Unfortunately you will find that they simply are not as effective as regular corporations, and hence they tend to be very small, and occupy only a small niche where their lack of competitiveness won't cause them to go bankrupt quickly.
Of course the effectiveness of the existing system led us right into a climate disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Ocean Spray has over 2,000 workers and has been going for 91.
Being a co-op doesn't mean you have to cut yourself off from the outside world.
And this isn't just being facetious, the executive team already sees the sales team as the real value-adders and the developers as merely a cost centre.
Either you respect the toilet cleaner or you don't respect anyone.
As an annecdote, the company handy-man was the social glue that held morale together. He was never recognised for it, but it was always him firing up the grill on a nice day, or remembering your birthday. Everyone matters or no one does.
I've seen so many co-ops fall apart over things like this.
That's a fallacy. There are very smart people cleaning toilets and picking strawberries in the hot sun because capitalism is far far from a level playing field. While not everyone is going to be a surgeon or physicist, there are far more people capable of it than our current system surfaces.
> How do you equally compensate everyone
It's only in a selfishness-oriented culture where someone with rare skills will leverage that scarcity to hoard more of society's resources for themselves. Why should a surgeon make 50 to 100 times a farm worker for work that is equally exhausting?
Why should a star NBA basketball player earn 10 times more than that surgeon, for being born tall and having amazing ball handling skills?
Why should a founder/CEO earn 10 to 100 times more than that NBA star (10,000 to 100,000 times more than the strawberry picker) for a social media company that profits off of social media addiction, undermining privacy to harvest information to sell advertising that in turn is used to manipulate people's emotions and weaknesses?
If your answer is that "the market says so", you are begging the question.
If your answer is that it's because of "human nature", we've made that a self-fulfilling prophesy by adopting a system where "selfishness is a virtue".
Not everyone can be a surgeon -- like literally might not have the steady hands for it. More importantly, you don't want just anyone performing surgery on you.
Not everyone has the baseline genetic gifts + nurturing required to play sports at a world-class competitive level.
The more rare something is that is useful, the more value it has in society. I'm sorry that supply and demand is a difficult concept for you.
Now assume your utopian society where everyone is worth the same. Who does the truly difficult jobs? Do people become brain surgeons because of their gifts and training or because they want to? Why would somebody go through the rigorous education process necessary to do brain surgery if they could farm or serve food? Not everyone _loves_ their job, even at the highest levels of talent & training. Now, would you want somebody to be a brain surgeon _just_ because they love it and it's what they want to do? Even if they aren't good at it? Please.
So your strategy for discourse is to demean and make condescending assumptions?
As I and at least another have pointed out, you beg the question. Supply and demand based valuation is not an arbiter of fair value, it is simple a mechanism for determining value that some people consider an optimal self-correcting "algorithm". I do not.
There are plenty of people with the skills to become doctors and who would do it not to "enrich myself", but because they would like it, or want to help other people, or like the social status of doing something not everyone can do, and they would do it for no more pay than a grade school teacher or a janitor job that entailed the same amount of work/effort/stress. Sure, if one job was more stressful, or more dangerous, our more distasteful (e.g. cleaning toilets), there would be adjustments in compensation, hours or something else to make up for it.
You will counter that the "free" labor market does just that: automatically arrive at fair adjustments. It does not. Because it is centered on supply & demand of skills -- people with rarer skills can coerce more money out of society. Their price will be bid up naturally at auction.
I counter that that is the wrong auction. Imagine an inverted auction: people (with the same inborn skills) bid for the jobs they want to do. So on the auction block is 40 hours a week as a surgeon (for the first N years your job is to be trained, you are paid the same before and after training), and 40 hours per week cleaning toilets, and 40 hours per week working in the fields (please, at least out of respect for the people who feed us, watch at least 10 short videos on United Farm Worker's feed: https://twitter.com/UFWupdates/media). Whoever bids the lowest wins -- just like bids for government contracts. I'll bet anything that the result will be bids to be doctor will be lower than farm worker which will be lower than cleaning toilets -- i.e. the toilet cleaner will have the highest salary.
To me this latter auction is the true arbiter of fair pay. The more desirable jobs (intellectually, creatively or spiritually stimulating, higher social status) will pay less, and the more undesirable jobs (dangerous, dirty and/or demeaning) will pay more.
We have plenty of people with the skills for "brain" jobs. But capitalism and its naturally resulting symptom, the Mathew Effect, ensure that a lot of smart people never see the light of day. So we would do fine without people who will only do work to enrich themselves. Especially when we have a culture that exalts the common good, and gives social status to givers, as opposed to our current culture that worships takers. Those who have the skills to be a surgeon but won't do it unless they are paid 100 times what a farm worker makes can go ahead and pick lettuce. Fine by me.
Just look at the UK or like...almost anywhere in South America.
No one will ever come to a consensus about what they think the economic reward for a particular thing should be. Why should we listen to you about what is fair and how much an NBA star should make? Markets should decide, with people voting with their money
See my other reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28457605
> people voting with their money
This also begs the question. If the system is unfair, then what you say is "their money" is at question. There are also challenges to the notion of any Earth resources being private property. You don't get to assume capitalist principles to argue that capitalism is correct.
Agreed that we won't come to consensus. There is no consensus that capitalism and so-called "free labor markets" are the right way. You preference just happens to own the day. But so once did Feudalism. And slavery. And the divine right of kings. To believe that humanity has now arrived at the be all and end all of economic systems is sheer human arrogance and folly.
Says the guy trying to dictate what everyone should get paid. Also, that is a strawman argument since no one claimed we are at the 'end all be all' of economic systems.
How do you know the person cleaning the toilets doesn't have the potential to be a better manager/developer than you?
Everyone decries the evils of context switching, meetings, interruptions when my headphones are on, etc. People come to this field because they don't like doing people-centric tasks, but people-centric tasks are at the heart of any organization -- especially one operating as a collective.
Once established however worker cooperatives do very well.
One thing I have read is that cooperatives are less likely to grow into monopolizing behemoths because they approximately maximize profit in proportion to the number of workers rather than overall; they will only grow to the most efficient size. I can't remember where I read this, but it makes sense to me (although I'm not an economist.)
I grew up shopping at a Bi-Mart. Some folks have entire careers at Mondragon. Worker cooperatives are incredibly successful; we should really be asking why traditional corporations get so many subsidies and tax benefits.