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In your worker co-op utopia, when say you envision the workers as the owners, how exactly does one change jobs then? Would I be forced to sell my ownership any/

• dbingham 4y ago
  Note, it's not a utopia - just better, not perfect. It's a refactor. An iteration on the existing system. > when say you envision the workers as the owners, how exactly does one change jobs then? Would I be forced to sell my ownership any/every time I wanted to leave a job? Open question. I think there are a couple of ways you could explore implementing this. One would be through ownership similar to what you describe. Workers would earn ownership over the course of their employment, when they want to move jobs the cooperative has to buy out their share (which would also enable retirement) at some agreed upon value. The cooperative would have to maintain capital reserves to cover this case. It doesn't really make sense for workers to take their share with them with out equity markets. They'd just be selling their equity back to the cooperative at a later date. Another approach would be to consider businesses as institutions to be governed, rather than property to be owned. In this case, no one owns the business. The workers govern it. There's no equity earned. It would be one worker one vote. In this case retirement would need to be handled either through pensions set aside, or more likely through national social security (which we already have). It's also possible that retirement could be handled through normal savings accounts. With out a stock market, financing would happen through traditional banks (as worker cooperatives), credit unions, or municipal banks and there would be much more incentive to pay real interest on savings accounts. In the former case, the earned equity overtime probably more accurately values workers contributions, and therefor also founder contributions. In the later case, the system is simpler, more egalitarian, and less prone to manipulation by founders looking to retain authoritarian power as long as possible. Important to note, I think there are existing worker cooperatives experimenting with both implementations (and probably additional ones as well), so if we're interested in seeing the effects of each approach (and possible unintended consequences) it would be worth studying what they're doing. If I ever manage to save up enough to take a multi-year sabbatical I want to write a book on the topic and do that research.
  • yucky 4y ago
    > Another approach would be to consider businesses as institutions to be governed, rather than property to be owned. In this case, no one owns the business. This is probably the quickest way possible to ensure no new businesses are created, ever. There would be no incentive, and if the government has proven anything it's that it is the least efficient institution ever created. > The cooperative would have to maintain capital reserves to cover this case. The math on this doesn't work. > I think there are existing worker cooperatives experimenting with both implementations Indeed, and now we know why they're not significant enterprises in any way.
    • dbingham 4y ago
      > Indeed, and now we know why they're not significant enterprises in any way. This is just factually incorrect. Mondragon has 80k employees and 12 billion euros in revenue. Equal Exchange has 120 employees, $70 million in revenue and national scale distribution. There are absolutely worker cooperates successfully competing at scale. They do have trouble getting financing in a Capitalist economy, but they would not be an issue in an economy based on them. Personally, I think I think one worker one vote and strong social security is the resolution to the question posed above.
      • yucky 4y ago
        The issue with "one worker one vote" is that it assumes an egalitarian world that couldn't be further from reality. CEO's are in many places overcompensated, sometimes ridiculously so. But the idea that a CNC programmer or engineer should get the same input as the guy pushing a broom around to clean up their part shavings is so absurd that you will never get talented people to take part. This of course means the only solution to the talent disparity is an ultra-authoritarian crackdown on any type of private enterprise at all, a truly dystopian outcome that we've seen only under the likes of Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot etc. I think the part you're overlooking (or consciously not wanting to think about) is enforcement. How do you expect to prevent someone from starting a private business and structuring it in a non co-op manner? Ultimately, this can only be enforced with violence or the threat of violence, right? So now how do you convince people used to freedom to accept widescale authoritarian violence as being "worth it"?