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Comment by WBrentWilliams | Hacker News Reader

Historically, worker-owned cooperatives did get much mention. The ideal of early labor organization was that the workers should own the means of production. This was exactly why early labor disputes were so bloody: the owners of the factories and mills saw the organized labor movement as theft. That is, organized labor was threatening to "steal" what they "built". Yes, the quotes are mine, because my own viewpoint is one of symbiosis.

The biggest problem is not that a worker-owned coop doesn't work. They do. The problem is one of primate social hierarchy. That is, "someone has to be the boss".

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Ownership and who is in charge are orthogonal in this regard. Even if everyone has equal shares in a factory, they are going to vote for what's best for the factory and it's going to piss the workers off that have the worst jobs.

That precisely illustrates my point. See also, Agile as it is currently practiced in many companies. Politics, in any form, is a very rough game.

It's nasty because everyone is sublimating the frustration of their autonomy. Their accumulated resentment inspires an "I'll get my turn" narrative. Eventually it's up or out. If it's up then their narrative crystalizes around an identity which is responsible for the output of their unit. They go into fearless commander mode. AKA: narcissism. Ownership sees them as obsequiously adaptable. Fuck the details. They have the best people. Trust them. Then they extract the costs from those beneath them. They just have to work 1% harder than their unit. Meanwhile work-ethic is attributed to character and not compensation. Thus, under-compensated workers can be shamed into over-working. This completes the cycle with another wave of narcissists and (d)ejected losers. Ownership promotes this because they've decided that labor is otherwise fundamentally unmotivated. They don't care about the externalities.

I think it's a misconception that worker coops can't have 'the boss'. Most successful ones I've read about delegate day-to-day decisions to an executive committee.

The differences between that and management-owned companies are the political tools all workers have to influence decisions, and the shared social contract which says all owners have a stake in the company's decision making (not all employees have to be owners from day one).

I have some observational experience of the cooperative movement in two European countries (UK and Italy), having lived in areas where such movement was deeply entrenched in collective consciousness.

My experience is that cooperation is nice but it doesn't scale. As soon as you reach a significant size (a few hundred people), hierarchy is established; leadership will then progressively solidify around a specific network of people, which becomes a de-facto separate class; eventually, you end up in a situation that is cooperative in name only, with a traditional managerial class dominating an exploited workforce; in the best case, the organization will share a culture of respecting workers slightly more than regular companies, but that's about it.

Note that I'm not discarding the model entirely, it can work extremely well on a small scale. There are also "hybrid" examples (like the John Lewis Partnership) which seem to better embody the cooperative ethos than "pure" coops at scale.

Mondragon corporation is pretty big. Of course this brings up larger questions of "worker owned cooperatives" based on the Roman Catholic economic theory of distributism versus the 1960s counterculture version of "worker owned cooperatives."

I don't know Mondragon, but from Wikipedia, they don't seem to be particularly different from the large coops I know: the majority of workers in their largest operations today are not owners but regular employees, and there is still large pay disparity (albeit smaller than elsewhere).

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