A frequent complaint I found online about co-ops is that the ability to take profits without sharing is too tempting, and soon most of them become two-tiered.
You have the old employers who have founded the company together and now they are co-owners; and the new employers who were not given the option of co-ownership, and have to work like employees in a regular company. Alternatively, instead of hiring new employess, some services are supplied by a contractor, so the contractor’s employees de facto work for the co-op, but are not its co-owners.
This is something that idealists complain about, because their dream is that “if co-ops will become popular and successful, gradually all companies will become co-ops, and every worker will be a co-owner”, that is a peaceful gradual transition from capitalism to workers-owned economy; but in reality it seems like the co-ops only change the economical monarchies to economical oligarchies, not economical democracies. They become similar to companies as usual with multiple owners.
Actually, I imagine that this change can come quite naturally, even if you don’t plan it. Imagine that you are an idealist, and your dream is to transform the whole world to co-ops. You and your other idealistic friends create a co-op which e.g. makes computer games. And you need someone to clean your rooms. Would you make that person an equal co-owner? That feels like an overkill. So you would just pay some company to send someone to clean your rooms.
But in a way that shows practical problems of workers-owned economy. If you have people who work for multiple companies, should they get an ownership in each of them? But then they should probably get smaller ownership than people who only work for one company. If there is a production chain where a company X produces tools or services for a company Y, shoud employees of X automatically get ownership of Y, and vice versa? That could be rather impractical for companies which provide services to huge number of customers, such as phone companies. -- Saying that something is “workers-owned” is merely an applause light unless we specify which workers owns how much of which company.
A frequent complaint I found online about co-ops is that the ability to take profits without sharing is too tempting, and soon most of them become two-tiered.
You have the old employers who have founded the company together and now they are co-owners; and the new employers who were not given the option of co-ownership, and have to work like employees in a regular company. Alternatively, instead of hiring new employess, some services are supplied by a contractor, so the contractor’s employees de facto work for the co-op, but are not its co-owners.
This is something that idealists complain about, because their dream is that “if co-ops will become popular and successful, gradually all companies will become co-ops, and every worker will be a co-owner”, that is a peaceful gradual transition from capitalism to workers-owned economy; but in reality it seems like the co-ops only change the economical monarchies to economical oligarchies, not economical democracies. They become similar to companies as usual with multiple owners.
Actually, I imagine that this change can come quite naturally, even if you don’t plan it. Imagine that you are an idealist, and your dream is to transform the whole world to co-ops. You and your other idealistic friends create a co-op which e.g. makes computer games. And you need someone to clean your rooms. Would you make that person an equal co-owner? That feels like an overkill. So you would just pay some company to send someone to clean your rooms.
But in a way that shows practical problems of workers-owned economy. If you have people who work for multiple companies, should they get an ownership in each of them? But then they should probably get smaller ownership than people who only work for one company. If there is a production chain where a company X produces tools or services for a company Y, shoud employees of X automatically get ownership of Y, and vice versa? That could be rather impractical for companies which provide services to huge number of customers, such as phone companies. -- Saying that something is “workers-owned” is merely an applause light unless we specify which workers owns how much of which company.