Even when I was living in a very liberal area, there were only a small handful of stores that advertised as worker co-ops. It’s funny too because those co-op stores were all incredibly popular and successful, so I don’t understand why they are so comparatively rare? The organizational structure seems simple to maintain, and has a high incentive for regular workers to go above and beyond since they directly benefit from the business being successful, so what’s the deal? I am speaking from a US centric view, so maybe things are different in Europe, but even with my limited knowledge I feel like they are relatively unpopular there too, but maybe not? I dunno.
You need a lot of capital to start a business, which is usually held by people who don’t have an incentive to start a business for others benefit.
Also, entrepreneurs are usually individualistic (not talking shit, that’s just the nature of it).
It’s easier to get loans or investment if you can offer ownership of the business or its assets as collateral or equity. That’s easier to do with concentrated private ownership than with a business that starts as a cooperative with shared ownership. So there is a structural¹ bias in favor of concentrated ownership and away from cooperative ownership when starting a new business.
In some successful worker-owned businesses, the business started as a traditional private endeavor and then converted to worker-owned through the deliberate choice of the founders & workers. For instance, the Cheese Board Collective here in Berkeley started as a privately owned cheese shop which was then sold to its workers a few years later. It’s been a cooperative since 1971.
¹ That is, the system can have this bias, regardless of whether the individuals making up the economy have this preference.
a
It’s not a matter of individual opinion or “liking”; it’s a structural issue. Even a community-minded, cooperatively-owned credit union faces the same incentives as a commercial bank when making business loans: it’s easier to evaluate and hold accountable a single business owner than a collective of owners.
As a result, cooperatives are easier to start when the founders have personal savings they can draw on, than by taking on business loans. A common model is to start the business “normally” and then sell it to its workers, rather than starting it as a collective up front.
The Mondragon Corporation is a federation of worker-owned coops in Basque, Spain that involves 81,000 people and has been running since the 1950s. They have coops for manufacturing, banking, retail and education and they all work together to support each other.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
The book “From Mondragon to America” (available on Kindle and elsewhere) goes into extensive detail about how it works.
They’re tricky. While they can be extremely healthy and successful, with extremely high employee morale, they can also be cumbersome and bureaucratic, as that’s the power structure that replaces the traditional hierarchy. So, very much a pros and cons thing, they’re not just exclusively more fun and amazing to work at.
When it works its great though.
a
Curiously, the internal economy of a typical “capitalist” corporation is strictly dictatorial, even to the point of Führerprinzip: every sub-unit of the corporation has a manager in charge of it, who has dictatorial control of that part of the company, and is only responsible to their own manager.
a
If you’re doing that you probably already have a worker-owned cooperative.
Any given co-op into the hundreds of people or more is going to have noticeably more. There is just literally a greater number of people involved in almost every phase of decision-making. This cannot be made quickly.
Just because corporations are cumbersome does not mean they are going to be just as bad as co-ops in this regard. And just because we like co-ops does not mean we should not try to be somewhat objective about them. They are certainly not simply across-the-board superior in every way, that’s just fantasy. Except at small scales, then the cumbersomeness doesn’t really come into play.
a
That’s not the same. Shareholders are not involved in the operation of the business. They simply vote every once in awhile, if they feel like it, for a board of directors. They are not involved in decisionmaking beyond this, nor do they operate a business.
There’s a difference between shilling and being a grown-up that has experience working in the industry.
Except for the fact that you clearly don’t know how shareholder structures work, so just sit down and shut up. Maybe you’ll learn something. Assuming, you’re really not a shill.
Yeah, you’re just spraying bs now, unless you want to do some of that education you’re talking about.
Survivor bias. The only ones that make it are the extraordinarily well run ones. I worked for one that feel apart. All it takes is one period where for whatever personal reasons there aren’t enough committed core members to manage the business.
It’s expensive to start a business. You’d need some seed money to start the thing for rent, products, salary and more. If a bunch of people go together, pool their money, sure they might get it to work, but they also share all the risk of failure. Also, who decides if there is conflict? Who has the final say? Not everything can be solved by compromise.
a
Most leftists I know are absolutely Scrooges. It horrorfies me every time we come up with a brilliant plan to save the world.
The ones who aren’t usually burn out trying to accommodate the rest.
