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What is a Demand Coop

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Re: What is a Demand Coop

#81

Post by chilmers »

vlovich123 wrote: post #30
Aurornis wrote: post #4

> In many existing demand cooperatives, such as rotating savings groups, there is often a trusted central coordinator — frequently an older community member — who helps maintain accountability and keep the interests of the group aligned. Aligned with what? Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated.…

> how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center. Believe it or not, there’s no power structure that is immune to not having a benevolent individual at the center. That’s because most things are norms and practices developed culturally, not codified in power structures or laws.

For what it's worth, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer bands, i.e. the kind of structure humans actually evolved to live in, do seem to be relatively immune. They consist of a group of nuclear families who act together for mutual benefit. Everyone knows everyone else personally, and important decisions are made via consensus. Leaders exist, but they earn their position by demonstrating themselves the wisest, fairest, most capable, etc individual. and can lose it if they keep making bad decisions. And if one person attempts to become too dominant, the others will join together to kill or expel them, or leave to join another band.

Of course, it's not a perfect system, but it tends to avoid the excesses of control, violence and oppression that other power structures can enable. I try to avoid employers, clubs and other organisations whose internal dynamics don't resemble it (aside from the killing). As a result, I've mostly avoided the kind of stress and politics that other people seem to find themselves mired in.

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#82

Post by bonsai_spool »

zdragnar wrote: post #80
saghm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collecti…

You're comparing unions that cover short-term contracts (film production, MLB) with "blue-collar unions" that represent hourly or salaried long-term employment contracts. Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?

> Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?

Yes, it is a surprise! Because we're talking about very educated technical workers.

It seems like top tech programmers are closer to pro athletes than factory floor workers from the perspective of their value to owners.

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#83

Post by yourapostasy »

alecco wrote: post #65

I've seen many co-ops fail. They never address the long-tail nature of productivity, perhaps to not offend people or because most people can't admit it or even understand it. Popular loudmouths take power. Quiet competent people leave. Co-op slowly dies. This negative cycle is even more pathological in co-ops than in a normal corporation/for profit. I hope some day someone figures a better way.

> They never address the long-tail nature of productivity...

Mondragon tries to address this through accepting bounded inequality. 9:1 pay ratio from highest-paid to lowest-paid is allowed (still far below US median corporation 192:1 ratio). They decouple democratic ownership from operational management. They funnel profits into individual internal capital accounts in proportion to the worker's pay, payable upon retirement or dissociation from the cooperative. They heavily subsidize continuing education to lift the long tail baseline skillsets.

However, I suspect none of the above is effective without the right cultural context. The Basque region where Mondragon's cultural center of gravity still heavily draws upon and resides within, laid the fertile cultural cues the cooperative leverages. High competence individuals are rewarded within this Basque-centric cultural context with high social status, reasonable job security, and the psychological reward of building up their own community.

If that supposition is true, then the uncomfortable reality is the dominant, hyper-individualistic American cultural context will always be a poor fit to co-ops. That might be made irrelevant through demographic replacement: everywhere the hyper-individualistic culture dominates, it is currently eliminating families with no demographic end in sight. We shall see.

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#84

Post by dzink »

You’ve described a corporation. Think of YC companies - equity owned by early employees. Controlled by “someone senior”. And if things are going good more friends are invited to join in, multiple companies start owning equity within each other and you back new incomers by directing demand towards their products. The difference between that and a coop is that in a corporation there is some legal standing to enforce the rules and control abuse. In eastern europe where coops had more of a presence the people in power would just abuse the coops - theft, misdirection of resources towards “friends”, pyramid schemes benefiting “older members”… but you couldn’t go and sue as a shareholder because via political connections the entrenched leader and his buddies could use their power to pay off someone and hurt you. The real prof in concepts like this are enforceable contracts.

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#85

Post by mastax »

chilmers wrote: post #81
vlovich123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center. Believe it or not, there’s no power structure that is immune to not having a benevolent individual at the center. That’s because most things are norms and practices developed culturally, not codified in power structures or laws.

For what it's worth, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer bands, i.e. the kind of structure humans actually evolved to live in, do seem to be relatively immune. They consist of a group of nuclear families who act together for mutual benefit. Everyone knows everyone else personally, and important decisions are made via consensus. Leaders exist, but they earn their position by demonstrating themselves the wisest, fairest,…

Pre-agricultural Hunter-gatherer bands aren’t a monolith. Many were radically egalitarian, yes, many others were strictly hierarchical including slavery and human sacrifice. A surprisingly large proportion of them were hierarchical for one part of the year and egalitarian for the rest (often coinciding with religious festivals and/or different means of sustenance depending on the season).

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#86

Post by phillc73 »

CarVac wrote: post #79
tantalor wrote: post #78

Fix the title: coop -> co-op The abbreviation for "cooperative" is always spelled with a hyphen.

Or coöp if you want to be fancy.

It's generally inconsistent. The first sentence is written, "A co-op is an economic system built on the simple idea that coordinating the economic activity..."

Co-op is correct here, but not in the title (Coop). Probably personal taste, but I'd also like to see hyphentation for "co-ordinating", "co-operate" and "co-ordinator" as well.

Then I noticed the em-dashes, so perhaps I'm reading the machine's work anyway.

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#87

Post by graemep »

pjc50 wrote: post #70
Aurornis wrote: post #4

> In many existing demand cooperatives, such as rotating savings groups, there is often a trusted central coordinator — frequently an older community member — who helps maintain accountability and keep the interests of the group aligned. Aligned with what? Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated.…

This sort of thing had a huge social movement in the UK in the 1800s, and parts of it still survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group , for example. The trick is that it doesn't "feel like" a co-op, for most customers it's just a normal shop with an unusual ownership structure. The financial co-operatives, the building societies, fell victim to "carpetbaggers" in the 90s who encouraged members to…

> The trick is that it doesn't "feel like" a co-op, for most customers it's just a normal shop with an unusual ownership structure.

People know what it is, and there are other similar cooperatives too. They have over 5 million members so a reasonable proportion of customers must be members. if you regularly use one its silly not to be a member.

> The financial co-operatives, the building societies, fell victim to "carpetbaggers" in the 90s who encouraged members to vote for proposals to convert to traditional for-profit structures and get bought out by other banks

Yes, that was damaging good institutions for a one off profit from people who joined just for that profit. A number did survive. Nationwide is the biggest, but there are a few others around.

One of the things that differentiates them from shareholder owned banks is that they are keeping branches open.

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#88

Post by saghm »

kortilla wrote: post #49
saghm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job. What would you say are the highest salaried professions in the US outside of management/executive roles that would obviously not be a part of unions? I think most Americans would probably list athletes and…

> If you think that the union isn't demonstrably an effective tool for having achieved huge increases in salaries for players across the board at both the highest and lowest skill levels, I'd argue the burden of proof is on you, because you'd be arguing against the obvious interpretation of the history in the decades following the establishment of the union. The burden is on anyone to make a claim in either direction…

> How do you know the salaries wouldn’t have increased just due to baseball popularity and demand for good players?

For starters, baseball is not nearly as popular today as it has been in the past, but salaries have not decreased. But more fundamentally, we do have a demonstrative example of great outcomes for players with the union, whereas we don't have a counterfactual of what would play out. Since you're the one arguing that a different choice would have been better (or the same), it stands to reason that you should have to provide evidence, because in the absence of either side providing a compelling argument, the only data we have is "things sure worked out well for the players after they had a union".

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#89

Post by saghm »

zdragnar wrote: post #80
saghm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collecti…

You're comparing unions that cover short-term contracts (film production, MLB) with "blue-collar unions" that represent hourly or salaried long-term employment contracts. Is it any surprise that people who work as salaried employees would presume a union at their workplace would be structured and behave more like a "blue collar" union than not?

MLB players routinely have contracts for multiple season, so I'm not sure what you're talking about here. How many salaried engineers in the US do you think have multi-year contracts compared to "at-will" employment?

Also, I'd argue that establishing a union when a profession has relatively high social standing and pay if it seems likely that things will get worse is exactly the mechanism for fighting back against that decline. It's a lot harder to get management to agree to your terms if you've already lost most of your influence.

Re: What is a Demand Coop

#90

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #75
kortilla wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were in charge of all of the union decisions in all 3? That’s good for you but not representative nor possible for everyone joining a union.

Not in charge, I didn’t say that. But I voted in all, while I did have a bigger role in the second one

Did the union do exactly what you wished it to do in all cases? I.e. your perspective carried every single vote? That is the claim I was disputing. For the vast majority of union workers, this will not be the case. Even if it was true for you, it's not true for most.
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