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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry. In most companies, the difference between workers and owners is that the owners provided the capital to get things started.

A factory that builds modern tractors is a pretty huge investment. It’s very large and has a ton of very expensive robotics. It also has a huge supply chain that delivers a wide variety of parts to the factory for final assembly.

A factory worker, while a lot more skilled than a day labourer working on a farm, does not have access to the kind of capital needed to start a big factory. So how does it happen? The people who have the billions of dollars in capital needed to start the factory aren’t just going to give shares to workers they hire.

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> It’s very difficult to start a worker cooperative in a capital-intensive industry

some of the most successful Danish agricultural companies started out as / are cooperatives.

Very difficult but not impossible. Looks like some of those co-ops go back to the 1700s.

So that provides one possible solution to the problem: start small with no capital and grow over a period of centuries to become a large co-op.

But how do you achieve it today? How do you take a bunch of workers and start a co-op factory that can compete with John Deere?

Credit/VC? Or you start a co-op dairy / farm / repair shop and work for centuries towards arriving at where JD is today (by which time big corps would have moved a few centuries ahead).

Credit is probably the only way. But I don’t see regular banks jumping at the chance to invest in worker co-ops. Maybe a credit union?

VC doesn’t work. Investors want equity for their money.

VC works plenty well. It's a business deal. 100% of a $0 business is $0, so in exchange for enough money to jump start the business that you don't have the funding for, you give up some equity so that in the eventuality that you're successful supplanting John Deere, your investors get paid out. That's how the system works.

No, it doesn't work. If you let VC invest then you cease to be a worker co-op, you become a regular business.

Worker co-ops have only one class of member: worker-owners. People who do both the day-to-day work and are part owners of the business. Unless the VC people are willing to show up and start punching the clock like everybody else, they are a different class: owners who don't work. Worker co-ops disallow that class of membership by definition.

So select for investors who can stomach a specified return, so the company doesn't have to IPO, but can instead buy them out. After the coop is able to generate revenue to and is able to buy out the initial investor's initial investment, and give them a return between 10 and 100x, it reverts to being a traditional coop.

So the solution is to invent a time machine, and go back in time to the days before factories (or internal combustion engines) were invented and stuff was manufactured (with "man" coming from Latin for "hand") by hand in cottages, and start your co-op then.

no, the point is they built their own diary factories

I was under the impression that tractor manufacturing was down to bolting together bought in components at this point, such as the various Turkish Perkins engine + ZF gearbox + Carrero front axle + random cab companies cab, with a bit of fabrication to make parts to hold it together. A coop building a highly repairable tractor could make this their value proposition by publishing the diagrams for the fabricated parts, and the full list of parts they bought. There's little reason that a fairly normal fabrication shop couldn't be making tractors, and making them competitively with mainline manufacturers

> There's little reason that a fairly normal fabrication shop couldn't be making tractors, and making them competitively with mainline manufacturers

Economies of scale.

We don't live in a fantasy land where things work a certain way just because it would be nice if they did.

To add to that: if I'm purchasing a hugely expensive piece of capital equipment that my business depends on, it's nice that I can repair it myself when I have downtime, but if I need it up and running tomorrow, it's probably worth it to bring in the repair tech who does it day in, day out and can get it done a lot faster than me.

That local fab shop would now have to provide 24-hour on-call service, which is a completely different business.

> it's probably worth it to bring in the repair tech who does it day in, day out and can get it done a lot faster than me.

Indeed, and that is cheaper than keeping a guy on staff that can fix your equipment.

The biggest farmers I know keep someone on staff. The next tier down use outside repair services. And the smallest guys (I am a small time farmer, emphasis on small) repair their own stuff.

So in the context of myself and my own needs right to repair is crucial. But I can argue for the right to repair in general as well: Flexibility is key, in light of creaky supply chains.

no, there are loads of mechanics anywhere that will happily work on things, they are simply prevented from working on many aspects of modern vehicles because it is made impossible by the manufacturers

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