We need to have a lot more discussion about a longer term path towards becoming a worker cooperative. And providing support to get there.
There are details around financing, legal structure, startup vs existing, decision making, and more that have to get solved. This stuff takes time and in some cases a certain scale.
🧵 1.
🧵 2.
Just take the simple scenario where you have to remove a worker because they did something unethical.
At a certain scale, this is not legally reasonable. A 2-person company cannot be written so one person can oust the other one. Instead the business disbands. So at what scale can the group be legally protected? 3? 4? 5? 10?
Alternatively, it can become onerous to let people vote because the business needs protected.
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There has to be some middle ground to learn while still having proper legal protections in place.
In the meantime, all the workers should be actively involved in running the business democratically.
I suspect a lot of worker coop startups have these kind of gates, but it’s not talked about much.
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Another area is capital funding. Funding could be debt or capital, and it could be from the workers or outside sources.
So we should be talking about how to structure funding so there is a return that doesn’t steal the surplus from the workers.
I think this would be a good discussion for any business. In my industry of consulting, capital should get very little return. But what about a high tech manufacturing worker coop? Some investments need a risk-adjusted ROI.
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I’m not a fan of only worker owners getting patronage. That seems like a way to feel like there’s still two classes of workers.
Every worker should get some profit share.
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Probably the easiest way to start towards a worker coop is decision making. Get everyone involved. Remove organizational hierarchies that are pointless. Give individual responsibility to autonomously make small decisions.
The stupidest part of capitalism is it puts all decision making authority in the hands of those who invested capital. Decisions should be made by workers who have knowledge and perspective.
Joel Leichty