51–60 of 311 posts
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.
Important note: yes they go extinct in a market shaped by regular capitalist rules.
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 st…
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.
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 st…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Cool, now combine the salaries of the entire C-suite. That’s what the parent comment is referring to.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, now combine the salaries of the entire C-suite. That’s what the parent comment is referring to.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Cool, now combine the salaries of the entire C-suite. That’s what the parent comment is referring to.
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...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, now combine the salaries of the entire C-suite. That’s what the parent comment is referring to.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Co-op is not a socialist model at all. It's just an alternative corporate structure.
It's the workers owning the means of production, in what way is that not socialist?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The workers own the means of production. That's the only thing that socialism means.