This is tangentially related at best but I always found it amusing that a forum for founders and populated mainly by pampered white-collar workers happens to be one of the hot-spots of revolutionary sentiment in the interweb, very ironic.
The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
271–280 of 311 posts
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unclear why hearing that someone else is richer than you is supposed to be cool, regardless of if they're capitalist coded or cashier coded.
Because it suggests non-capitalist business models can be more successful than generally imagined.
I think this is already well known due to the existence of landlords, who are pre-capitalist. Although most people don't think of farmers or California retirees as belonging to this class, which they probably should.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Energy cooperatives are another thing I've seen work well here in the US. A house I lived in got our electricity from a Touchstone Energy cooperative[1] and our rate was dirt cheap and they even mailed us a dividend check every year. I've even received a few checks from them after moving out of the area and no longer being a customer of theirs. They had great customer service too. They were significantly better in ev…
Sounds like my credit union. I call and someone picks up the phone pretty quickly and competently. I got in as a minor, so I paid $5 for my startup share. (Adults are $25). They’ve been giving me a $5 dividend share every year for a few decades. And charge me $0/month for a pretty full-service bank experience (not common at banks in Canada). They’re on a North American network of ATMs (Exchange & Accel) so I have pre…
Which one?
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What large corporation doesn't have central planning? Do you think every factory just makes up their own schedule and makes what they want?
To be clear, I'm usually against large corporations as well, because of this very point. Especially, when they -- as in America and many other non-socialist states -- use their lobbying power to capture the market via regulation.
However, there still is a fundamental difference between centralized corporate planning and centralized planning by the monetary authority. Corporations have to deal with market supply/demand, and we've seen enough examples of large companies simply going bankrupt to rest assured that large corporations are not invincible.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heavily centralised economic planning is a feature of Marxism-Leninism, not of Socialism.
well, also the modern corporation. I think the centralized planning aspect is actual orthogonal to the resource distribution/means of production aspect
The modern corporation is in no way able to mandate the corporate structure of other corporations.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#276The 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’ve worked for an employee-owned US business. It was indistinguishable from a normal corporation that periodically grants stock to employees, except other forms of retirement contribution were sub-par, and vesting periods for everything were LOL WTF long. Working conditions and such were worse than many places in ways that definitely wouldn’t have been the case if it were a traditional ownership structure with a uni…
Which one? As with all things, there is a lot of variation. There will always be good places and bad. The question is whether they are better on average.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
between the microschool and ESA movements going on right now, there will likely be many publicly-funded & worker-owned schools popping up over the next few years (amongst other much stranger hybrids).
In many jurisdictions, a teacher co-op can already obtain a charter to have an "open to the public, funded by the public, and accountable to the public" charter school. If we're going to be pedantic I think that would fit your funded+governed definition. owned+operatred might be closer to what you are gesturing at though, or perhaps local democratic oversight? Regardless, the old public/parochial types of school categorization is not nearly nuanced enough to be particularly useful for where things are already, let alone soon headed.
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#278The 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.
Employee ownership can't exist if its a publicly traded company. The co-op model is literal ownership of direction of the company, not just financial ownership. Most publicly traded companies aren't anywhere close to employee owned even though they may grant stock to employees. Those employees have no say on the company direction (see latest news about Google firing employees for protesting).
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Consumer co-ops saw popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, but have largely faded from view. A niche they had occupied, "natural food store" is now dominated by Amazon through its Whole Foods subsidiary, though there are some independent co-ops still extant, You missed a chance to mention PCC Community Markets, the USA's largest grocery store co-op, who are also located in Seattle! (And just like Amazon, PCC was recent…
In the '90s/'00s I worked at the Davis Food Co-Op in Davis, CA which was one of the largest full-service (meaning not just hippie health food) consumer-owned grocery co-ops at the time. After working in the bakery I was on the Board for 3 years, a fascinating experience (we followed the Carver Policy Governance model, where the board is basically the legislative/judicial branch and the CEO is executive). When a Whole…
And DFCO still exists, which relieves me to find:
https://davisfood.coop/>
Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op
#280The 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’ve worked for an employee-owned US business. It was indistinguishable from a normal corporation that periodically grants stock to employees, except other forms of retirement contribution were sub-par, and vesting periods for everything were LOL WTF long. Working conditions and such were worse than many places in ways that definitely wouldn’t have been the case if it were a traditional ownership structure with a uni…
As an employee-owned business, you had a say in this. How did the discussion go ? What were the arguments for and against those decisions ?