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Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

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Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#331

Post by cjbgkagh »

MrJohz wrote: post #304
cjbgkagh wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder about selection criteria biases, it's not like both types of business were started with the same set of circumstances. I.e. if you flipped a coin on a non-cooperative and if heads made it a cooperative would it's probability of success increase or decrease.

Some of the studies do try and control for the type of business, and the effect still seems to come through. Feel free to click through the sources - that's why I provided the Wikipedia link, because I was too lazy to copy all of their sources into my comment! ;)

"type of business" is not really sufficient of a control to glean anything really. I know economists/social science make a profession out of trying though, it does not mean we should listen to them.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#332

Post by [deleted] »

rcme wrote: post #328
fouc wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone else had to get it off the ground implying what? that "workers" can't start something? Even if we imagine there's a category of people that are suited to be "starters" or "entrepreneurs" that category is still plenty numerous, easily 10-35% of the population, if not more.

Yes that is the implication. Starting something requires raising money and organizing things. Generally, at the start, only a small number of people care to do this work. And once they do it, why would they give their ownership stake away to their employees when they could just keep it for themselves?

[deleted]

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#333

Post by BartjeD »

sudosysgen wrote: post #267
Aunche wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At most places I've been involved in the workers are more careful with money because they are standing together and want the business to succeed. This doesn't contradict anything GP said. Worker owners are careful with company money because they have to be, due to being invested into it. That's a responsibility that not everyone wants, especially when an organization approaches the scale of tragedy of the commons.…

Worker co-ops aren't less likely to expand because of risk, it's because more employees diluted the pie, so they don't have an incentive to grow for the sake of growth, but only if there are significant economies of scale or social need.

Why cant they hire non share packaged employees? Why do they have to shrink their pie?

To me this sounds very annecdotal and intuitive based on what you think you know.

I'd like to know if it has been studied and what those studies found.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#334

Post by hot_gril »

MrJohz wrote: post #317
hot_gril wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Created from scratch probably means someone with a lot of money beforehand decided to do it. The same study calls coop formation rare, and it's hard to control things when you're sampling a rare case.

That's true of conventional businesses too, though. It's not like banks hand out loans to anyone who walks in off the street with grandma's best bolognese recipe.

Even more money for the coop, though. Like, enough to not need other investors/banks.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#335

Post by spookthesunset »

BartjeD wrote: post #333
sudosysgen wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worker co-ops aren't less likely to expand because of risk, it's because more employees diluted the pie, so they don't have an incentive to grow for the sake of growth, but only if there are significant economies of scale or social need.

Why cant they hire non share packaged employees? Why do they have to shrink their pie? To me this sounds very annecdotal and intuitive based on what you think you know. I'd like to know if it has been studied and what those studies found.

Well if they start hiring “non share packages employees” it kinda stops sounding like worker owned and more like owners and workers, eh? Seems to defeat the purpose of being worker owned.

Maybe if you have a vesting period of something. But even then it is one employee, one vote or is voting dependent on something else like number of shares?

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#336

Post by alwa »

erhaetherth wrote: post #319
Aunche wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At most places I've been involved in the workers are more careful with money because they are standing together and want the business to succeed. This doesn't contradict anything GP said. Worker owners are careful with company money because they have to be, due to being invested into it. That's a responsibility that not everyone wants, especially when an organization approaches the scale of tragedy of the commons.…

> How many regular voters bother to read the raw, uneditorialized finances that the government provides Where can I get this data? Does the US provide CSVs or JSON or something?

Yes, and they put a fair degree of effort into making it accessible. One good place to start might be with the Treasury’s fiscal data site [0].

As their plucky little public outreach page [1] points out:

“A regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9

[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#337

Post by sam0x17 »

rcme wrote: post #328
fouc wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone else had to get it off the ground implying what? that "workers" can't start something? Even if we imagine there's a category of people that are suited to be "starters" or "entrepreneurs" that category is still plenty numerous, easily 10-35% of the population, if not more.

Yes that is the implication. Starting something requires raising money and organizing things. Generally, at the start, only a small number of people care to do this work. And once they do it, why would they give their ownership stake away to their employees when they could just keep it for themselves?

Practically anyone already wanting to work at such a place would care to do it with the proper resources. Imagine if you could easily get a government grant to start such a co-op...

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#338

Post by danielheath »

bscphil wrote: post #223
danielheath wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s challenging to retain senior staff at those rates; there’s a limit to how much of a cut I’ll take to work at a cooperative.

I mean, it's usually part of the premise of "worker owned" that there's going to be a heavy reduction in what you might kindly call administrative staff.

Concretely: I recently saw a worker-owned coop offering everyone 60k euro per annum regardless of role (fully remote).

That's livable almost anywhere, and it's a reasonable salary for a mid-level dev in the Phillipines, but more experienced folk are going to find it hard to give up the option of earning 2-4 times as much.

Their product is flaky as hell and it's driving customers away in spite of their unique positioning.

Re: Can a worker-owned restaurant work?

#339

Post by t-writescode »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #96
peterashford wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Adam Smith hated rent seeking behaviour and I think its the biggest flaw in how we do capitalism: the wealthy create wealth by controlling stuff - especially natural monopolies like land, not by doing any actual work. It's parasitic.

That's literally the capital in capitalism. There's not some other way to do capitalism that's not like that: it's inherent to the model and what you want is some other system.

How about rent control?
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