61–70 of 472 posts
https://www.start.coop/accelerator
Also in NYC is "The Drivers Cooperative" which is Uber but owned by drivers and they're doing pretty well so far (based on the last annual report).
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Also in Italy there is a region where a lot of "companies" are cooperatives, (Emilia-Romagna), I'd say it's one of the wealthiest regions in Italy, I've lived there and was one of my happiest time in my life. I'd say a restaurant owned by workers can work, but as everything depends who do you work with, more than class, is personalities that make the difference, that's why I don't like these kind of articles, I think…
Switzerland has a retail/grocery chain called co-op, I always wondered if it was an actual coop or not, I’m guessing it is.
One thing that I never understood was, if an employees wages are tied to the success of the company, would that not incentivize better work ethic as a whole? That is how it works in the start-up world. You get equity, you have literally invested in the company, and you know that your work should (in theory) directly benefit you financially. Instead we end up in a system where the employee/employer relationship is inh…
You might enjoy the This American Life episode called NUMMI: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 It looks at how Toyota took GM's worst plant and made it one of the best using the same workers. And how GM's management refused to learn lessons from that. I think the current antagonism is something that started with management many decades ago. But now it has a lot of momentum, such that people on both side…
I heard about an Arizmendi customer who went to Paris and was really excited to try real French bread. When she got there, all she could find was horrible like you could find in any supermarket. She told her French friend about her disappointment and asked where she could get some real French bread. The friend's reply was, "Berkeley."
There are a lot of great worker co-ops in the Bay Area. Here's a map from Network of Bay Area Co-operatives: https://nobawc.org/map-of-nobawc-coops/
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That is generally not how things work. Your same argument could be made if they realized the restaurant was very popular/profitable (with low empoloyee wages). Rents have to be somewhat in line with market. They can't just increase rents ignoring the rest of the market. If you are arguing that switch costs are high, so they can. That may be somewhat true, but I know of multiple restaurants in my area that have moved.…
> That is generally not how things work. Your same argument could be made if they realized the restaurant was very popular/profitable (with low empoloyee wages). Rents have to be somewhat in line with market. They can't just increase rents ignoring the rest of the market. No, that is actually pretty much exactly how things work. Successful restaurants get higher rents on lease renewal which is why they're incentivize…
Successful restaurants usually get higher rents because the value of the location increases with the success of a restaurant. This generally means higher costs for the property owner. This is also why most successful restaurants have long term leases, meaning 10 years or more, and major chains like McDonalds can have even longer leases; it's not unusual for an Applebee's location to have a 30 or 50-year lease.
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Switzerland has a retail/grocery chain called co-op, I always wondered if it was an actual coop or not, I’m guessing it is.
It's probably a customer co-op. A funny thing about this is that every kind of alternative ownership structure is considered leftist and somehow "publicly owned". But in a customer co-op that doesn't include the workers and in a worker co-op that doesn't include you.
You can even have co-op without workers (there was one in Stain, northwest of Paris when I lived there) with really good food at really good price, but you had to work there like 4-8 hours a month to be customer.
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Does it? If the rest of the community doesn't want you there, seems pretty cut and dry. There are no "managers" at Valve, yet they fire people all the time. You would simply receive your pay, and whatever your portion of the dividends owed to you up until your date of firing.
There is a lot more legal overhead to buying out an LLC owner against their will compared to firing an at-will employee.
[1]Granted, I'm thinking of European definitions here, because I get really confused when I try to educate myself about American ones. An GmbH is more or less an AG with stakes rather than shares, whereas an American LLCs seem to behave somewhat differently (taxation, for example is pass-trough).
One thing that I never understood was, if an employees wages are tied to the success of the company, would that not incentivize better work ethic as a whole? That is how it works in the start-up world. You get equity, you have literally invested in the company, and you know that your work should (in theory) directly benefit you financially. Instead we end up in a system where the employee/employer relationship is inh…
Wages tied to success of the company, ie profit sharing; how much more profitable could a restaurant become if every employee gives it their absolute best labor output? A few percentage points here and there? Certainly not orders of magnitude. Maybe theres no improvement in some situations at all? I don't see it as much of an incentive, especially if the variable compensation is partly in lieu of fixed compensation.…
Left Hand Brewery in CO is majority employee owned but not 100%. https://www.brewbound.com/news/left-hand-brewing-now-majorit... (2015)
>Because it can be hard to get everyone in the same room, most votes are held via a Discord server. People respond to proposals with a thumbs-up emoji for yes, a thumbs-down for no, and a monocle to signal they want further discussion — a closer look, if you will I would love a retrospective on the role of Slack and Discord as tools of revolutionary politics in the last decade or so. Seems like no matter where you fa…
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340463/disaster-anarchy/
https://academic.oup.com/policy-press-scholarship-online/boo...