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.
It is an interesting question why they don’t outcompete other businesses.
The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
81–90 of 311 posts
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 un…
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…
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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#83For 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…
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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#84The 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/articl…
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.
The percentage of ownership is relevant, as is where the profit goes.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#85The 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/articl…
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.
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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#86The 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/articl…
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.
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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 un…
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…
That's not scale though. Socialism works great in small loosely organized tribes, but fails at nation scale every time.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#88The 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/articl…
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.
No it wouldn't, see here for example: https://www.investopedia.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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 un…
> 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).
I completely agree that capitalism as we know it is highly flawed, but history has proven that socialism is not the answer.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#90I'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?
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.