5 ms·

Employers will try to paint organization as a hostile maneuver to justify their own hostility toward workers who try it.

by jdc 6y ago

garbagetime 6y ago
There's a solution to that: remove the employers. The end goal of organisation should be worker control.
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  Barring some non-compete stuff in their contracts, the workers are free to leave and start their own co-op
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    There is a difference between the legal possibility of doing so, and the practical possibility.
    - HideousKojima 6y ago
      >There is a difference between the legal possibility of doing so, and the practical possibility. Yes, because the existing employer has actually created a lot of value by investing their capital in the business, because providing investment is actually incredibly valuable
  - garbagetime 6y ago
    I hope you're right (although I know you're not): the easier it is, the better. What I'm suggesting isn't meant to be impossible. (of course, it would be easier just to turn an existing company into a co-op, but if co-op start-ups weren't at a massive systematic disadvantage, that would be great)
    - eru 6y ago
      What HideousKojima was suggesting that you don't need to ban employers to make cooperatives possible.
      - garbagetime 6y ago
        He said they were free to. That's the part I disagree with: in fact employees generally aren't free to take the risk to start a new company.
        eru 6y ago
        What keeps them? Just to be clear: I agree that for most people they can earn more money at lower risk and effort working for an established company than starting their own company or cooperative.
    - eddyfromtheblok 6y ago
      how do I ascertain that a software product is made by a co-op? marketing, probably, to be sustainable. what examples are there of well-marketed co-ops? it's not really something that is in the forefront of the collective consciousness. a few knowledgable grocery shoppers, sure, know of Welch's which is owned by the National Grape Coop, and the Green Bay Packers are as a publicly-owned American football team are a stretch for being a coop as owners only have voting rights and not profit reimbursement. I say this as someone who volunteered to run the finances of non-profit co-op housing communities, way back when, that it's a foreign concept for most. Someone needs to differentiate products that don't abuse workers. I could see twitch, etc being an avenue for promotion, of course, but getting a groundswell of streamers into this is another matter.
dmix 6y ago
People always paint these as some conspiracies against unions but there's plenty of genuine discontent with unions amongst the public and there's some legitimate concerns with them. You can see it today with police unions being the biggest hawks blindly defending any police abuse and protecting them for ever being fired. This elephant in the room often gets ignored in public discourse. And the police aren't the only ones. I grew up in a small town where unions were used like mini fiefdoms riddled with nepotism where you had to know someone to get a job. Theres also a long history of racism in unions, the original forming of them in the US were to exclude low wage black workers from 'stealing' white jobs. It seems to work well at first before slowly morphing into a rigid protection racket for current employees, locking a company down to its current structure (which only makes sense for a few slow moving homogeneous industries like factories - until of course they simply automate or move to Asia or shut down). It's also notable people always use historical nostalgic examples to hype up some golden age of unions for jobs that no longer exist for some reason... They've also long been covers for corruption and back room political influence. I personally believe unions are long overdue for reform and modernization. I'd maybe support something like unions-light, but today they always come with tons of other baggage like preventing bad workers from being fired, adding tons of bureaucracy and hoop jumping, crippling companies ability to adapt to market changes, forcing people like comedians and small indie bands to hire 30 different people for individual jobs (like paying a guy $40hr to pull a cord to open the curtains and nothing else which happens in NY clubs) creating inefficiencies which hurt company growth and customers and therefore employees/economies/taxes, completely shutting down small businesses who simply can't afford to support unions, not applying well to companies with a variety of different job roles, etc. It's like a sledgehammer when most people just want to make more $$.
- grandmczeb 6y ago
  > I grew up in a small town where unions were used like mini fiefdoms riddled with nepotism where you had to know someone to get a job. Yeah same. I grew up in a town with a large union presence (auto workers) and it was unbelievably corrupt. I’m not against unions conceptually, but they can be implemented very badly in practice.
  - 6y ago

Employers will try to paint organization as a hostile maneuver to justify their own hostility toward workers who try it.

by jdc 6y ago

Employers will try to paint organization as a hostile maneuver to justify their own hostility toward workers who try it.

garbagetime 6y ago

There's a solution to that: remove the employers. The end goal of organisation should be worker control.

HideousKojima 6y ago
Barring some non-compete stuff in their contracts, the workers are free to leave and start their own co-op
- mschuster91 6y ago
  There is a difference between the legal possibility of doing so, and the practical possibility.
  - HideousKojima 6y ago
    >There is a difference between the legal possibility of doing so, and the practical possibility. Yes, because the existing employer has actually created a lot of value by investing their capital in the business, because providing investment is actually incredibly valuable
- garbagetime 6y ago
  I hope you're right (although I know you're not): the easier it is, the better. What I'm suggesting isn't meant to be impossible. (of course, it would be easier just to turn an existing company into a co-op, but if co-op start-ups weren't at a massive systematic disadvantage, that would be great)
  - eru 6y ago
    What HideousKojima was suggesting that you don't need to ban employers to make cooperatives possible.
    - garbagetime 6y ago
      He said they were free to. That's the part I disagree with: in fact employees generally aren't free to take the risk to start a new company.
      - eru 6y ago
        What keeps them? Just to be clear: I agree that for most people they can earn more money at lower risk and effort working for an established company than starting their own company or cooperative.
  - eddyfromtheblok 6y ago
    how do I ascertain that a software product is made by a co-op? marketing, probably, to be sustainable. what examples are there of well-marketed co-ops? it's not really something that is in the forefront of the collective consciousness. a few knowledgable grocery shoppers, sure, know of Welch's which is owned by the National Grape Coop, and the Green Bay Packers are as a publicly-owned American football team are a stretch for being a coop as owners only have voting rights and not profit reimbursement. I say this as someone who volunteered to run the finances of non-profit co-op housing communities, way back when, that it's a foreign concept for most. Someone needs to differentiate products that don't abuse workers. I could see twitch, etc being an avenue for promotion, of course, but getting a groundswell of streamers into this is another matter.

dmix 6y ago

People always paint these as some conspiracies against unions but there's plenty of genuine discontent with unions amongst the public and there's some legitimate concerns with them. You can see it today with police unions being the biggest hawks blindly defending any police abuse and protecting them for ever being fired. This elephant in the room often gets ignored in public discourse. And the police aren't the only ones. I grew up in a small town where unions were used like mini fiefdoms riddled with nepotism where you had to know someone to get a job. Theres also a long history of racism in unions, the original forming of them in the US were to exclude low wage black workers from 'stealing' white jobs. It seems to work well at first before slowly morphing into a rigid protection racket for current employees, locking a company down to its current structure (which only makes sense for a few slow moving homogeneous industries like factories - until of course they simply automate or move to Asia or shut down). It's also notable people always use historical nostalgic examples to hype up some golden age of unions for jobs that no longer exist for some reason... They've also long been covers for corruption and back room political influence. I personally believe unions are long overdue for reform and modernization. I'd maybe support something like unions-light, but today they always come with tons of other baggage like preventing bad workers from being fired, adding tons of bureaucracy and hoop jumping, crippling companies ability to adapt to market changes, forcing people like comedians and small indie bands to hire 30 different people for individual jobs (like paying a guy $40hr to pull a cord to open the curtains and nothing else which happens in NY clubs) creating inefficiencies which hurt company growth and customers and therefore employees/economies/taxes, completely shutting down small businesses who simply can't afford to support unions, not applying well to companies with a variety of different job roles, etc. It's like a sledgehammer when most people just want to make more $$.

grandmczeb 6y ago
> I grew up in a small town where unions were used like mini fiefdoms riddled with nepotism where you had to know someone to get a job. Yeah same. I grew up in a town with a large union presence (auto workers) and it was unbelievably corrupt. I’m not against unions conceptually, but they can be implemented very badly in practice.
- 6y ago