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Comment by ShrigmaMale | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I'm kind of surprised more unions haven't taken responsibility for opening up co-ops. They have lots of money to do it, it's pro-worker, and it enables them to own the means of production.

Unions ironically act very conservative these days. They could take some bold steps to potentially create very worker-friendly, worker-owned shops, which would create a voluntary, non-coercive path towards the "market socialist" structure many people advocate.

Even in large industries like automobiles where this is hard, they could probably start doing something like smaller-scale parts production and sell those.

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> I'm kind of surprised more unions haven't taken responsibility for opening up co-ops

Because that requires skillsets they don't have. People with the skills to start, manage and run companies usually aren't workers so not a part of the union, and I doubt the union members would be happy if the union spent lots of money to hire managers to bet on a startup.

> Because that requires skillsets they don't have.

This is reductive, union organizers have management skills that would transfer over if needed. The reason co-ops are not more common is moreso because there aren't the same kinds of institutions that support their growth like there are for traditional companies.

There are film studios that are run as cooperatives. They tend to not have a lot of access to capital markets and don't make the kind of bland, inoffensive to Chinese censors nostalgia puffs that bring in a billion dollars globally and fund the Disneys of the world, so the Disneys of the world are still going to employ more writers.

Because the real title should be Unions Work For Union Members. Unions became unpopular for a reason. Some were (and I assume still are) outright criminal organizations. The better ones were happy to sell out future workers with two tiered pay structures and by rotting out the companies they worked for.

In practice they have just been another layer of economically unproductive people siphoning off value.

Unions are working to fight the two tier wage structure you speak of; are you aware? UPS/Teamsters is one such example.

Because after 15 years the balance of power has tipped from those who sold out to those that were sold.

Ok, so can you explain how that shift in the balance of power does NOT invalidate your parent point?

Because it's still the union doing what's best for union members. The only thing that's changed is what's best for the union members.

unions should work for their members. If a union isn't working for the interests of the members, that union's leadership needs to be replaced. Corporations are only concerned with increasing profit. They aren't interested in protecting workers from being exploited. Some corporations were (and I assume still are) outright criminal organizations. Let corporations worry about protecting their bottom line, and let unions worry about protecting their members.

> ...opening up co-ops.

Word.

IIRC: SEIU, or equally large org, has been funding employee co-ops.

Also IIRC: Richard Wolfe coined worker directed social enterprises (WDSE) to encompass all the democracy and co-op notions.

Having done some (very modest) workplace democracy, and seen the results, I'm very bullish. I read Wolfe's book Democracy at Work when it came out. It was a (very modest) good start. But needed a lot more work developing the ideas. Especially wrt governance and operations.

Enough time has passed, I should circle back and see how things have progressed.

> Unions ironically act very conservative these days.

In multiple ways.

In the US, the transition from representing predominately white middle class blue collar workers to representing all workers has been very bumpy.

Labor in the US would be so much further along today if unions had also abandoned their commitment to the Cold War Consensus when Capital did. Anti labor measures like NAFTA should have been wake up calls.

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