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Comment by Broussebar | Hacker News Reader

As the article said Duralex was the brand use by a large number of school cantinas in France. Inside of each glass there’s a small number used by the brand to identify the mold used for the creation of the glass. For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table). That’s why the CE is holding his glass like that in the guardian article. Beside the nostalgia i think a lot of people support them because it’s a SCOP (the majority of the capital of the company is owned by the employees) [1] and it’s nice to see that another kind of company is possible.

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_coop%C3%A9ra...

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>For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table).

I only knew the version where your age is the number on the glass. For fetching water, it was the slowest person to say "pot d'eau" (water jug) and sometimes put a hand to your head (it depended on the group).

I might have generalized then. It’s maybe something that we had only in the south (aka the broc à eau area). We also used it to check our age of course.

no I was in IDF and the glass gets your age and the oldest or youngest had to fetch the water, so it not only in the south

To complete, the number was also deciding what age we were for that day

I too would like to believe that "another kind of company is possible", but this isn't a ringing endorsement...

Eighteen months ago, Marciano oversaw a staff buyout of the company, which had been placed in receivership for the fourth time in 20 years. Today, 180 of the 243 employees are “associates” in the company.

It has only been employee-owned for a short time. Some overhang from the management style of the previous 20 years is only to be expected.

Durable is really the French household name "par excellence".

You mean Duralex. And maybe not just in France. My British school canteen was monopolised by Duralex too.

> it’s a SCOP (the majority of the capital of the company is owned by the employees)

On the other hand, I suspect that this also makes it more difficult for them to change and adapt.

Why? Most large corporations I’ve dealt with are highly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Good ideas get lost in silos or bogged down in bureaucracy. Whether it works or not seems entirely dependent on whether the company has a moat around their revenue stream, which allows them to be inefficient everywhere else.

For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee control of everyday decisions could actually allow the company to adapt and change more easily. The ones making decisions have skin in the game, both as workers and owners.

If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.

Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?

In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.

Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? According to the article, they only became a coop recently, so having a CEO capable of firing everyone didn’t work out for them.

They took investors, who agreed to the rate of return on their investment. That doesn’t sound like charity.

Now, your example of a CEO that wants to fire everyone assumes that that’s the right decision. How well has that kind of thinking worked for other firms like Boeing? That type of authority structure introduces its own set of distortions, which usually skew towards shareholders, and often not towards long term sustainability.

As a worker, I would be against that decision for selfish reasons as well as for rational reasons. It sounds like a bad idea. If they want to sell commodity glassware, then that’s a race to the bottom. But they’re selling quality, which requires humans with skill.

> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

This needs to be backed up. Mondragon in Spain has thrived for decades. In America, mutual aid societies used to provide health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits before being squeezed out by other groups who were better at things like regulatory capture.

There is a long history of cooperative ownership that goes beyond the stereotypical hippie grocery store. I think it’s too quick to dismiss Duralex.

> Were they a coop when they went bankrupt?

They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy.

The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP structure is this company's last chance, literally.

Their Wikipedia page says that headcount is flat to increasing over the last 10 years.

The coop structure is a result of their bankruptcy in 2024. As I understand, this was the proposal that didn't involve any layoffs and it was chosen by the bankruptcy court. They also got a large de facto subsidy. The fact that they have run out of money again so quickly (the root of the article) is quite worrying to say the least.

None of that changes anything to the points of my previous comment.

Except that these employees had been put on temporary unemployment (chômage partiel) [0] and their difficulties have been going on for much longer than 10 years.

Ultimately all I am saying is that other structures have not fared better than the COOP. Claiming that the potential current failure is because the COOP prevents hard decisions to be made while ignoring the fact that the previous owner lasted 3 years before failing (in spite of the temporary unemployment decisions) is not logical.

[0] https://www.novethic.fr/economie-et-social/business-model-en...

I have never claimed nor suggested that their situation is because they are a coop...

Most of the replies I got here have not even read my comments, apparently, and completely beside the point or just rush to condemn me for blaspheming. It's like the poor guy who dares disagreeing at a student socialist meeting.

Here is a quote from your original message which I have read and suspect others have too:

> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.

These two paragraphs following each other do make it seem like you are making a connection between the two, coops being unpropitious for hard decisions and this particular coop heading for bankruptcy.

That original comment was primarily made up of three paragraphs criticising coops, and readers naturally assume that the final concluding paragraph (this place is likely going bankrupt) is linked to the first three.

> just rush to condemn me for blaspheming.

Nobody has accused you of blasphemy. They just disagree with you. You are not being victimised, and nobody has pretended you were not allowed to think as you think. There is just a discussion taking place between disagreeing people.

> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.

Everyone can rally round in their time of need but that doesn't change the fact that Duralex was struggling to begin with, and once this goodwill windfall dries up they'll be back here.

:s/employees/shareholders, and it still sounds true.

> If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.

"The company" is a fiction. Real parties are, e.g., employees, capital owners, suppliers, and customers (and, to the extent that any of those are corporations or similar convenient fictions, the same kinds of groups with respect to those entities.)

With a pure labor coop (which an SCOP isn't quite, put similar enough that it works as an approximation for discussing general traits), "capital owners" and "employees" are the same group, rather than different groups whose interests are frequently adversarial.

> Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?

Quite possibly, though because of this exact issue (and generally the need to buy out ownership shares of terminated employees), labor coops are less likely to go on hiring binges that force them to rapidly and massively downsize to survive when the conditions that drove the binge change.

But returning to that "quite possibly" remark: is it really possible?

It is an observed difference in behavior, the “quite possibly” qualifies the reason for the difference.

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