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> At most places I've been involved in the workers are more careful with money because they are standing together and want the business to succeed. This doesn'
by Aunche 3y ago
> At most places I've been involved in the workers are more careful with money because they are standing together and want the business to succeed.
This doesn't contradict anything GP said. Worker owners are careful with company money because they have to be, due to being invested into it. That's a responsibility that not everyone wants, especially when an organization approaches the scale of tragedy of the commons. How many regular voters bother to read the raw, uneditorialized finances that the government provides?
> co-ops have a higher success rate than hierarchical businesses
This is only true when you're defining success as a binary "does this company still exist." Worker-owned companies are significantly less likely to expand because they would be creating risk but would have to share the additional profits with the new hires. This would especially be the case for a restaurant which doesn't benefit from economies of scale (see Publix supermaket as an example of a worker-owned corporation that does).
Even if Jude's can sustainably pay $30/hour, it would take hundreds of similar restaurants to match the success of a single "nice" privately owned restaurant chain like In-and-Out, which also pays above-market wages to thousands of employees, albeit not as above market as Jude's.
- afavour 3y ago> This is only true when you're defining success as a binary "does this company still exist." Worker-owned companies are significantly less likely to expand Why would that be a criteria of “success”, though? A worker owned business capable of supporting all its employees and maintaining itself long term is definitionally a success.
- dpig_ 3y agoAbsolutely agree. Why does everything need to scale up forever? Resources are finite.
- mcv 3y agoThe notion that everything has to expand is a product of our investor-driven economy. I think it's unhealthy. I'd much rather have a million local business than one giant megacorp.
- Aunche 3y agoThe existence of a few restaurant co-ops doesn't preclude the existence of a soulless megacorp like McDonald's. If your goal is to give more people a fair wage, it's much more effective to expand as much as possible.
- IMTDb 3y agoWhen talking about the model itself, success could be defined as the proportion of business operating under that model. If the model is successful for all parties involved, it would be logical that more and more restaurant move to a co-op system.
- sudosysgen 3y agoWorker co-ops aren't less likely to expand because of risk, it's because more employees diluted the pie, so they don't have an incentive to grow for the sake of growth, but only if there are significant economies of scale or social need.
- chii 3y ago> more employees diluted the pie why should this new employee automatically dilute the pie before their "worth" is made real (by virtue of working and contributing to the bottom line)? if adding this new employee creates more value, the existing owners shouldn't have a problem with adding. Of course, unless the employee start owning their share before being first able to be vetted.
- sudosysgen 3y agoYou grow the pie and you dilute it. The end result is that unless there are economies of scale, growth is not very economically attractive.
- ChoHag 3y ago[dead]
- BartjeD 3y agoWhy cant they hire non share packaged employees? Why do they have to shrink their pie? To me this sounds very annecdotal and intuitive based on what you think you know. I'd like to know if it has been studied and what those studies found.
- spookthesunset 3y agoWell if they start hiring “non share packages employees” it kinda stops sounding like worker owned and more like owners and workers, eh? Seems to defeat the purpose of being worker owned. Maybe if you have a vesting period of something. But even then it is one employee, one vote or is voting dependent on something else like number of shares?
- erhaetherth 3y ago> How many regular voters bother to read the raw, uneditorialized finances that the government provides Where can I get this data? Does the US provide CSVs or JSON or something?
- alwa 3y agoYes, and they put a fair degree of effort into making it accessible. One good place to start might be with the Treasury’s fiscal data site [0]. As their plucky little public outreach page [1] points out: “A regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9 [0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/ [1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/