[HN Gopher] The Basque Country's Mondragon Corporation is the la...
___________________________________________________________________
The Basque Country's Mondragon Corporation is the largest
industrial co-op
Author : toss1
Score : 256 points
Date : 2024-04-24 12:58 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| This seems to be fairly unique in its breadth of different
| enterprises. Most co-ops seem to stay in a single industry e.g
| John Lewis with 80,000 employees in UK retail or the many
| agricultural/distribution co-ops owned by farmers.
|
| Wikipedia page is a clearer read:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
| n1b0m wrote:
| The Co-operative Group in the has a group of retail businesses,
| including grocery retail and wholesale, legal services,
| funerals and insurance, and social enterprise
| dv_dt wrote:
| In the US a lot of the ag coops seem to be marketing oriented
| with maybe some capital equipment sharing (regional packing
| shipping facilities, etc).
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Co-ops are fascinating to me as an alternate evolutionary branch
| of capitalism. Like the marsupials to the placentals. Also like
| the marsupials, in most cases where co-ops compete with regular
| capitalist businesses they go extinct.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| Agreed but you could say the same thing about monopolies though
| right? Anti-trust legislation exists to prevent that sort of
| extinction.
| darby_eight wrote:
| It exists to preserve competition, which theoretically is
| supposed to ameliorate the negative aspects of privately
| owner enterprise.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _which theoretically is supposed to ameliorate the
| negative aspects of privately owner enterprise_
|
| It's because non-competitive markets are a market failure
| [1]. Not amelioration.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
| soco wrote:
| Important note: yes they go extinct in a market shaped by
| regular capitalist rules.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they go extinct in a market shaped by regular capitalist
| rules_
|
| Source? Because unless America, much less Wyoming [1], are
| not "shaped by regular capitalist rules," this statement is
| false.
|
| [1] https://www.wyomingrea.org/about/coop-map/
| mminer237 wrote:
| Why are there so many co-ops in existence today then?
| rqtwteye wrote:
| In the short term dictatorships usually are superior to
| democracies because they can move fast and have less
| stakeholders to satisfy. So a capitalist business will usually
| beat out a co-op. That doesn't mean that society as a whole
| gains.
| solarpunk wrote:
| I'm afraid I don't understand. My state is chock full of co-ops
| that compete with their corporate counterparts.
|
| Hell, there's (at least) 3 separate co-op grocery stores in my
| city, they each compete with an Aldi, and multiple local
| grocery chains in their respective neighborhoods.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _My state is chock full of co-ops that compete with their
| corporate counterparts_
|
| Same, and we're deep red. My power company is a member-owned
| co-op. It's cheap as hell (6.8C//kWh for wind) and doesn't
| enjoy burning down the state as a hobby.
| solarpunk wrote:
| oh damn, I completely forgot about utility co-ops!
|
| I'm envious of those, they're all over the state but
| they're only out in the sticks.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Co-ops are just the way that socialism can exist in a
| capitalist society. And while capitalist businesses can usually
| undermine them using all the tools of capitalism, notice that
| co-op workers are usually happier and paid better, co-op
| customers are treated better and receive better service, and
| the community suffers less from having a co-op in the area.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| How are co-ops anti-capitalist? They appear to me no
| different than a shareholder or partnership. Are most law
| firms socialistic in that they have partners who work for the
| firm getting a share of its profits?
| anon291 wrote:
| They're objectively not any less capitalist than a private
| company with restrictions on share transfers.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The workers own the means of production. That's the only
| thing that socialism means.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This is completely incorrect.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| how is "socializing" the ownership of a business not
| socialist?
| rybosworld wrote:
| The business ownership in a coop is not "socialized".
| It's still privately owned.
|
| The definition of socialism is not, and never has been,
| "workers owning the means of production."
|
| A coop still meets all the characteristics of capitalist
| entity:
|
| - privately owned
|
| - for profit, with profits going to shareholders
|
| If you think coops are socialist, then you must also
| think any company that has more than 1 shareholder is
| socialist.
|
| If you think private ownership (which coops protect and
| uphold) is allowed under socialism, then you don't
| understand what socialism is.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| your opinion about the semantics of "coop" and
| "socialism" is wrong. most semantic debates are worthless
| anyway.
|
| every socialist i know and have read agree that a coop is
| a socialist organization, and we will keep creating these
| enterprises as an alternative to capitalism, until one
| day, ideally, the capitalist corporations won't be able
| to compete in the job market with the coops, forcing them
| to socialize their ownership and power structures.
| despite whether you think it's socialism or not.
|
| here are the 7 cooperative principles. please explain how
| this is capitalism? https://www.electric.coop/seven-
| cooperative-principles%E2%80...
| rybosworld wrote:
| There's no semantics.
|
| > every socialist i know and have read agree that a coop
| is a socialist organization
|
| _Every unicorn I know thinks leprechauns are real._
|
| A coop protects and upholds private ownership and
| distribution of profits to their shareholders. That's not
| semantics.
|
| Socialism does not protect private ownership. Socialism
| does not distribute profits to shareholders (because
| there are none). That's also not semantics.
|
| If you want to have a non-semantical conversation, the
| onus is on you.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| ok, well you have no idea what you're talking about, so
| if you think that a coop is capitalism, then i'm gonna
| use that ignorance to my advantage, and convince
| everybody that coops are capitalism. psyop coops on the
| capitalists. thanks for the great strategic idea!
| rybosworld wrote:
| My guess is that someone who thinks private, for-profit
| businesses are socialist, will not gain much traction
| convincing anyone of anything.
|
| But best of luck!
|
| If you can explain to me how a co-op, which is a
| privately owned, and for-profit business structure, is
| _not_ capitalist, I am all ears.
|
| P.s. Definitions are important. Hand waving them away as
| "semantics" is a common trick of the ignorant.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| lol keep on arguing on the internet about stuff you don't
| know anything about, comrade. and use poor debate
| tactics, like "Every unicorn I know thinks leprechauns
| are real." will really get you far in life.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Multiple people here have told you that your
| understanding is incorrect. Now you've resorted to straw
| man so... I think deep down we all know who is talking
| out of their behind.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| two people, you and some other guy who is also wrong and
| doesn't know the 7 principles of coops based on his
| comment (you still haven't argued about how those
| principles are capitalist, so pretty sure the onus is on
| you anyway). there are plenty of examples in the other
| comments on this post supporting my opinion. being a
| contrarian doesn't mean you're right.
|
| and re: strawman, i just met you at your level after you
| used the logical fallacy: "Every unicorn I know thinks
| leprechauns are real." it was pretty clear at that point
| that you weren't going to have a reasonable conversation.
| i apologize for not pointing that fallacy out directly
| and instead i said, "well you have no idea what you're
| talking about". i could've been more graceful with that,
| or just ignored you.
|
| anyway, thank you for sharing your (wrong) opinion about
| whether or not a coop is socialist.
| rybosworld wrote:
| "being a contrarian doesn't mean you're right" - oh the
| irony
|
| You never had an argument beyond "I'm right and you're
| wrong" lmao.
|
| I asked you to respond to specific questions like:
| Explaining how a privately owned, for-profit org (a coop)
| can exist in a socialist world. You ignored it and have
| now devolved to emotional responses only.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i'm not responding to those comments because you clearly
| aren't informed about the definition of socialism,
| particularly the nuances and the debates that leftists
| have about this definition all of the time. nor do you
| understand what a cooperative is. it's not worth my time
| to go tit for tat in a debate if we're not operating on
| the same knowledge, and you're not willing to learn.
|
| you are just somebody who argues on the internet, a
| natural contrarian who thinks they are right about
| everything, while being totally wrong. i call it the
| hacker news contrarian effect. it's quite amazing to
| witness. good day, sir.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| a political and economic theory of social organization
| which advocates that the means of production,
| distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated
| by the community as a whole
|
| The community is normal understood as the complete body
| politic.
|
| A partnership is not socialistic. Lawyers are
| capitalistic in most books, but they have partnerships.
|
| The organization of a business doesn't matter in
| capitalism. Capitalism, boiled down to private property
| and market. A co-op competing with other companies
| largely without price control is just as capitalistic as
| IBM or Google.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| "capitalism" is simply a way to organize an enterprise. an
| enterprise can participate in a market without structuring
| the organization as a capitalist enterprise. free market !=
| capitalism. american-style capitalism consists of a
| political system that supports the capitalist enterprise
| structure.
| gadflyinyoureye wrote:
| Definition of capitalism: an economic and political
| system in which a country's trade and industry are
| controlled by private owners for profit.
|
| The private owner here is a co-op. Not socialist.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| this is wrong. see my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40145796
| dbingham wrote:
| Because labor is calling the shots and reaping the
| benefits, not the capital investors.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _co-op customers are treated better and receive better
| service_
|
| I'd argue this is because a co-op can attract higher-quality
| workers for less than a purely profit-minded shareholder-
| owned business. (Similar to companies with a unique culture.)
| Generalise the model and you'll get the co-op equivalent of
| the 70s-era UAW running roughshod where they can.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think alternatively/additively they may be more
| responsive around firing ineffective staff, and a culture
| of productivity. When workers/managers directly pay for
| their co-worker's unproductiveness, they have an incentive
| to replace opposed to simply hire more additional staff.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Co-op is not a socialist model at all. It's just an
| alternative corporate structure.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| It's the workers owning the means of production, in what
| way is that not socialist?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It is. People don't realize socialism isn't mutually
| exclusive with capitalism.
| rybosworld wrote:
| That's a bastardized interpretation of what socialism is.
|
| Socialism is defined by social ownership. The society as
| a whole owns production, rather than individuals or
| groups.
|
| A coop is a just group that divides up ownership among
| all the workers, not the society/community. The division
| isn't necessarily even. And the workers don't necessarily
| have 100% ownership between them. For example, there are
| coops with publicly traded stock.
|
| A coop can be, and often is, still privately owned.
|
| If you're definition of socialism is "Workers owning
| means of production" (which by the way, is not and never
| has been the definition), then every FAANG is a socialist
| entity for awarding their employees shares.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| There is a full spectrum of left ideologies that call
| themselves Socialist, so your claim of "is not and never
| has been the definition" is flatly wrong. Collectivists
| and Syndicalists, in particular, are Socialist schools
| that are strongly onboard with worker co-ops (typically
| described as trade unions running their businesses).
|
| And FAANGS are not owned by their workers, full stop.
| Less than 5% of Google's shares are owned by employees,
| and most of those shares are owned by management. Bezos
| personally owns more Amazon shares than everyone else in
| the workforce combined, Meta is well known for being in a
| strange situation where Zuckerberg personally owns more
| than half of all voting shares. Vanguard owns more shares
| in Netflix than the entire workforce combined. Apple has
| negligible employee owned shares.
|
| Your misinterpretation comes from a willful twisting of
| the words "workers" (does not typically mean "the founder
| personally") and "owning" (which is typically understood
| as "having control over" rather than "maybe could break
| the tie between a handful of investment firms").
| triceratops wrote:
| Is a law firm socialist?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| ignore him, he's got hacker news debate bro vibes.
| orwin wrote:
| It is the worker owning the mean of production, so i don't
| think you can do more socialist than that to be honest,
| it's almost the definition of socialism (communism for
| fellow europeans).
|
| You can find some differences between western co-op and the
| socialist ideal (mainly, you still have hierarchy and a
| power structure mostly determined by how much you make),
| but to me it seems mostly academics.
| rybosworld wrote:
| Workers participating in ownership is not what socialism
| is.
|
| Socialism is about societal ownership. A coop is not
| societal ownership. It is still private ownership in
| practice.
|
| How many tech workers own shares in their company? Are
| those companies socialist?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| This is one of those cases where subtly different
| definitions of technical words are being used in
| contradictory ways. A very common definition for
| capitalism vs socialism in Leftist spaces is concerned
| with power and economics, with socialism being when labor
| has the power to dictate the allocation of capital,
| whereas capitalism is where capital has the power to
| dictate the allocation of labor.
|
| A more political definition looking at government is
| "socialism is when capital is allocated for the benefit
| of the collective, capitalism is when individuals are
| granted exclusive ownership of capital to allocate how
| they choose".
|
| Note that a worker's co-op meets the first definition of
| socialism, and the second definition of capitalism.
| Dibby053 wrote:
| >in most cases where co-ops compete with regular capitalist
| businesses they go extinct
|
| After seeing time and time again the success of workers of
| bankrupted companies pulling up their compensations and
| unemployment benefits to rebuild the company in a co-op model,
| I wonder if it's not the opposite.
|
| "Money attracts money", and I don't think it's too crazy to
| think that if everybody had access to low-interest credit under
| the same conditions as the big players, this model would be the
| norm, rather than the exception.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| "Everyone has access to low-interest credit under the same
| conditions as the big players." just sounds like a fantastic
| (in the fantasy sense) recipe for inflation as the underlying
| capital and goods sought remain constant but the monetary
| supply increases. In addition to potentially creating
| something resembling another 2007 financial crisis worth of
| mispackaged bad debts.
| Dibby053 wrote:
| Central banks fought the 2007 crisis by increasing the
| monetary supply of a receding economy, so I don't see how
| removing the intermediaries and having the central bank
| itself allocate the resources in a fair way could make
| things worse than they are now.
|
| I'm not talking about letting people borrow at 0% to spend
| in food and utilities. What I'm thinking of is a system
| where the path from business plan to business isn't
| determined as much by the amount of capital one already
| has, which is what causes the usual corporate structures to
| be formed in the first place: those who assume "all" the
| risk in turn receive "all" the benefits.
|
| That often doesn't reflect the real stakes at play.
| Investors can have a diversified portfolio (and often
| plenty of spare capital for more tries), while workers
| invest 100% of their work on the same company for years or
| decades. The co-op model is more natural but the dynamics
| of money make it more rare than it should be.
| marssaxman wrote:
| That may well be what tends to happen in the large-scale
| economy, but in my personal experience, co-ops crowd other
| businesses out over time because they are far less likely to
| piss me off and alienate me. At this point "co-op" has become a
| pretty strong quality signal: it's not going to be flashy, and
| it might be a little inefficient, but it will always be
| _decent_.
| sangnoir wrote:
| REI competes with corporates just fine in the US, a country so
| capitalist they still ask everyone it they ever were associated
| with Communism before they let them visit - more than 2 decades
| after the fall of the USSR.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I'd love to see more details about the business model and
| corporate structure and how it works. Also, they mention that the
| workers are "liable for any losses." - How does that work? If I
| own a share of Acme stock, I'm not liable for their losses,
| though the value of my share may go to zero.
|
| Pretty interesting idea. Are there other examples as well?
| solardev wrote:
| Wikipedia has a list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives?wp...
|
| In the US, I'm most familiar with Equal Exchange (fair trade
| coffee), Nebula (creator owned YouTube for documentaries), TESA
| (educational board games), Alvarado St Bakery (the tiger-
| branded breads available in many stores).
| bombcar wrote:
| It maybe "liable for losses" in the way that shareholders often
| are - if they want the company to continue when it is losing
| money, they need to "pony up" and invest more.
|
| But it may be a different type of corporation than the standard
| US "limited liability" type (where you can only have your
| shares go to zero unless you're significantly materially
| involved AND do criminal shit).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| If you run ACME as sole proprietorship S-corp in the US, you
| are also on the hook for the losses. If you spend 9K but spent
| 10k, you have 1K less in your bank at the end of the year.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| > The salary differential between the highest and lowest paid
| workers in Mondragon, for example, remains about six to one; for
| the largest 500 listed companies in the US, the gap is closer to
| 272 to one. At the year end, members of Mondragon's co-operatives
| also decide collectively on whether they should pay themselves
| bonuses and, if so, how much. This profit-sharing comes in
| addition to a base pay rate that, on average, is 40% above
| Spain's minimum wage.
|
| Workers are better off.
| usrusr wrote:
| It's an amazing success story (even if surely not without any bad
| spots), it makes me happy just knowing that it exists.
|
| But I do wonder how much of its workability hinges on Basque
| nationalism rechanneled into something more useful than
| nationalism usually is. If that nationalism also had something
| like an independent state as a default outlet, the balance
| between cohesion and corruption creep might shift just enough
| across a tipping point. I'm really not sue that it can be
| replicated (but I'd love to be proven wrong!)
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > But I do wonder how much of its workability hinges on Basque
| nationalism rechanneled into something more useful than
| nationalism usually is.
|
| Basically none, it does not hinge on that.
|
| If anything basque nationalism hurts the proyect more than it
| helps. Many of the workers in the basque country came "to
| disrupt" basque nationalism. So many of the old workforce in
| Mondragon is not basque born.
|
| there was a civil war in spain, most of the industrial capacity
| was destroyed in the country but not in the basque country.
| There was a nationalist movement there, so the far right
| dictatorship thought they had a great strategy. Move people
| from poor spain to the basque country, you utilise the little
| industry that remains and you take over the nationalism with
| people who feel spanish.
|
| The only bit of Basque "nationalism" that helped mondragon was
| that many of its competitors were kicked out. In the 70s and
| 80s a ton of american companies came to Spain, the far right
| dictator hiding his axis friends allied with america in
| exchange for some military bases and allowed american expansion
| in Spain. Basque country having some of the largest industrial
| network was a prime candidate for their location. Then the 80s
| and 90s had a ton of terrorism which scared american companies
| which left industrial giants like Mondragon without
| competition.
|
| So basque nationalism played little part in its success, its
| more like the American boom of the 1950s, everyone else had a
| detroyed industry and they didnt so there was a boom. Basque
| country had the same thing but instead of building coca cola
| and taking over south american countries to sell cheap bananas
| they opened cooperatives. There is little reason other than
| chance that Sillicon Valley is not like that, early companies
| like IBM could have set up as coopearatives and their early
| advanatge would not have been disrupted in the sleightest.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| are there any books you'd recommend to learn more about this
| history?
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Any part you would be interested in particularly?
|
| I just grew up there, so most of it was less books and more
| just personal experience. But there are no few resources,
| books, shows or documentaries about the area.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| most curious to learn more about the civil war.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| There are a number of famous english speaking authors
| that have done pretty good work around it.
|
| On non fiction you have "The spanish civil war" by Thomas
| Hugh.
|
| On the fiction side you have "For whom the bell tolls" by
| Ernst hemingway and "Homage to Catalonia" by George
| Orwell
| usrusr wrote:
| Thanks, the part about that area being an industry hotspot
| after the civil war was completely new to me. From my German
| perspective, Spanish history with all its disconnect from the
| three "big stories" of the twentieth century almost feels
| like from a different timeline!
| mzs wrote:
| I think it's more based on the schooling in CST:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching
| JTbane wrote:
| C-suite salaries are so high in America I'm wondering if these
| sort of co-ops could be more competitive on that cost saving
| alone.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was paid $36M in 2023.
| The company had, at the end of the year, 310,000 employees. So
| we can assume that if got paid zero, the company would've been
| able to distribute about $116 to each of them. Doesn't look
| very compelling to me, in that particular case.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Cool, now combine the salaries of the entire C-suite. That's
| what the parent comment is referring to.
| nullhole wrote:
| Also maybe do it across a few more industries.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Also maybe move whatever other goalposts you can find
| until the Marxist theory begins to make sense.
| hollerith wrote:
| Also keep stubbornly clinging to the idea that organizing
| and coordinating workers is not real work.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It is, but it's not worth the massive sums some
| executives pay themselves.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Haha, imagine being the type of person who attacks anyone
| who criticizes ultra-high C-suite salaries by calling
| them a "Marxist".
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| How is it an attack? What would be a more accurate
| descriptor for someone who appears to subscribe to the
| idea of an oppressed class and an oppressor class?
| enraged_camel wrote:
| This has nothing to do with class warfare. We're talking
| about individuals who make several orders of magnitude
| more money than regular employees, despite the
| impossibility of demonstrating that they add an
| equivalent amount of value to the organization. The idea
| isn't "everyone should make the same amount", the idea is
| that pay should be proportional to one's value add.
| TheGamerUncle wrote:
| Lmao this is not marxism this is much much closer to
| falangism and Catholic Syndicalism. Also answering to
| your comment "How is it an attack? What would be a more
| accurate descriptor for someone who appears to subscribe
| to the idea of an oppressed class and an oppressor
| class?"
|
| Nobody talked about that or said that they just asked to
| replicate the model in more industries, and seeing the
| sorry state of many products, that seems wise.
|
| As someone that escaped a socialist country, I can and
| will have to ask you to take five minutes to enage with
| people comments instead of blindly barking.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You end up with ~$2300 more per employee, assuming they all
| get paid the same and there are 20 of them. Which still
| isn't much.
| skciva wrote:
| Ask the average American worker if they'd like an extra
| $2300 a year. And yes I understand thats pre-tax. But
| even so, thats a non-negligible amount for a lot of
| people.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not diaagreeing, but most of the people working for
| JPM are not average.
| dh2022 wrote:
| For whom $2,300 / year is meaningful is, dare I say, hard
| to answer question. Most of the people for whom an
| additional $2,300 / year is meaningful pay little to no
| taxes. However, a large chunk of these people also get
| Earning Income Credit. These people would lose at least
| part of this credit if their income increases. This
| question I believe can be answered by the bi-partisan
| U.S. Government Accountability Office or U.S Treasury-
| they certainly have the income returns for all Americans.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Stepped tax thresholds are always a problem when they
| incentivise low-earners to keep their income below a
| certain, arbitrary level. However, it would be
| inappropriate to deny employees a raise based on the
| existence of tax levels - after all, wouldn't the
| employees pay exactly no tax at all if they weren't paid?
| The tax is also guaranteed in most cases to improve the
| economy of the local area. I don't know the specifics of
| how it works in the USA, but I am aware of 'buy American'
| policies for federal public spending and equivalent rules
| for local government.
|
| Say an employee effectively gets $10 less money, but the
| company effectively now pays the government $1000 in the
| same period. That might mean new bus subsidies, legal
| aid, development grants... things which make everyone
| slightly better off in the long-term. I think that's a
| good trade-off.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > For whom $2,300 / year is meaningful is, dare I say,
| hard to answer question
|
| There were many articles written on the impact of the
| 2021 Advance Child Tax Credit (up to $1,800 per child
| over a 6 month period). The impact was very significant
| on lower-income families - which makes sense because for
| those earning less than $40,000 per year, that amount is
| more than the amount in one's paystub.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| And how many JPmorgan employees fall into that category?
| sangnoir wrote:
| Glassdoor tells me the salaries of JPMorgan tellers
| ranges from $38,000 - $62,000 with a median of $42,000.
| So without digging into salary distribution at the entire
| company, I can yell you with certainty that it's a non-
| zero fraction.
| andrekandre wrote:
| thats still 2000+ dollars per employee that can go into
| the economy, or help a family get through a rough patch
| no?
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| JP Morgan works in 65 countries, in some of them 2300
| would be a year of salary.
|
| Venezuela avg salary 230$ per month
|
| Vietnam avg salary 277$ per month
|
| Lebanon avg salary 190$ per month
|
| Nigeria avg salary 730$ per month
|
| Pakistan avg salary 293$ per month
| dfadsadsf wrote:
| In all those countries, average salary for JP Morgan
| employees is significantly higher (especially if you
| include expats). Also I think you are significantly off
| with Nigeria avg salary - no way it's so high in such a
| poor country.
| vidarh wrote:
| Nigeria is tricky - I've seen estimates ranging from
| $130-$750. World Bank classifies it as a "lower middle
| income" country at this point, which would suggest they
| at least think the median is <$4k or so per year, I
| think.
| Kalium wrote:
| OK. Let's assume that the rest of the C-suite combines to
| give that number a solid 5x multiplier. How accurate that
| is is left as an exercise to the reader, but be aware that
| the CEO is almost always the highest-paid member of a
| C-suite.
|
| That would turn $116 into $580 per year. Spread out, that
| would be approximately $22.30 per paycheck if biweekly, or
| $24.16 if twice a month. All before taxes, of course. Real
| life-changing money for hundreds of thousands of people,
| right?
|
| The point here is not that spreading the money from the
| C-suite to the workers is in any way a bad idea. The point
| is that it doesn't go nearly as far as we might like to
| think. We might want to adjust our policy preferences and
| goals to reflect reality instead of dreaming of us all
| dining endlessly on the the fat of the C-suite.
|
| Oh, and here's a reference for C-suite comp at JP Morgan
| Chase. Reliability unknown, but if accurate it means my
| assumption of a 5x multiplier is overly generous:
| https://www1.salary.com/JPMORGAN-CHASE-and-CO-Executive-
| Sala...
| hawk_ wrote:
| > instead of dreaming of us all dining endlessly on the
| the fat of the C-suite.
|
| I thought the issue with such high/concentrated C-suite
| compensation isn't the envy (though that may be the case
| for some). The issue is that just by squeezing $116 per
| employee such a CEO can pay herself. Like if removing
| armrests from all employee chairs nets you a few
| additional millions of dollars, the temptation to do so
| exists.
|
| If there was no such C-suite, there would be less
| incentives for pennypinching over basic employee
| wellbeing.
| Kalium wrote:
| If you look at sibling comments, you'll find a whole
| discussion where users talk about the major significance
| to many people of a different numerical estimate. With
| that in mind, I think that for many people the issue is
| indeed greater employee income instead of avoiding
| pennypinching over basic employee wellbeing.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| I believe the idea is you replace individuals who solely
| manage across the board, with the idea management is really a
| part time job. That so many executives split their time would
| suggest that might very well be the case. With that in mind,
| there are many efficiencies imaginable beyond just the
| C-suite. And the employees now have ownership, so they have
| more of a reason to take up more responsibility than the
| current environment where employees are increasingly detached
| from their work, for good reason.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Huh, that sounds like taking yet another full-time job and
| smearing its workload across everyone. That already
| happened with quite a lot of occupations - thanks to
| "increased productivity" brought by computers, a typical
| white-collar employee is now _also_ doing the job of a
| secretary (calendar, mail, setting up meetings), graphics
| department (PowerPoint), financial department (managing and
| reporting travel expenses), and couple other ones as well.
|
| And then everyone is surprised that real productivity
| doesn't seem to track the theoretical increase brought by
| technology. Well, maybe because most of that turns out to
| be replacing legible expense (salaries of well-defined
| jobs) with larger, illegible ones (everyone else doing tiny
| bit of extra work). Feels to me that your proposal would
| end up being just another case of that.
| jancsika wrote:
| > graphics department (PowerPoint)
|
| You started the paragraph with the word "workload," but
| here the load is about as close to zero for the average
| employee as one could get without being pedantic about
| it.
|
| People aren't using virtual brushes and learning color
| theory to digitally paint their PowerPoints, or even
| composing their slides effectively in the visual space
| provided as a graphic designer would in Photoshop. They
| are writing and revising their drafts _in_ PowerPoint,
| often using the default templates or perhaps 2-3 minutes
| of trying out different themes.
|
| That ends up smearing all the costs and benefits of
| default PowerPoint look-and-feel across the audience for
| all these boring presentations.
|
| But I claim the cost to the employee's time and education
| due to them _technically_ having taken on the
| responsibilities of a graphic designer are, on average,
| effectively zero.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Maybe I named the department wrong, but my point is, back
| before PowerPoint, in the era of more analog
| presentations, large companies had a separate group of
| people you would ask to prepare charts and graphics for
| your presentation. Nowadays, you have to do it yourself.
|
| My point is that all of us are constantly distracted by
| random, intermittent tasks outside our specializations,
| which previously were done by dedicated specialists -
| people who could afford to become proficient at that
| work. This is a huge productivity hit for everyone.
| reaperman wrote:
| A few corporations still have a separate department
| dedicated entirely to generating things like PowerPoints.
| McKinsey for example. The consultants are good at
| creating PowerPoints if they need to, but they can just
| outline it or flesh it out as much as they like and toss
| it over the fence to the "PowerPoint department" which
| will complete it overnight based on the
| instructions/outline/information/draft sent in by the
| requesting consultant.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| If we factor in not just C-suite but the entire middle to top
| management, then I definitely think there is something to come
| for.
|
| Though, in the end, the US is extremely adversarial. So these
| people standing to loose out on the competition would do
| anything to stifle such innovations.
| mistermann wrote:
| The US reputedly has the best Democracy money can buy.
| dexterdog wrote:
| So in this utopia does the organization run with no
| management at all or does management all work for $0?
| mvc wrote:
| Unlike some of these executives, we're not animals. We
| won't make them work for less than the living wage.
|
| But there will be fewer perks.
| zbyforgotp wrote:
| It is an interesting question why they don't outcompete other
| businesses.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Most likely because growth is not really the primary goal.
|
| If an organization has any goals besides growth at all costs
| it will fall behind.
| office_drone wrote:
| The simple explanation is that the actions of C-suite
| executives add value, even after factoring in their
| compensation
| skulk wrote:
| shades of https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's really the non-employee shareholders that take the value,
| so instead of comparing with CEO and management, you should
| instead be asking:
|
| "How to transfer ownership of all publicly traded shares such
| that they are owned solely by the employees and not non-
| employee investors"
|
| CEOs and management are simply there to prevent the above from
| happening, which is why they are paid by the board so much.
|
| The boards are the unelected non-employee owners that need to
| go away
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| C-suite compensation, especially stock-based, is often in part
| to ensure management loyalty to shareholders vs other things.
| Worker board membership means management once again has
| competing loyalties, but now _de jure_. That means it is not
| worth it to the share holders to pay the extra "ransom
| compensation", in addition to workers probably outright being
| against it. I would thus expect C-suite compensation to go
| down.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "ensure management loyalty to shareholders"
|
| Everyone's pay is to keep them, isn't it? Nobody is loyal
| beyond being paid.
|
| Do CEO's really provide so much 'extra' benefit to justify
| the premium? Is their loyalty in particular worth paying so
| much for?
|
| I'm just not seeing how 'ransom' is needed. Isn't growing a
| healthy business supposed to be the goal for CEO and Board?
| And if employee owned, it is same.
|
| The only reason to pay the extra 'ransom' to be loyal to
| shareholders, is when they want the CEO to do things that are
| 'not' for the benefit of the company, but only to benefit
| shareholders, who can sell and exit.
| monknomo wrote:
| I think the question is who is the business healthy for,
| and who is the c-suite and up loyal to?
|
| It is possible, and even likely, that a healthy business
| differs in some material ways for a CEO+board than its
| employees, though I also expect there are also overlaps
| oersted wrote:
| They actually have a lot of difficulty in hiring good directors
| for this exact reason, they have widened the gap several times
| and are planning to keep widening it.
| office_drone wrote:
| Coops have a hard time hiring directors because they can get
| paid more in standard corporations?
|
| What a heartwarming story of employees knowing their worth
| and not settling for less.
| jmyeet wrote:
| For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what
| socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this
| where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is
| Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of
| shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal
| government through food stamps to employees and decimating local
| economies to the point where they're left with dollar stores.
|
| There's a Tiktoker who is having the Amish build a barn on the
| land she bought in upstate New York and she keeps calling them
| "capitalist". The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure
| but that's not capitalism. The Amish keep their surplus labor
| value. It saddens me to see how fundamentally people
| misunderstand what capitalism actually is.
|
| All we've done is replace the divine right of kings and landed
| aristocracy with the capital-owning class of the likes of Jeff
| Bezos. It's sad to see how many people champion their own serfdom
| when examples like Mondragon show it doesn't have to be that way.
| mgaunard wrote:
| In my experience, people would rather be employees paid in cash
| whose amount is agreed ahead of time than partners where
| they're paid depending on the company's profits.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I have been wondering if you could make it work in Silicon
| Valley for a small firm. Take 2-10 people that could be
| founders and give them the alternative of being the Nth
| partner. They'd need to bring in 1/N of the profit to earn
| their keep. I think it's doable.
| monknomo wrote:
| I have long suspected a model like this, borrowing from
| lawyer shops and worker co-ops, could be pretty good for
| software. Since software is sort of inherently project
| based, could have a mix of product and contracting, and
| could have wins both on the co-op side and whoever the co-
| op is doing work for/selling product to
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| They already exist, but aren't especially common.
|
| As you point out, the challenge is always around revenue
| sharing. From what I have seen, they last maybe 5 years and
| then break up when people feel like they are putting in
| more than they are getting out.
|
| The productive difference between the top and bottom half
| of the N needs to be less than the extra efficiency the
| coop provides the top half of N. This isn't easy.
|
| Eg top performer brings in 150k revenue, receives 100k
| salary, but can only make <100k without the coop.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Others have brought up this issue when I've discussed it
| with them. I wonder if there's a solution. Perhaps
| something in game theory? When productivity is more
| easily measured then there's little debate - like making
| commission on sales.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There are a lot of solutions, each with different
| tradeoffs. By far the most common solution seen is
| limited Partnerships, where those individuals with enough
| Revenue and Leverage become the co-owners, and those that
| are replaceable are not co-owners but receives the salary
| based on Market rates.
|
| I'm sure commission works well in companies where
| individual basically Works in isolation, but it is
| notoriously difficult to quantify productivity in teams
| and larger organizations. How much value does a engineer
| at Google create? Does a janitor at Google create? Of
| course you can divide the company profit by headcount,
| but that number is largely meaningless. Some people will
| be far higher some people will provide negative value.
|
| For a co-ops, I think the game theory solution quickly
| converges on something that looks like a traditional
| company. You pay employees a market salary, and then
| split the corporate dividend proportional to salary. To
| account for differences in performance, the employees
| hire management too fire workers and give out raises.
| This works well for large co-ops, but obviously can lead
| to a lot of drama for a 10-person company
| harimau777 wrote:
| I think that could change if the workers are not living
| paycheck to paycheck. It would also probably be possible to
| develop some sort of middle ground. For example, workers
| could be paid a conservative salary and then profits could be
| distributed as a bonus at the end of the year.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It could with hierarchy of needs, but what would the gain
| really be of doing so? Mostly ideological. And that is
| putting aside any of the other 'competitive balance issues'
| vs other business structures.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Depends on how much say they have.
|
| If employees have no say in how the company is run, CEO &
| board could easily run it into the ground (but jump ship with
| a gold parachute), then: yeah, most people will prefer a
| fixed paycheck.
|
| But if regular employees are at the helm, company is more
| likely to do what's in the (long-term!) interest of
| employees.
|
| Surely that'll make employees more willing to share in
| financial risks (+rewards!) of the organization. They're more
| personally invested in it - literally.
|
| Let's hope this model gains more traction.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Doesn't that depend on how profitable the company usually is?
| I know plenty of people in the finance world who, if paid
| only their salary, would be searching for a different job.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Socialism is a big tent, by definition that's only one possible
| manifestation. Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive
| with Capitalism (private property + market economy), for the
| same reason mixed-market economy (as practiced by most liberal
| democracies) represents not purely one thing or another. Co-ops
| are nothing new.
|
| > The Amish keep their surplus labor value.
|
| People don't want to live like the Amish.
|
| > It saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand
| what capitalism actually is.
|
| The right to private property + market economy.
| bumby wrote:
| > _People don 't want to live like the Amish._
|
| To the OP's point, do you think living like the Amish is
| necessary to keeping surplus labor value?
| slothtrop wrote:
| Labor theory of value is bunk.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive with
| Capitalism (private property + market economy),
|
| As I just explained, that's not what capitalism is.
| Capitalism is a relatively new invention (~500 years) that
| arose from the ashes of feudalism. Exact same economic
| structure. Different exploiters.
|
| Consider this: markets exist in supposedly non-capitalist
| countries. They existed in the Communist bloc. We've got
| cuneiform tablets describing markets going back 5000+ years.
| Capitalism didn't create markets or a market economy.
|
| This is what I mean when I say that not only do people not
| know what scoaialism is, they don't know what capitalism is
| either. Yet the instinct to defend it is so strong,
| particularly in Americans. That too is relatively new.
| Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example.
|
| > People don't want to live like the Amish.
|
| Who says they have to? We can point to an example of people
| living co-operatively in, oh I don't know, the article of
| this submission?
|
| > The right to private property + market economy.
|
| Then why did market economies exist before and outside
| capitalism? Private property is a core tenet of liberalism
| (which really means "neoliberalism" today). Private property
| in capitalism can be more accurately traced back to
| enclosures, which are really an evolution of land grants
| under feudalism.
| namlem wrote:
| Private property under feudalism wasn't available to all.
| There can be no capitalism without liberalism. Property
| rights as a matter of law and everyone being equal under
| the law is essential.
|
| Earlier partial market economies were in practice more like
| command economies with relatively small free markets in
| certain sectors.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Monarchs and nobles having estates is functionally
| indistinguishable from private property.
| namlem wrote:
| They key difference is that _only_ nobles could have
| private property.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Capitalism has a definition, and you don't get to change
| it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
|
| > supposedly non-capitalist countries.
|
| They are State Capitalist. There's no supposition about it.
| That the governing body is captured by Communist ideologues
| has no bearing. Hence there are now billionaires operating
| in China and Russia.
|
| > They existed in the Communist bloc.
|
| They were re-introduced so fast it would make your head
| spin when Lenin's reforms were shown to be a disaster.
|
| > Capitalism didn't create markets or a market economy.
|
| I did not say so, and this is perhaps where your confusion
| lies. I said Capitalism is the right to private property
| and a market economy. I did not say markets are strictly
| endemic to Capitalism. Although you'll find no scalable one
| in a liberal democracy devoid of Capitalism.
|
| > We can point to an example of people living co-
| operatively in, oh I don't know, the article of this
| submission?
|
| A co-op is not tantamount to a society, it's an employer.
| The existence of a co-op in itself does not jeopardize the
| right to private property, or by extension Capitalism.
|
| This is why the quiet part the zealots eventually meander
| to is "see, we just have to _force_ people to... "
| bumby wrote:
| > _Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example._
|
| Is this widely accepted by historians or is this a fringe
| theory? Marx's _Capital_ wasn 't published until after
| Lincoln's death, so I'm a bit skeptical.
| anon291 wrote:
| Socialism as practiced also implies heavy centralized planning
| to mandate these arrangements and then set price floors and
| ceilings to set production capacity.
|
| The Amish tend to reject social ownership of land so they are
| not socialist or communist by any means. Distributist would
| probably be the best description with any mention in the
| literature.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Centralized planning is only a feature of certain forms of
| socialism. It's generally not a feature of democratic
| socialism or the various anarchist forms of socialism.
| piva00 wrote:
| Heavily centralised economic planning is a feature of
| Marxism-Leninism, not of Socialism.
| monknomo wrote:
| well, also the modern corporation. I think the centralized
| planning aspect is actual orthogonal to the resource
| distribution/means of production aspect
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| What large corporation doesn't have central planning? Do you
| think every factory just makes up their own schedule and
| makes what they want?
| dlachausse wrote:
| The problem is that socialism doesn't scale without force.
| Eventually you'll run out of people who willingly go along with
| doing things for the greater good. Looking at history, once you
| get larger than a commune or coop it all falls apart. You need
| force to seize the means of production, and the leaders of this
| force never give up their "temporary" powers. You also need
| force to get people to do the necessary but undesirable jobs,
| usually resulting in a centrally planned economy, which history
| again tells us results in misery, famine, and failure.
|
| It is also human nature that most of us want someone that tells
| us what to do. Humans consistently organize into social
| structures where there is a leader in charge, whether it is a
| patriarchal or matriarchal extended family structure, a tribe,
| a club, a company, or a government entity a leader always
| emerges.
|
| Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system
| other than all the others that have been tried.
| harimau777 wrote:
| > Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst
| system other than all the others that have been tried.
|
| There are other systems that we've tried which work much
| better than the corporate Capitalism that we have in the
| United States. Most notably democratic socialism/social
| democracy/mixed economies (with the exact dividing lines
| between those three depending a lot on who you ask).
| dlachausse wrote:
| I completely agree that capitalism as we know it is highly
| flawed, but history has proven that socialism is not the
| answer.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Think you are mixing up Communism and Socialism.
|
| Socialism is alive and well and working.
|
| Every major capitalist society today (including US) has a
| percentage of Socialism sprinkled in to keep it
| functioning. Pure capitalism leads to a brutish tragic
| world, so some socialism is added to at least keep people
| from outright starving and rising up in revolution.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Yes you're talking about hybrids of socialism with
| capitalism, which are absolutely the way to go. History
| has shown that nation-scale "pure" socialism (which in
| practice nearly always results in a flavor of
| Marxism/Communism) is even more brutish and tragic than
| "pure" capitalism.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| What would you say about President Julius Nyerere of
| Tanzania? His term in office was characterised by a
| peaceful transition from British colonialism to such a
| 'pure' form of socialism (including a full public
| ownership of all land and enterprise). This survived for
| three decades of almost completely peaceful, slow, and
| steady economic growth before the 90s, when it
| democratically voted itself into the capitalist state it
| is now. In fact, the only war Tanzania fought in that
| period was against Idi Amin's Uganda, which was widely
| regarded as a far more brutish and tragic country than
| Tanzania could ever have been accused of.
| dlachausse wrote:
| I would say that it was one of the most successful
| attempts at nation-scale socialism, but ultimately still
| a failed experiment. As you said yourself the people
| themselves democratically voted for capitalism.
|
| > Julius Nyerere's leadership of Tanzania commanded
| international attention and attracted worldwide respect
| for his consistent emphasis upon ethical principles as
| the basis of practical policies. Tanzania under Nyerere
| made great strides in vital areas of social development:
| infant mortality was reduced from 138 per 1000 live
| births in 1965 to 110 in 1985; life expectancy at birth
| rose from 37 in 1960 to 52 in 1984; primary school
| enrollment was raised from 25% of age group (only 16% of
| females) in 1960 to 72% (85% of females) in 1985 (despite
| the rapidly increasing population); the adult literacy
| rate rose from 17% in 1960 to 63% by 1975 (much higher
| than in other African countries) and continued to
| rise.[4] However, Ujamaa decreased production, casting
| doubt on the project's ability to offer economic growth.
|
| > The most prominent ecological consequence during this
| time in Tanzania was due to the forced settlements by the
| TANU government and President Nyerere. During the time of
| forced settlement, TANU provided more artificial means of
| agricultural aid while cracking down on yield results and
| as a result, production yield began to decrease and land
| became underdeveloped. Land was not being utilized to its
| full potential and therefore, not only were crop yields
| subpar, but the biodiversity also became inferior.
|
| > There were also internal factors that led to the
| implosion of the Ujamaa program. The first was resistance
| from the public. During the 1970s there was a resistance
| from the peasantry to leave their individual farms and
| move to communal living due to the lack of personal
| capital that came out of the communal farms. This led
| President Nyerere to order forced movement to Ujamaa
| villages.
|
| Above quotes were taken from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ujamaa
| piva00 wrote:
| Mondragon's example goes exactly against all of your points.
| It's a 70k workers company ran as a co-op. You can have co-
| ops running and trading between them, the only point where
| capital is necessary is for investments in new businesses
| lines (in the sense of financing capital, not all capital,
| financing capital from banks can also come from co-op banks).
|
| Undesirable jobs are done either way if people are paid,
| there's no difference if it's run by capitalists, the
| government or a co-op, you need to hire people and pay them.
| A co-op would work the same way.
|
| Capitalism is definitely not like Democracy, democracy has
| been proven since ancient Greece to be a decent system to
| organise power, and it has evolved over time to be more
| inclusive. Capitalism has only shown that if left untamed and
| to grow on its own it will only consume more, exploit more,
| and remove freedoms of being a human being in the world if
| you don't pay up.
|
| Capitalism is useful but every decade it seems to be reaching
| the limits of what it can be, no better version of capitalism
| has emerged, every evolution of capitalism has only magnified
| its destructive power. Democracy has done the exact opposite.
| dlachausse wrote:
| To counter you, at nation scale I can list off dozens,
| perhaps even oven over a hundred highly successful
| capitalist nations, with generally happy and prosperous
| citizens, but I can't think of a single successful attempt
| at communism/socialism at that scale.
| kwere wrote:
| capitalism is about accountability and trust at scale
| compared to previous systems that worked on connections
| that didnt scale well across classes / countries /
| cultures. Bankruptcy, is probably the best idea came out
| capitalism.
|
| Competition between humans can turn ugly wheter on economic
| or political fields and "common folks" do ends up as
| collateral victims. Thats unchecked human nature
| feedforward wrote:
| The entire world was socialist from the time of the Lubang
| Jereji Saleh cave paintings 40,000 years ago until 10,000
| years ago. Societies with different classes only sprung up
| 10,000 years ago. _They_ only scaled with force, and the
| literature from 4000 years ago to now attests to this.
|
| > Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst
| system other than all the others that have been tried.
|
| Hunter gatherer bands in the Amazon live the way they have
| for 50,000 years - even prior to crossing the Bering Straits.
| Whereas societies where the capitalist mode of production
| predominant were barely even formed less than 500 years ago.
| Also from the time of the Paris Commune to the Cold War until
| now, it has been racked with threatening crises. Even in the
| US we see self-described socialist politicians being elected
| nowadays.
|
| It's hard to make capitalism sound permanent when it has been
| so impermanent.
| dlachausse wrote:
| That's not scale though. Socialism works great in small
| loosely organized tribes, but fails at nation scale every
| time.
| namlem wrote:
| It doesn't even work that well at the local level. The
| Kibbutzim in Israel were socialist for like 70 years, but
| now are almost all mixed market capitalist in some form
| or another.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Capitalist internally or externally?
|
| Do Kibbutz have highly paid CEO's that earn much more
| than the members, and subject them to pay cuts?
|
| As pointed out in this thread, a Co-op is socialist
| internally by sharing wealth across more of the labor.
| But capitalist externally since it sells to a capitalist
| world.
| adolph wrote:
| > Hunter gatherer bands in the Amazon live the way they
| have for 50,000 years
|
| As much as "noble savage" is a comforting story, the truth
| is likely more complicated.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67940671
|
| https://www.npr.org/2011/01/12/132853997/Amazon-Once-Was-
| Hom...
|
| https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-
| new-...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Technically everything is more complicated. In threads
| like this, people play fast and loose with terminology.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Well, for what it's worth democracy doesn't scale without
| force either. Somebody, i.e. the state, has a monopoly on
| violence, to protect our property. In any case, you're just
| talking about state based socialism, like marxism.
|
| But there are other forms of socialism that do just fine and
| are alive today, like syndicalism. They work because they
| don't rely on a government to exist, correctly recognizing
| their power in industry.
|
| The best years of America for the middle class were when
| there was a good balance between decent paying, unionized
| manufacturing jobs and the customers who chose to pay higher
| prices and get American products.
| namlem wrote:
| Syndicalism in practice is closer to capitalism than
| socialism, and the syndicates are the de facto state.
| sokoloff wrote:
| There was a time when paying for US-made products was
| paying for better quality products (among other
| properties).
|
| As offshore manufacturing got better, buying American
| became much higher percentage "feel good" and much lower
| percentage "get better product". Right now, there are some
| product categories where the highest-quality product in the
| world is not capable of being produced in the US.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Sadly true. There are also major product categories that
| are literally impossible to buy US made goods in even if
| you're willing to pay the premium for it. Additionally,
| many of the "US made" products are merely assembled here
| from foreign made components.
| saalweachter wrote:
| > The problem is that socialism doesn't scale without force.
|
| Eh, not a problem unique to socialism, or devoid from
| capitalism.
|
| The history of labor in the United States is rife with both
| socialist (well, maybe anarchist) bomb-throwers and rich
| capitalists hiring private armies to gun down striking
| workers.
| kwere wrote:
| striking workers usually would occupy factories, property
| they had no right to "seize". If workers quit / stopped
| showing on mass, nobody would have done anything
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Is this really socialism? It seems more like a company with
| lots of owners. I can imagine that the local residents who must
| buy from this cooperative may feel pretty excluded, especially
| if the cooperative overcharges. The insiders can still screw
| over the outsiders. It's just the proportions are a bit
| different.
| adolph wrote:
| > The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's
| not capitalism.
|
| The semantic challenge is that unlike the claimed differences
| between communism and socialism, Capitalism and capitalism
| share the same word, similar to Liberalism and liberalism.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Socialism (communism?) is usually framed as "workers earning
| their full worth" but the dirty truth is that it is more
| "workers earning their preset cut of the pie, which is
| independent of the work they put in".
|
| So while the shelf-stocker might be earning $24/hr, their
| actual hard economic output is much less than this - $19/hr.
| The difference is made up by the salesperson making $26/hr,
| instead of $31/hr.
|
| Many sales people might be fine with this sacrifice, but even
| more likely will not, and will tire of being the ones who need
| to sacrifice.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| In a real company, it would be the shelf stocker making
| $13/hr vs their output of $19/hr, the sales guy making $26/hr
| vs their output of $31/hr, and some jackass who inherited an
| oil fortune making the surplus $11/hr from their economic
| value of $0/hr.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| > The Amish in question are entrepreneurial for sure but that's
| not capitalism. The Amish keep their surplus labor value. It
| saddens me to see how fundamentally people misunderstand what
| capitalism actually is.
|
| wish more people understood the historical roots of the word
| "entrepreneur". americans conflate
| business/enterprise/entrepreneurship with capitalism. i think
| most people would be more open to these ideas if it weren't
| from the misinformation dating back to the red scare.
| mamonster wrote:
| This reminds me of the yearly complaint in French politics that
| CAC40 companies are paying monstrous dividends, to which the
| answer is always: If they are so monstrous then surely you
| should simply buy the shares yourself?
|
| You could just be an Amazon or a Walmart shareholder by logging
| into your Robinhood account, unlike the feudal regime where to
| become an aristocrat you would need to be some sort of famous
| knight, which seems much harder.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Do the CAC40 companies have fixed-percentage-of-profit
| dividend yields?
|
| Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with your
| own money.
| mamonster wrote:
| I mean depends on if they are mature or not, but the
| complaints in France are about the absolute amounts in
| euro, not the %s paid out(for example this year the
| complaints are about Total making a lot of money from oil
| and banks making a lot of money from higher interest rates,
| the proximal causes of both being completely outside their
| control).
|
| >Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with
| your own money.
|
| Well, yes, since as a shareholder you technically "are" the
| company.
| jmyeet wrote:
| First, intended or not there is an incredible amount of
| privilege in the idea that "everyone can be a shareholder".
| An awful lot of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and
| struggle to afford housing and food. Increasing homelessness
| is, first and foremost, a consequence of housing
| unaffordability.
|
| Second, owning 10 shares of Amazon doesn't make you a capital
| owner. If you still need your paycheck to survive, you're a
| worker, subject to the whims of your employer.
|
| The really damaging thing about retirement accounts, for
| example, is that it has convinced people that they are
| current or future capital owners. It makes workers advocate
| against their own best interests.
| mamonster wrote:
| I dare say that Americans not being able to afford housing
| has very little to do with Walmart or Amazon, since it was
| neither that decided to turn housing into a very safe and
| investable financial asset, but rather the government.
|
| The definition of capital owner being someone who doesn't
| need a paycheck to survive is weird. Your average startup
| founder needs a paycheck and he is clearly not a simple
| worker. As soon as you own shares in a company(or a bond)
| you are a capital owner. The question is then how much that
| capital is worth and what you can do to make this capital
| worth more.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| > You could just be an Amazon or a Walmart shareholder by
| logging into your Robinhood account
|
| Many Walmart and Amazon employees could not, due to lack of
| capital.
|
| Even if they did buy stock in their company, I think it's
| pretty clear that is very different from being in a co-op as
| described in the article.
| losvedir wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing actually legally
| preventing a Mondragon-type industrial co-op like this from
| existing in the US, right?
|
| That it's not so common is an interesting question: does it get
| outcompeted by your standard corporation? Would people rather
| generally work as employees than take on risk as owners?
| Something else? I think in a co-op like this, employees would
| still be eligible for food stamps, and there's nothing
| preventing them from "decimating" a local economy, either.
|
| I think this is "socialist", and it seems to be working, and
| everyone is happy, so more power to them. But my understanding
| is since there's nothing preventing people from setting this
| up, the "Red Scare" was not a bunch of people going, "hey,
| change the laws so me and my buddies can set up a co-op". Like,
| what's the actual policy change desired? "Let folks who want to
| run corporations and work for them do so, and let folks who
| want to operate in a co-op do so?" No, because that's our
| current situation.
| namlem wrote:
| There are some large co-ops in the US. The largest iirc is
| CHS, a tier 2 co-op (co-op made of smaller co-ops).
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| The Barrier to entry is probably capital costs.
|
| Probably difficult at this point for enough lowly workers to
| pull their money and form a company, open stores, and compete
| with a Whole Foods.
|
| The mega corps already dominate and can undercut anything
| that is starting up.
|
| Amazon is kind of like a fiefdom where if they see someone
| building a castle in the distance, they can send some knights
| out to attack before it gets too big.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Every part of our economy and government is dedicated to
| wiping out any form of socialism.
|
| A developing nation even thinks about nationalizing their
| resource extraction? Suddenly there's a coup with the CIA's
| fingerprints all over it.
|
| NATO is a foreign policy arm of the United States dedicated
| to crushing any leftist momentum. Hell, we recruited Nazis to
| run it.
|
| We constantly back totalitarian regimes to crush leftists.
|
| At a more local level we do things like make municipal
| broadband illegal.
|
| Our government uses eminent domain to seize property for
| corporate interests.
|
| The only non-terrorist domestic law enforcement the FBI does
| seems to be union busting.
|
| We've started wars over communism.
|
| We had private organizations like the Pinkertons crush
| collective action. Look up Homestead.
|
| It was rumored that when the UK wanted a post-Brexit trade
| deal, one of our conditions was privatizing the NHS.
|
| Every level of our society is devoted to crushing collective
| action.
| jhbadger wrote:
| >A developing nation even thinks about nationalizing their
| resource extraction Suddenly there's a coup with the CIA's
| fingerprints all over it.
|
| In the Cold War, yes, because then it was assumed (rightly
| in some cases, wrongly in others) that any country who
| would nationalize their stuff was simply a Soviet puppet
| state following orders from Moscow. After the Soviet
| collapse, that isn't what the CIA (or American policy in
| general) cares about.
|
| > NATO is a foreign policy arm of the United States
| dedicated to crushing any leftist momentum. Hell, we
| recruited Nazis to run it.
|
| Everybody used Nazis after the war. Both the US and USSR
| snatched up every competent Nazi scientist, engineer, and
| intelligence officer they could and cut deals with them not
| to charge them with war crimes if they'd work for them.
| (Operation Paperclip for the US, Operation Osoaviakhim for
| the USSR). And of course NATO today isn't focused on
| containing Communism but rather the right-wing dictator who
| rules Russia today, and unlike in the Cold War, the current
| critics of NATO are almost entirely right-wing.
| SSJPython wrote:
| > Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are
| fairly paid for their labor.
|
| What is "fair pay" for labor in your eyes? Is it the entire
| surplus being generated? Why is that considered fair?
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Is it the entire surplus being generated?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Why is that considered fair?
|
| Because there is no value without labor.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| When the company takes a loss, do you agree that all of the
| workers should go hungry?
| namlem wrote:
| This is not socialism, it is syndicalism. Some argue that
| syndicalism is a type of socialism, but in practice, it behaves
| more like a type of capitalism.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Mondragon was founded by a Catholic priest and IMHO is more
| accurately described as Distributist than classically
| Socialist:
|
| https://distributistreview.com/archive/mondragon-revisited?f...
| Quarrel wrote:
| The co-op structure is less used in the US, but there are quite a
| lot of significant employee owned corporations (which come with
| the limited liability benefits to shareholders).
|
| There are also quite a few with mixed founder / employee
| ownership. Publix for instance employ 250,000 people across their
| supermarkets and are employee / founder owned.
|
| A recent list of the largest from Oct 2023:
|
| https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Would it be fair to say that companies like AMZN or GOOG have
| "employee ownership" because of the stock options? If so, it
| means many tech companies meet this definition.
| dmoy wrote:
| The percentage of ownership is relevant, as is where the
| profit goes.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Board control is probably more important than profit on
| this one, I'd say
| dmoy wrote:
| Right, percentage of ownership (since board control stems
| from that?)
| stonogo wrote:
| Not really, but technically yes. "Employee-owned" is being
| used in a specific way here; it's a specific form of
| ownership governance. Most often the shares are owned by
| employees via a trust, which the business funds. None (or
| mostly none!) of the stock options available to Amazon or
| Google staff are useful in terms of controlling the business.
| When someone is using the term "employee-owned business,"
| they are generally referring to a business in which employees
| have actual control, not just a profit-sharing certificate.
|
| Of course, any publicly-traded company can be 'employee-
| owned' to whatever degree the employees buy shares. But this
| term usually indicates something else.
| semanticist wrote:
| Most people working for Amazon don't get stock options, most
| of Amazon's employees are doing stock management in
| warehouses, delivery, etc.
|
| Beyond that, stock _options_ aren't stock, and stock _grants_
| to employees are often in restricted classes... they're not
| meaningful employee ownership because they're structured to
| ensure that they don't represent any kind of employee control
| over the company.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| In many tech companies like Microsoft and Netflix, there is
| only 1 stock class and SWE employees get stock grants that
| aren't restricted on vest. You just conveniently picked the
| FAANG company where most of its workforce are warehouse
| employees.
| dbingham wrote:
| But the employees don't own a controlling share. For it
| to be a worker cooperative it really needs to be entirely
| owned and governed by the people working there.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The tradeoff is that requiring all shares be worker-owned
| devalues the shares owned by workers, due to massively
| reduced liquidity. This situation does not necessarily
| benefit the workers since they have an interest in
| maximizing the value of their share.
| bboygravity wrote:
| How does reduced liquidity equal lower share value?
|
| Makes no sense to me.
|
| Case in point example: SpaceX shares are very illiquid
| but also very very much up since SpaceX was founded.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Suppose I own 0.01% of the company I work at. If that
| company is publicly traded, I can sell those shares to
| anyone.
|
| If that company is a co-op in which only employees are
| allowed to own shares, the only people I can sell my
| shares to are other employees.
|
| In general, more willing buyers (who in turn know they
| can they sell those shares unrestricted in the future to
| any buyer), increases the people willing to bid on those
| shares at any given moment in time. (It's the same basic
| reason that you'd rather have $100 in cash than $100 gift
| card for Starbucks.)
| lsaferite wrote:
| Are you even allowed to buy/sell shares in an employee
| owned co-op? I understood that share ownership was part
| of employment with the company. It entitles you to a
| share in the profits and a share in the decision making,
| but I didn't think it was a tradable instrument itself.
| pineaux wrote:
| This is the answer to all the above. These shares give
| you a right to part of the profit, but cannot be sold.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What does it mean to own something that you cannot
| sell/assign?
|
| That sounds like plain old profit sharing, not ownership.
| dbingham wrote:
| Ownership in the sense of governance, not of property.
|
| Worker cooperatives are organizations that are governed
| by their workers for their workers, not owned as property
| to be traded or sold.
| nyssos wrote:
| > How does reduced liquidity equal lower share value?
|
| 1: Lower liquidity usually goes hand in hand with higher
| transaction costs, which means a bigger gap between how
| much the buyer pays and how much the seller walks away
| with.
|
| 2: Time value of money: Suppose some liquid asset can be
| exchanged for $X right now, and an otherwise equivalent
| illiquid asset can be exchanged for $X by, let's say, a
| month from now. $X today is more valuable than $X in a
| month, so no one is going to buy the illiquid asset today
| for $X if they could get the liquid one instead.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| How do you handle companies like AMZN where Jeff Bezos
| still plays a role. Yes, he seems to be busy doing other
| things but he does seem to have a role. And the founders
| at all of these companies are still doing things. Even
| Bill Gates has some kind of role, right?
| burkaman wrote:
| No it wouldn't, see here for example: https://www.investopedi
| a.com/articles/markets/011516/top-5-g.... All Google
| employees combined own probably less than 1% of the company.
| They would need to own at least 50% to accurately call it
| employee-owned.
| Quarrel wrote:
| .. to be too pedantic, but it's only less than 1% if you
| exclude the founders, who are still employees.
|
| (and possibly Sundar?)
| burkaman wrote:
| You're right, I didn't realize they were still actively
| involved with the company. Sundar has 0.01% though.
| dv_dt wrote:
| There are a lot of different co-op structures and different
| aspects of the broad term co-op. Employee ownership is one
| aspect that could be further broken down. Profit
| participation, worker-led governance and decision making,
| formal legal & tax categorizations are other interesting
| aspects.
|
| Stock options in small percentages are a form of profit
| participation but a weak contributor to the question on if a
| business is a co-op.
| btbuildem wrote:
| It's not even in the same game, forget ballpark.
|
| Rank and file aren't really "shareholders". We hold an
| utterly insignificant stake compared to funds and other
| corps. They can take a board of directors and bend their
| beaks all they way back to their rectums, force them to act
| against a company's best interests.
|
| Employee ownership means the employees decide what they do
| with the profits derived from their labour. The company
| itself tends to benefit as well, in terms of stability,
| quality of work life, and long-term profitability.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Co-ops in the US seems to be particularly popular in
| agriculture.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Energy cooperatives are another thing I've seen work well
| here in the US.
|
| A house I lived in got our electricity from a Touchstone
| Energy cooperative[1] and our rate was dirt cheap and they
| even mailed us a dividend check every year. I've even
| received a few checks from them after moving out of the area
| and no longer being a customer of theirs. They had great
| customer service too. They were significantly better in every
| way than the regional monopolies and municipal power
| companies I've dealt with.
|
| [1] https://www.touchstoneenergy.com
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Sounds like my credit union. I call and someone picks up
| the phone pretty quickly and competently.
|
| I got in as a minor, so I paid $5 for my startup share.
| (Adults are $25). They've been giving me a $5 dividend
| share every year for a few decades.
|
| And charge me $0/month for a pretty full-service bank
| experience (not common at banks in Canada).
|
| They're on a North American network of ATMs (Exchange &
| Accel) so I have pretty good coverage out of town, can even
| deposit cash/cheques into CDN partner ATMs. In a lot of
| smaller towns, you can't bank on every big bank having a
| branch, but a good chance of a partner credit union.
| cmurf wrote:
| I wonder if it could work for public education. Perhaps even
| in lieu of teachers unions.
|
| Much more narrowly, I wonder if it could work for certified
| flight instructors. Most CFIs are young, know little about
| business, marketing, tax compliance. And as a consequence are
| often exploited by employers who misclassify them as
| independent contractors only to pay them less, without
| benefits, and still direct their schedules, coerce them into
| noncompetes. A co-op would help protect their interests while
| raising standards, in a cost efficient way.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| One of the challenges of a co-op school is that people tend
| to be "in the market" only whilst they have school-aged
| children, roughly ages 5 to 18. In much the same way that
| student involvement in higher education tends to focus
| strongly on the few years such students are actively being
| educated, which means that faculty, staff, and corporate
| influence in higher educational institutions tends to
| overwhelm student power.
|
| That said, yes there are co-op schools, with the Co-Op
| School in Brooklyn, NY, being prominent:
| <https://thecoopschool.org/>
| Kalium wrote:
| > I wonder if it could work for public education. Perhaps
| even in lieu of teachers unions.
|
| In a very real sense, public schools are already customer-
| owned cooperatives governed by a set of trustees elected by
| the customer-owners.
|
| That said, once you have a school owned by the teachers
| it's no longer a public school. Public schools are funded
| by and governed by the public. A cooperative school owned
| by worker-owners is by definition not a public school.
| Quarrel wrote:
| Quite a few construction companies too.
| xeromal wrote:
| Seems to happen once the founder retires. My little
| brother's tile laying business is going to distribute
| ownership to the employees based on years + skill once the
| founder retires. They're already highly paid and treated
| well (they even have a 401k match which is surprising for a
| little 30 employee construction company). I think it's the
| way to go unless you have heirs that you want to run the
| company.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That sounds different than a co-op. The interesting and
| tricky part about a co-op is navigating entry and exit.
| xeromal wrote:
| Isn't a coop just an employee owned company?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Worker co-ops are employee-owned companies, but not all
| employee owned companies are co-ops.
|
| The point that I was highlighting was that it comes down
| to the Articles of Incorporation and how ownership is
| managed on an ongoing basis. What happens when someone
| retires or you hire someone new.
|
| If I were to retire and simply give my company to my 10
| employees, Nothing would stop them from hiring new
| employees and not sharing ownership, leaving the company
| and keeping ownership, or selling their ownership to a
| third party.
| xeromal wrote:
| I appreciate the extra information and that's exactly
| what I was looking for with my question. Makes total
| sense.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Quite, and encouraged by the USDA, see e.g.,
| <https://www.usda.gov/topics/rural/co-ops-key-part-fabric-
| rur...>.
|
| Producer co-ops generally are at least _somewhat_ prevalent.
|
| Two notable _former_ examples are Visa and Mastercard (they
| 've since reverted to publicly-traded corporations, in the
| aughts). Both were originally formed as co-operative ventures
| among member banks, effectively a producer co-op.
|
| I've looked into worker co-ops previously, and noted that
| most examples seem to have relatively simple organisational
| needs, with typical sectors being food-service (restaurants
| and cafes), publishers, acting troupes, and if memory serves,
| a political party. Mondragon is notable for being an
| industrial manufacturing company.
|
| There are also worker-owned (though not necessarily co-
| operative) businesses, such as Bob's Red Mill (milling and
| cereal products).
|
| Consumer co-ops saw popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, but
| have largely faded from view. A niche they had occupied,
| "natural food store" is now dominated by Amazon through its
| Whole Foods subsidiary, though there are some independent co-
| ops still extant, often in quite unexpected locations. Three
| Rivers Market in Knoxville, TN, comes to mind.
|
| Credit Unions are another often overlooked case of co-ops ---
| both in terms of being neglected over commercial banks _and_
| not being recognised as co-operative businesses.
|
| The Nonprofit Quartery ran a recent article on recent trends
| in co-ops in 2022:
|
| <https://nonprofitquarterly.org/where-are-new-co-ops-
| emerging...>
|
| News of a 2015 list of the top 100 US co-ops:
|
| <https://www.thenews.coop/list-top-100-co-ops-usa-released/>
|
| And the 2023 listing: <https://impact.ncb.coop/hubfs/Co-
| op%20100%202023%20Report%20...> (PDF)
|
| Breakout:
|
| - Ag: 47 firms, $187.6 billion (59%)
|
| - Finance: 17 firms, $39.1 billion (12%)
|
| - Grocery: 8 firms, $33.1 billion (10%)
|
| - Energy: 22 firms, $26.8 billion (8%)
|
| - Hardware: 3 firms, $18.6 billion (6%)
|
| - Other: 3 firms, $13.4 billion (4%)
| com2kid wrote:
| > Consumer co-ops saw popularity in the 1960s and 1970s,
| but have largely faded from view. A niche they had
| occupied, "natural food store" is now dominated by Amazon
| through its Whole Foods subsidiary, though there are some
| independent co-ops still extant,
|
| You missed a chance to mention PCC Community Markets, the
| USA's largest grocery store co-op, who are also located in
| Seattle!
|
| (And just like Amazon, PCC was recently in a union labor
| dispute!)
| Optimal_Persona wrote:
| In the '90s/'00s I worked at the Davis Food Co-Op in
| Davis, CA which was one of the largest full-service
| (meaning not just hippie health food) consumer-owned
| grocery co-ops at the time. After working in the bakery I
| was on the Board for 3 years, a fascinating experience
| (we followed the Carver Policy Governance model, where
| the board is basically the legislative/judicial branch
| and the CEO is executive).
|
| When a Whole Foods opened across town, they shut down in
| less than a year largely because of the
| strength/quality/loyalty of the Davis Food Co-Op.
| robocat wrote:
| > Bob's Red Mill
|
| I think Bob basically gifted the company to the employees
| (they bought in over 10 years, but at a valuation far lower
| than Bob could have got selling the company to an
| acquirer).
|
| Some discussion on the employee ownership here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39374158
| nextos wrote:
| Galois.com, pretty famous in the software correctness area,
| is kinda a co-op right, as it is employee owned?
| nyssos wrote:
| Not exactly. Galois employees are beneficiaries of the ESOP
| trust that owns the shares, rather than direct owners as in
| a prototypical cooperative.
| nextos wrote:
| Sure, my understanding was that Galois is not exactly a
| co-op.
|
| Why this structure? Is it more advantageous in the US?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| One of the main challenges for co-ops is navigating the
| entry and exit. If you had Direct employee ownership, you
| have to buy in when you start and sell your stock back
| when you leave.
|
| A trust with the employees as beneficiaries solves a lot
| of these problems. It also prevents the co-op members
| from taking the company public for a huge payday.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's more or less the same structure
| used by WinCo as opposed to direct ownership
| dllthomas wrote:
| Yes, but note that those are typically neither worker co-ops
| (like Cheese Board or the components of Mondragon) nor
| consumer co-ops (like REI or a grocery co-op), but a
| cooperative association of businesses that are themselves
| typically very much not co-ops.
| vkou wrote:
| Customer co-ops are nothing like employee co-ops.
|
| REI is a customer co-op, and in the past few years, hasn't
| exactly been a model employer.
| eatonphil wrote:
| That's not what I'm taking about.
|
| https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/almost-
| half-l...
| dllthomas wrote:
| > Customer co-ops are nothing like employee co-ops.
|
| And agricultural co-ops are neither.
| Qworg wrote:
| Morning Star is an example that takes it even further - there
| are no bosses and all pay is peer based. They do about $1B a
| year and have 10% of the tomato ingredient market.
| kyle_grove wrote:
| I lived in Woodland for a time and I really wish I had
| heard about them back then so I could arrange a plant tour.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Also worth noting for HN: Igalia is a workers' co-operative of
| open source developers, many of whom are significant
| contributors to browser and HTML renderer code:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia
| marricks wrote:
| I was shopping at winco a couple years back, which is employee
| owned, and one of the cashiers was in his 40s/50s and mentioned
| he had a couple million in retirement.
|
| Very cool to hear, dude will likely be better off than me.
| Employee owned corporations are good.
| astrange wrote:
| Unclear why hearing that someone else is richer than you is
| supposed to be cool, regardless of if they're capitalist
| coded or cashier coded.
| anthonymartinez wrote:
| i dunno why you wouldn't want to celebrate the success of
| others, especially when they're essential workers!
| astrange wrote:
| I don't think this situation is the same thing as
| celebrating the success of others!
|
| Of course in my neck of the woods (Silicon Valley) it's
| expected that all 50 year olds are multi millionaires, as
| all you need for that is have owned a house for a few
| decades.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Because it suggests non-capitalist business models can be
| more successful than generally imagined.
| vundercind wrote:
| I've worked for an employee-owned US business.
|
| It was indistinguishable from a normal corporation that
| periodically grants stock to employees, except other forms of
| retirement contribution were sub-par, and vesting periods for
| everything were LOL WTF long.
|
| Working conditions and such were worse than many places in ways
| that definitely wouldn't have been the case if it were a
| traditional ownership structure with a union rather than
| employee-owned.
|
| They did love to put that up front when selling a job there,
| though. As if it actually meant something.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| big ships are generally terrible places, as a rule. places
| that are less bad are exceptions. but most of the time you're
| picking your poison, yet that doesn't mean alternative models
| aren't worth exploring.
| mgaunard wrote:
| How is it different from a normal partnership?
| badpun wrote:
| Partnership can have employees who are not partners.
| wwarner wrote:
| I visited Bilbao a few years back and the claim then was that
| Basque Country had the highest average income in Spain. Today
| Wikipedia [0] lists it as second.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_lists_of_Spanish_autono...
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| Its the highest median income in that table.
|
| Its second only in GDP per capita because a number of big
| corporations moved to Madrid. There has been a slow but fairly
| unstopable centralisation in Spain, specially since the Catalan
| independence debalce a few years ago, more and more companies
| have moved their headquarters to Madrid. Which has raised the
| GDP of madrid a ton and moved many jobs there.
| triceratops wrote:
| I might be wrong but in most unitary states, the capital
| region tends to have the highest GDP. I'm not aware of
| significant exceptions to this rule.
| namlem wrote:
| >Pursuing a co-operative model is far from plain sailing,
| however. Numerous hurdles exist. For one, membership does not
| come cheap. To join a co-operative, workers typically put up a
| one-off payment of about EUR17,000 each. Plus, just as they are
| entitled to a share of any profits, so, too, are they liable for
| any losses. Commercial pressures can also prove acute, as Fagor
| Electrodomesticos's troubled history shows. The fact that all
| major investment decisions have to be put to the vote can also
| make Mondragon's co-operatives less agile than their conventional
| competitors. And finding financing can be problematic as the
| private capital markets are effectively closed to them, admits
| Fagor Arrasate's Mendieta: "We can't incorporate external capital
| into the co-operative's share capital because we are governed by
| the principle of 'one person, one vote', which no capitalist
| investor would accept."
|
| As with any system, there are tradeoffs.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/8y0mj
| pphysch wrote:
| > Mondragon Corporation is the globe's largest industrial co-
| operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its
| profits
|
| > That sentiment is echoed by Mondragon's 70,000 other workers.
|
| According to SCMP [1], Huawei has over 130,000 shareholding
| employees 3 years ago. So the "globe's largest" claim seems
| factually incorrect.
|
| [1] - https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3173121/huawei-pays-
| ou...
| Collisteru wrote:
| I wonder why co-ops are so comparatively rare in the US, even
| though everybody seems to like them (customers and employees).
|
| It could just be tradition and the effects of history. But then
| why did US history create more shareholder corps while European
| history created more co-ops?
|
| It could be that US investors are less willing to invest in co-
| ops. But then, why? Is there something about them that makes them
| less competitive? Why are they ostensibly worse in the US than in
| Europe?
| jltsiren wrote:
| I guess it's because American culture is more focused on
| property and ownership.
|
| The co-op movement arose as a reaction to industrialization and
| capitalism, which threatened many workers. You could understand
| it as capitalism based on membership rather than ownership, or
| as a third way that's neither capitalism nor socialism. But
| just like socialism never really took root in the US, other
| alternatives to capitalism didn't fare that well either.
| jampekka wrote:
| Worker co-ops are quite concretely socialist in the sense
| that the workers control their means of production. Of course
| when embedded in largely capitalist economy, e.g. banks do
| still have often de-facto control over them.
| kwere wrote:
| co-ops existed well before industrialization, as guilds of
| artisans. Guilds were quite protective of their markets and
| IPs. You had to inherit the menbership or pay a hefty sum to
| enter the guilds.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Guilds were something very different.
|
| They were oligarchic rather than democratic: only masters
| were full members. They were monopolies rather than
| competing in the market: you had to be a member of the
| relevant guild if you wanted to do business. And they were
| not businesses: each master ran their own business instead
| of working for the guild.
| jampekka wrote:
| Co-ops are of course worse for investors. There are no voting
| stock in co-ops, so the stockholders can't squeeze maximum
| profits off workers and consumers.
|
| Europe had very strong socialist/non-capitalist political
| movements in the 19th century. Co-ops were seen as one
| alternative to capitalism, and were a huge movement.
|
| For example in Finland the largest bank and largest retail
| chain are (consumer) co-ops, and in general co-ops are big
| players in the economy.
| terr-dav wrote:
| >Co-ops are of course worse for investors.
|
| What investors?
| jampekka wrote:
| For example banks giving loans.
| PNewling wrote:
| >It could be that US investors are less willing to invest in
| co-ops. But then, why? Is there something about them that makes
| them less competitive?
|
| My, admittedly uninformed, guess would be it has to do with 1)
| there are more worker protections in the EU than in the US and
| 2) Co-ops tend to pay employees better wages, have better
| benefits, etc.
|
| Shareholder corps will try to drive down their labor costs as
| much as possible. Walmart goes so far as providing advice to
| how it's employees can best apply for food stamps, all the
| while keeping them under the 32hr/week threshold that would
| require them to receive benefits. This can provide a price
| advantage against co-ops who are not running these same
| practices. It the EU the labor protection laws are better so
| the potential difference of labor cost is diminished between
| sharecorp and co-op.
| ClarityJones wrote:
| Big-government is also an aspect. Both the federal and state
| governments in the US have a tendency to form wholly-owned
| subsidiaries to conduct businesses that could otherwise be run
| by co-ops.
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