Just emailed you about an enterprise account. My biggest concern would be longevity. Our org is an institution decades old and can't have a startup sunsetting on us a year after implementation.
50 karma · joined October 11, 2017
Some already are (co-ops, worker-owned, etc.) and all _should be_ if we want to keep society from pulling itself apart.
I'm sure this sounds very bleeding heart, but as a business owner, I'd rather give up stake in my own business to keep my employees and their families fed rather than opt for automation, firing my employees, and sitting in an empty office with piles of cash.
Business owners and shareholders need to learn empathy and start valuing the community at large over their own narrow interests.
To answer your question, though: I don't know.
The U.S. is an owner/exec-first economy, with labor holding very little political power. "At will" employment and "Right to Work" are inherently anti-union policies and although some states have successfully beat them back (Missouri for example), a majority of the country's labor is still without ways to organize.
It's a chicken and egg problem. A unionized shop probably couldn't compete against a full automated shop (depending on the industry). So until _most_ shops are unionized – which won't happen with rulings like Janus – it's almost an impossible task to organize the working class.
More reading:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/08/08/missouri-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/janus-a...
To me, a lot of the progress we're making is efficiency only for the sake of profit. We should be answering the deeper question of "what's the point of work?" Do businesses exist to make profit for a small group of people or do they exist as privately-owned community pillars providing services and wages to citizens?
Personally, I lean towards the latter. And that's as a business owner twice-over.
We should also be asking ourselves "why do we make the products we make?" Are we building and consuming to fulfill an urge created by advertising? If so, can we scale back advertising and thus consumption and thus waste?
Unionization and employee-ownership are other options for fairly distributing wealth based on effort. A shop that unionizes can vote to automate – or not – and thus control their own destiny. Granted we're not there yet legally; our laws skew heavily in the favor of business owners. So were a union shop to vote to _not_ automate, a shop that fired all of its employees and automated would more than likely succeed in the market.
And that brings me full-circle – is succeeding in the market and being profitable more important than keeping people employed in a democratically-controlled workplace?