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I think it's a misconception that worker coops can't have 'the boss'. Most successful ones I've read about delegate day-to-day decisions to an executive committ

I think it's a misconception that worker coops can't have 'the boss'. Most successful ones I've read about delegate day-to-day decisions to an executive committee. The differences between that and management-owned companies are the political tools all workers have to influence decisions, and the shared social contract which says all owners have a stake in the company's decision making (not all employees have to be owners from day one).

toyg 11y ago
I have some observational experience of the cooperative movement in two European countries (UK and Italy), having lived in areas where such movement was deeply entrenched in collective consciousness. My experience is that cooperation is nice but it doesn't scale. As soon as you reach a significant size (a few hundred people), hierarchy is established; leadership will then progressively solidify around a specific network of people, which becomes a de-facto separate class; eventually, you end up in a situation that is cooperative in name only, with a traditional managerial class dominating an exploited workforce; in the best case, the organization will share a culture of respecting workers slightly more than regular companies, but that's about it. Note that I'm not discarding the model entirely, it can work extremely well on a small scale. There are also "hybrid" examples (like the John Lewis Partnership) which seem to better embody the cooperative ethos than "pure" coops at scale.
- scottlocklin 11y ago
  Mondragon corporation is pretty big. Of course this brings up larger questions of "worker owned cooperatives" based on the Roman Catholic economic theory of distributism versus the 1960s counterculture version of "worker owned cooperatives."
  - toyg 11y ago
    I don't know Mondragon, but from Wikipedia, they don't seem to be particularly different from the large coops I know: the majority of workers in their largest operations today are not owners but regular employees, and there is still large pay disparity (albeit smaller than elsewhere).

toyg 11y ago

I have some observational experience of the cooperative movement in two European countries (UK and Italy), having lived in areas where such movement was deeply entrenched in collective consciousness. My experience is that cooperation is nice but it doesn't scale. As soon as you reach a significant size (a few hundred people), hierarchy is established; leadership will then progressively solidify around a specific network of people, which becomes a de-facto separate class; eventually, you end up in a situation that is cooperative in name only, with a traditional managerial class dominating an exploited workforce; in the best case, the organization will share a culture of respecting workers slightly more than regular companies, but that's about it. Note that I'm not discarding the model entirely, it can work extremely well on a small scale. There are also "hybrid" examples (like the John Lewis Partnership) which seem to better embody the cooperative ethos than "pure" coops at scale.

scottlocklin 11y ago
Mondragon corporation is pretty big. Of course this brings up larger questions of "worker owned cooperatives" based on the Roman Catholic economic theory of distributism versus the 1960s counterculture version of "worker owned cooperatives."
- toyg 11y ago
  I don't know Mondragon, but from Wikipedia, they don't seem to be particularly different from the large coops I know: the majority of workers in their largest operations today are not owners but regular employees, and there is still large pay disparity (albeit smaller than elsewhere).