https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation#Wage_reg... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation#Wage_reg... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290978631_The_Mondr...
some ideas about how to offer "founder incentives" in workers cooperatives."
From a recent HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37304911
But worker cooperatives is known as "one worker, one vote" and anarcho syndicalists like Richard Wolff wouldn't consider that a worker cooperative anymore.
But also, Kasmir seems to be faulting co-op members for some lack of ideological purity, and frankly, for failing to live up to the aspirations that others have built around them, which aren't their responsibility.
> Many academics and social justice activists alike — maintain that co-ops promise a more democratic and just form of capitalism and even sow the seeds of socialism within capitalist society.
> Co-op members voted to pursue an international strategy to open these firms, and, thus, to employ low-wage laborers. Hence, we are confronted with a complicated permutation of a familiar state of affairs whereby the privilege of one strata of workers depends upon the exploitation of another.
> Compared with workers in the standard firm, co-op members were less involved in and showed less solidarity with the Basque labor movement, which at the time was part of an active leftist coalition for socialism and independence for the Basque country.
But the point of a co-op is not to further the goals of academics and activists, nor is it the responsibility of any co-op to maintain allegiance to whatever movements or institutions that the author admires. If Richard Wolff wants people to vote in the workplace, and wants those votes to mean something, doesn't that power and autonomy also necessarily mean they have the power to disagree with his views and pursue their own success and flourishing? And its success should be measured by the degree to which co-op members benefit, not by the extent that they're an ideological tool for outsiders.
Yes, one might have wanted Mondragon co-ops to create other worker-run co-ops in other countries, rather than subsidiaries. But it's hard to see how that would have actually worked. Frankly, starting factories in China by talking to workers about how important democracy is could have gotten people hurt. And these firms do still need to be able to compete and succeed in a global marketplace in which most of their peers are operating from a purely capitalist playbook. If you draw your ultra-orthodox definition of what a co-op too narrowly, you risk adopting a definition which excludes successful firms of any significant scale.
I've been in and started several worker cooperative businesses. I don't try to do it anymore because of what I perceive as a fundamental issue: the people that are the most explicitly attracted to worker co-ops are also the least business saavy or willing to put the business's existence ahead of ideological values. In my experience, it is a recipe for almost certain failure.
In the same way that anarchists point to Revolutionary Catalonia, workplace socialists point toward Mondragon, ignoring that these are both statistical aberrations rather than the normal state of affairs. The normal state of affairs is a bunch of naive ideologues that hand-wave away planning critical details. This isn't unique to worker co-ops; founders do it all the time, but the difference is that new ventures require flexibility and leanness, but worker-co-ops are exceptionally rigid and fragile.
Generally if worker co-ops "succeed" it's directly because they are being subsidized by similar ideologues rather than business efficiency. The actual product they sell is good feelings rather than products or services.
My funniest attempt involved 2 friends of mine who are both in a league of their own in their field. both of them kept sticking their nose in what the other was doing endlessly moaning that it couldn't be done. Eventually they just got angry that some noob would question their expertise.
It's a little weird that tech-folk are generally ok with the idea that groups can yield good predictions in the context of a non-owner community that is harnessed to improve a product, or in the context of a prediction-market, where people placing bets in disagreement can lead to a more accurate outcome than the participants taken separately would produce -- but somehow think this mechanism will fall apart if workers who have an interest in a firm's ongoing revenue are able to vote.
There is also the thrill of making something happen together. Like barn raising with 200 people is quite different from building a shed alone.