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?
Is a law firm socialist?
The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
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Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#182Co-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.
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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Co-ops in the US seems to be particularly popular in agriculture.
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…
> 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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. E…
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.
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
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#185The 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…
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
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#186The 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…
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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#187For 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…
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…
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Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#188The 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.
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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 leftis…
>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.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#190The 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.
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.