Earlier quoted context omitted.
If employees are more motivated, one would expect a greater level of employee productivity. So by the metrics of productivity, productivity growth, and most of the metrics used to measure corporate performance. The obvious response, of course, is that none of these metrics matter because they only apply to traditionally structured highly inequitable corporations. There's a lot of truth to this! Yet it perhaps attempt…
> by financial metrics. There are three stakeholders in any company: * The owners (stockholders) * Employees * Customers When a company makes profit (eg, they manufacture a mattress for $500 thats worth $1000), the profit is divided between those three groups of people. How the money gets divided depends on the relative power those groups hold. - In a market with lots of competition, the price goes down and the custo…
Fortunately, I think this is addressable. Cooperatives still have owners, be they employees or customers. The structure works by merging two of the three legs you sketch out. For worker-owned cooperatives, it should still be possible to evaluate how effectively they return profits to owners. You just have to evaluate it a little differently, perhaps by classing worker pay as dividends (or maybe the premium over non-coop competition).
Plus, you can look at things like their offerings and the cost or quality thereof. I don't know anyone who goes to Rainbow Grocery Coop for reasonable prices.
To recap, you're absolutely right. Coops are not optimizing for returning profits to uninvolved investor/owners. Instead, they are optimizing for returning profits to actively involved who act as one of the active groups above. As a result, I would think that metrics for evaluating a business could still be calculated and examined for a enterprise. After all, cooperative enterprises are still businesses.