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In the 1880s Bismarck increased the modern welfare state (it was called State Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany) https://en.wikip
by rmc 9y ago
In the 1880s Bismarck increased the modern welfare state (it was called State Socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism_(Germany) ). The idea was that, if the poor people can get some form of social welfare from the existing state, they're less likely to support a proper socialist/communist revolution. Sounds like that. People won't unionise when they don't think they need to.
- vnchr 9y agoInteresting comparison. In this case, people aren't unionizing for essentially the opposite reason. Rather than state provided social welfare, their needs are satisfied through this capitalistic solution. Employees are empowered and rewarded through their work.
- throwaway91111 9y agoI'm not sure if you can call this capitalistic, though. WF as a commune could likely share many of the benefits or exceed them even without requiring shareholders to satisfy. Instead, a devotion to profits will ensure they are given the minimum to execute their job well. It'll be interesting to see what bezos does with it for sure.
- wooter 9y agoname a single commune as successful or operating at the scale of Whole Foods or Amazon. in history.
- Retric 9y agoWhole foods is vastly larger than the majority of organizations world wide. Remember the world GDP is only ~80,000 billion so there is a rather small number of Organizations with 10 billion per year in Revenue. But, if your just mean billion plus dollar orgs then something like : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Farmers_of_Alberta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Farmers_of_Alberta is an interesting comparison. Further, measuring the success of such organizations is hard especially when they are not trying to make a profit. I mean how do you measure something like the US Democratic and Republican parties?
- laurencerowe 9y agoIn the U.K. both the Co-op (a consumer owned co-operative) and John Lewis/Waitrose (a worker owned partnership) have similar revenue figures to Whole Foods.
- rmc 9y agoThe funniest thing is that John Lewis/Waitrose is an upmarket supermarket.
- anigbrowl 9y agoMondragon corporation has existed in spain since the 1950s as a worker-owned cooperative and employs about 75,000 people. Whole foods employs about 91,000 but I'd say that puts them in the same ballpark. You could argue in addition that Mondragon has been limited by a) Spain having been a dictatorship until the 1980s, b) the relative youth of the EU single market vs that of the US leading to a more regional business culture and c) the additional language barriers in Europe that make business expansion a bit slower than in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
- ihnorton 9y agoNot exactly a commune, but interesting nonetheless and on the same scale as Whole Foods (12 bln Euro turnover): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation Oneida is (was) the closest US analogy I can think of, though much smaller. There are some very successful Kibbutzim spinoffs in Israel, into 100s of millions US$ (I don't know how ownership was structured).
- wozniacki 9y agoCould you expand on the Israeli firms? Are they essentially large family-run houses of commerce much like tradesmen guilds of the past?
- Bulkington 9y agoI also immediately thought of kibbutzim, just as a counterexample for debate. (Full disclosure: ex-volunteer) From Agriculture To High-Tech: Meet Five Kibbutzim That Became Global Powerhouses http://nocamels.com/2016/03/successful-israeli-kibbutzim-industry-technology/ http://nocamels.com/2016/03/successful-israeli-kibbutzim-ind...
- chandler 9y agoWell, Publix is employee owned, does that count? Comparing the wikipedia sidebar shows Publix with more stores, revenue, and over twice the number of employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Foods_Market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Foods_Market I'm not going near Amazon, though.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoFun fact: Publix is the largest employee-owned grocery chain in the US.
- 1123581321 9y agoEmployee-owned means the owners retired by selling the company through an employee stock purchase plan. Publix, Woodman's etc. are good places to work but they aren't communes or cooperatives.
- polymeris 9y agoSwitzerland's 2 largest supermarket chains Migros[1] and Coop[2] are structured as cooperatives, generating yearly revenues of ~28 billion CHF, each. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migros [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Switzerland) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Switzerland)
- throwaway91111 9y agoWhy? What's your point? Just sayig you can't possibly pin the benefits on capitalism—you know very well whole foods would avoid hiring anyone if they didn't have to. That is capitalism: minimize loss of money. Whole foods is a good employer IN SPITE of being capitalist.
- sqeaky 9y agoThere is a competitive advantage in having real loyalty from employees. Treating people well makes them want to be loyal. Even Walmart has started realizing this. It turns out that when you hire unmotivated people, pay them as little as possible, screw them on medical benefits, pay them too little to get their own apartment and in general work them harder than everyone else in that job sector that you get people who don't do a good job. In the past several years, Walmart has instituted new wage plans, better medical benefits, productivity goals from corporate that are still unreasonable but not insane and they think it is worth the money. I don't know if Amazon has learned this expensive lesson, but a business can run with high employee turnover and dissatisfaction for a long time before it catches up to them. Once it becomes apparent it is often too late to fix without losing heavily in the marketplace.
- throwaway91111 9y agoThere may be competitive advantages to happy employees, but there's always a cost, and capitalism is about minimizing those costs. Again, if a business could get away with it, they would simply not hire anyone to keep costs down. Simply put, human welfare is directly in contest with maximization of profits. This occasionally can result in being paid well—it's cheaper than hiring two people at a lower rate.
- rdiddly 9y agoSeems like the idea was "Whole Foods as a commune" i.e. viewed as a commune. In other words a conceptual lens through which you could view any organization. Amazon itself is a commune in some ways, and so is Whole Foods; therefore my two examples. in history. are Amazon and Whole Foods. So much for that. And looky there, other commenters supplied a bunch more (actual) examples. I'll throw in: The Catholic Church. The nation of Yugoslavia. What the heck: the Hell's Angels. Far outstripping Amazon's "scale" in terms of heads smacked with wooden fenceposts, that's for sure, or maybe not. Which is my next point - adjust the "scale" appropriately (and unfortunately you left no indication RE: scale of what, whether it be dollars in sales, people involved, people served, ham sandwiches set aflame, heads smacked, or dogs painted blue) in proportion to the amount of money/wealth existing in the world at that time. in history. or to the number of people alive at that time. in history. and that'll probably turn up a bunch more examples. There's also the question of "successful at what"? At providing for its employees/members? At serving its customers? At enriching its shareholders? At painting dogs blue? Also we should really make passing mention of the waxing and waning support for capitalistic enterprises vs. other types of communes in various places and times. in history. Is it a valid comparison between a company like Amazon, operating in one of the most capitalism-friendly sociopolitical environments (post-Reagan America) seen in some time, vs. another type of organization operating in the same environment that doesn't support that organization or even actively suppresses it? Your comment reflects an overabundance of confidence in things that are by no means simple or certain.
- tigershark 9y agoItalian Coop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coop_(Italy) About the same as whole foods revenue. At this point you have quite a few communes operating at this scale.
- fivestar 9y agoWhat's not capitalistic about it? A company can be setup with any number of metrics that determine success besides just pure profit. That most don't is a matter of who is running them, not that capitalism doesn't allow it to take place! Look at airlines--exec bonuses used to include metrics such as "customer satisfaction" and today those metrics are gone and only profits count. Nothing changed with capitalism, though. It's the asshole MBAs that changed.
- pm90 9y agoI mean if you think about it, Unions act as a protection mechanism. If your workplace is already labor friendly you feel less of a need for Unions, which cost money and time.
- _jal 9y agoIt is important to note that the antagonism between union and management is especially bad in the U.S. Germany demonstrates one arrangement that generally works to align the interests of the two. Just calling this out to try to counter the tendency of U.S. folks to assume that there is only one, unchanging form of capitalism. In fact, ours is increasingly a weird outlier.
- euyyn 9y agoWhat is that arrangement? How are their interests aligned?
- noir_lord 9y agoUnions have a board seat in larger SME's as well as much greater clarity on internal plans and finances. Makes hard decisions easier since the union and employees can see why decisions are made.
- Spooky23 9y agoOrganized labor is treated as stakeholders in the enterprise vs a counter-party in the US.
- rmc 9y agoIf a certain amount of workers agree they can form a workers council which is a legally protected union within the company. And they have much stronger legal rights, seats on the board of directors, legal requirements to see certain documents, strong protection against being fired. Lest you think this makes the country uncompetitive, Germany still makes cars, and the UK (which doesn't have this legal system) has vastly de-industrialised and doesn't make cars.
- irfanka 9y agoExactly the reason why there aren't any Software Developer Unions these days.
- m-j-fox 9y agoYou're kidding, right? Programmers are decently paid but should strike for a 40-hour work week.
- wooter 9y agono thanks. look at what collective/forced/politicized bickering over hours has done to the job market everywhere its been tried. look at the corruption. i enjoy my freedom to negotiate my terms as I, as an individual, and my employer see fit.
- anigbrowl 9y agoSure you do...now. You might find yourself in very different circumstances in the future.
- deong 9y agoI lived and worked in Iceland for five years, and they have a virtually 100% unionization rate. It's handled at the industry level rather than individual companies, but when you start a job, you are pretty much automatically enrolled in the union relevant for your work. A little money comes out of your paycheck, and the union is there in case you have problems. The unions also provide other benefits. For example, most of them own summer houses that any member can reserve to go spend a weekend away. You rarely hear the average Icelander on either side of the worker/manager divide complain about them at all. Everyone more or less views them as beneficial. Once or twice a year they make headlines when one group of workers or another feels aggrieved and it escalates to a brief strike in some small sector of the economy, but on the whole, I don't think many Icelanders would trade their system of employment for ours. Like so many other areas, I think the problem is that we in the US are just so very much worse at running our society and country than most other comparable countries. Look at health care. No one liked the ACA; no will will like the AHCA or whatever the Republicans pass. The problem isn't that it's impossible to do a decent job at a health care system. The problem is that we specifically suck. Put us in charge of anything, and we'll turn it into something awful that doesn't work, but provides some brief period of outsized shareholder value.
- panarky 9y agoThis is a great discussion of company culture, treatment of employees, worker cooperatives, etc., but I hoped HN would go deeper into the business and technology implications. What is the strategic logic behind this move? NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Bloomberg all take the same line: this is about Amazon's expansion into brick-and-mortar retail. They need a physical footprint, knock out Instacart for delivery, accelerate Amazon Go, and so on. But is this really Amazon's play here? Seems to me this is just the superficial and obvious rationale, and these analysts completely missed the bigger implications. Since Amazon said they're not renaming the stores, how can this be about Amazon's brick-and-mortar expansion? Seems more likely that Amazon's strategy is actually the opposite of this. Instead, maybe the bigger opportunity is to "Amazonify" a good brand, good people, good merchandising and thousands of relationships with good suppliers. Customers already trust Whole Foods and they like the assortment, but (1) only a small percentage of the population has access to a store, and (2) an even smaller percentage of the population can afford it. What if this is about taking the Whole Foods concept online in a big way ... make it dramatically more efficient, aggressively lower prices, and deliver all this goodness to a far larger percentage of the population? Whole Foods market share is less than 2%. Amazon could turn this $13 billion business into a $130 billion business by plugging WF into Amazon's existing apparatus for merchandising, pricing, inventory control, online sales, logistics, and direct-to-consumer delivery. Taking WF market share up from 2% to 20% is a much bigger opportunity than going the other direction, and just using WF stores to sell Amazon's grocery assortment.
- TAForObvReasons 9y agoIt's worth pointing out that the purchase, as based on today's price action, was effectively "free". Amazon market cap went up 3.5% as of the current tick, roughly $15.5B. The market effectively rewarded AMZN for the transaction far beyond the actual $13.7B tender offer!
- KekDemaga 9y agoThat is a great observation. Something like that is unimaginable to me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- naravara 9y agoPrussia was also a highly militaristic state, so it had the side benefit of keeping the young men fit and hearty enough to get conscripted for the next time they needed to bloody France's nose. It would also have the young women fit enough to bear many much young men that they could conscript into future wars. The logic of trench warfare era militarism is even more depressing than the normal logic of war. It's mind-boggling to think leaders figured it was appropriate to just throw demographically significant numbers of 16-20 year old boys into a meat-grinder just to keep the machinery of colonialist industry well greased.
- npunt 9y agoVery good points. To be a bit pedantic (this is HN after all), trench warfare didn't start until after Bismarck. Truly depressing logic though.
- delazeur 9y agoNo, trench warfare predated Bismarck, although it didn't peak until after he died. Vicksburg and Petersburg are good examples from the U.S. Civil War.