A workers' council, also called labour council, is a type of council in a workplace or a locality made up of workers or of temporary and instantly revocable delegates elected by the workers in a locality's workplaces. In such a system of political and economic organization, the workers themselves are able to exercise decision-making power. Furthermore, the workers within each council decide on what their agenda is and what their needs are. The council communist Anton Pannekoek describes shop-committees and sectional assemblies as the basis for workers' management of the industrial system. A variation is a soldiers' council, where soldiers direct a mutiny. Workers and soldiers have also operated councils in conjunction (like the 1918 German Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat). Workers' councils may in turn elect delegates to central committees, such as the Congress of Soviets.

Supporters of workers' councils (such as council communists, libertarian socialists, Leninists, anarchists, and Marxists) argue that they are the most natural form of working-class organization, and believe that workers' councils are necessary for the organization of a proletarian revolution and the implementation of an anarchist or communist society.

The Paris Commune of 1871 became a model for how future workers' councils would be organised for revolution and socialist governance. Workers' councils have played a significant role in the communist revolutions of the 20th century. This was most notable in the lands of the Russian Empire (including Congress Poland and Latvia) in 1905, with the workers' councils (soviets) acting as labor committees which coordinated strike activities throughout the cities due to repression of trade unions. During the Revolutions of 1917–1923, councils of socialist workers were able to exercise political authority. In the workers' councils organized as part of the 1918 German revolution, factory organizations such as the General Workers' Union of Germany formed the basis for region-wide councils.

Anarchists advocate for a stateless society based on horizontal social organisation through voluntary federations of communes, with workers' councils and voluntary associations acting as the basic units of such societies. Early conceptions of this theory have come from the writings of French anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. His theory of mutualism envisioned a society organised through workers' councils, cooperatives, and other types of workers' associations.

At the First International, followers of Proudhon and the collectivists led by Mikhail Bakunin have endorsed the use of workers' councils both as a means for organising class struggle and for forming the structural basis of a future anarchist society. Writing for the French anarchist journal The New Times [fr], Russian theorist Peter Kropotkin has praised the workers of Russia for using this form of organisation during the Revolution of 1905.

Modern anarchists, such as proponents of participatory economics, advocate for the use of workers' councils as a means for participatory urban planning as well as decentralised planning of the economy.

Council Communism advocates for a system of workers councils (council democracy) to coordinate class struggle. Karl Marx described in The Civil War in France the Paris Commune as a system with indirect elections, where district assemblies select at any time recall-able delegates to a higher assembly. Council communists, such as the Dutch-German current of left communists, believe that their nature means that workers' councils do away with bureaucratic form of the state and instead give power directly to workers. Council communists view this organization of a revolutionary government as an anti-authoritarian approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The council communists in the Communist Workers' Party of Germany advocated organizing "on the basis of places of work, not trades, and to establish a National Federation of Works Committees." The Central Workers Council of Greater Budapest occupied this role in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, between late October and early January 1957, where it grew out of local factory committees.