless variety of workshops and factories which are required to satisfy the infinite diversity of tastes among civilised men [and women] . . . factories and workshops which men, women and children will not be driven by hunger, but will be attracted by the desire of finding an activity suited to their tastes, and where, aided by the motor and the machine, they will choose the branch of activity which best suits their inclinations." [Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow, p. 197]
This vision of rural and urban integration is just part of the future anarchists see for the workplace. As Kropotkin argued, "[w]e proclaim integration. . . a society of integrated, combined labour. A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work; where each able-bodied human being is a worker, and where each worker works both in the field and the industrial workshop; where every aggregation of individuals, large enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural resources — it may be a nation, or rather a region — produces and itself consumes most of its own agricultural and manufactured produce." [Op. Cit., p. 26]
The future workplace would be an expression of the desires of those who worked there. It would be based around a pleasant working environment, within gardens and with extensive library, resources for education classes and other leisure activities. All this, and more, will be possible in a society based upon self-realisation and self-expression and one in which individuality is not crushed by authority and capitalism. To re-quote Kropotkin, "if most of the workshops we know are foul and unhealthy, it is because the workers are of no account in the organisation of factories" and "[s]laves can submit to them, but free men will create new conditions, and their will be pleasant and infinitely more productive." [The Conquest of Bread, p. 121 and p. 123]
"So in brief," argued William Morris, "our buildings will be beautiful with their own beauty of simplicity as workshops . . . [and] besides the mere workshops, our factory will have other buildings which may carry ornament further than that, for it will need dinning-hall, library, school, places for study of different kinds, and other such structures." Such a vision is possible and is only held back by capitalism which denounces such visions of freedom as "uneconomic." However, as William Morris points out:
"Impossible I hear an anti-Socialist say. My friend, please to remember that most factories sustain today large and handsome gardens, and not seldom parks . . .only the said gardens, etc. are twenty miles away from the factory, out of the smoke, and are kept up for one member of the factory only, the sleeping partner to wit" [A Factory as It Might Be, p. 9 and pp. 7-8]
Pleasant working conditions based upon the self-management of work can produce a workplace within which economic "efficiency" can be achieved without disrupting and destroying individuality and the environment (also see section I.4.9 for a fuller discussion of anarchism and technology).