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Genuinely speaking, do you really think Amazon will continue to operate if the "workers" took it over from the (evil) executives and owned all the power?
In my opinion, it'll fall apart in no time, because not a single decision will be made to progress work and to solve problems, and every problem will be a vote to people who don't understand the consequences and will prefer to serve their personal needs. Am I wrong?
I think your worries are misplaced. I work for an employee owned cooperative with about 60 employees. I think half of the employees are also owners. There's still a CEO, chosen by the board of directors, who are elected by the employee-owners. Day to day operational decisions are made by whoever is in charge of the relevant department, just like a shareholder-owned corporation. Bigger decisions, like long term strategy or how to distribute profits among employees, are voted on by all of the employee owners instead of shareholders. It's been in business for about 20 years and makes enough money to share profits with all employees regardless of their ownership status. So essentially this business operates like any other, but the profits are shared with the employee-owners and employees instead of going to shareholders or insane CEO salaries (compressed pay structure).
This is exactly the problem with such discussion. We end up with anecdotes. Yeah, I gotta see that company's financial statements, their business model, and their growth, to decide whether this is a good thing. In fact, the idea that it makes "enough money" doesn't sound good good. This kind of "stability" (I'll call it) is either due to a niche field or a dying company that sooner or later will become irrelevant. It's not how the real world works.
And even with this model you proposed, someone eventually can put their foot down. Those employees can sell their shares if they want, and we're all the way back to the (evil) capitalist model you don't like.
Worker coops are a good thing because unlike employer-employee-based firms they don't violate workers' inalienable rights. The justification is a principled ethical argument.
The workers' voting shares should be inalienable and attached to the functional role of working in the firm. The employer-employee contract would be abolished, so there would be no mechanism within the legal system for having a capitalist firm.
An inalienable right is one that the holder cannot give up even with consent
Until everyone fights what "rights" are, which is kind of the problem everywhere. You have a picture of these rights, which are pink and rosy. I believe you have good intention. But you have to imagine an contentious environment where everyone will disagree with you to maximize their gain, and minimize their effort. Any system you put in place and anything you define as rights will be malleable and will be up for thousands of debates, and eventually you'll be the dictator for setting up a system that you think will work. Back to square one.
This is why I said it's opinion. I got my answer. You agree with firing people. Good enough for me for now. Others don't.
I really think you should stop arguing and start listening.
It is a straw man that democracy means every problem is put to a vote. Workers can jointly decide to delegate decision-making to executives and managers. The difference in worker coops is that these executives and managers are ultimately democratically accountable to the people doing the work
So you're saying someone will want to act as an executive, but without getting the executive pay?
Why would anyone want to do that stressful job and responsibility, instead of just being a cog in the wheel and typing on a computer or moving boxes? Who decides who does what? And what happens if the managers disagree with half the "workers/owners" when a decision has to be made that benefits a part but hurts another? Who has the authority to put their foot down for the "greater good" even though half the workers don't like their decision?
The executives can be paid more. In a system where all firms are worker coops, it would be a much more compressed difference between the least paid and most paid worker in a firm than the absurd pay differences we see today.
A manger in a worker coop has the same decision-making rights as in any company. The difference is that they are democratically accountable to the workers instead of being accountable to the employer, an alien legal party. Essentially, workers hold all voting shares
You said a bunch of nice things, but you ignored the core of the problem. If workers hold all voting shares, what happens when they're split on an issue? Who can tell them to STFU for the better of the company?
Another similar question: What if there's an issue that will lead to half of them getting fired? Like, say, a technological advancement? So if work can be optimized by 200% by adding computers, but then 50% of the people are useless then. Wouldn't the workers vote to stay employed/paid instead of saving the company that can be destroyed in a competitive market where better, faster companies can emerge if this company doesn't adopt the newer tech? Who will make that decision?
Like I said, its like workers hold all the voting shares in the company, so these issues would resolved the same way that they are resolve in corporations owned by shareholders.
The rational action would be to adopt the new tech and instead of firing half of the workers, which is socially irrational due to the social costs of unemployment, dividing the remaining work among the existing workers. The extra time that each worker has could be used for producing something else
Like I said, its like workers hold all the voting shares in the company, so these issues would resolved the same way that they are resolve in corporations owned by shareholders.
You're ignoring a key point I'm trying to make: The workers have a conflict of interest, unlike shareholders. The workers want to minimize their work and maximize their gain, which is mutually exclusive in one company. While shareholders in the current system just want to maximize their gain (regardless of whether that's good or bad). So why would the worker strive to learn new things instead of keeping the status quo? Most people don't see the big picture and don't want to read a book to learn a new thing. How many people around you come from work and spend their evenings reading new things to stay up in their job? This is one problem.
Like I said before to another guy, if you keep dividing the extra without firing anyone, given a limited growth, eventually there won't be enough money to go around. Everyone will go bankrupt. How do you solve that problem too?
Better to have them making the decision than capitalists, who make more money for paying employees less
Also who says half of them have to be fired? Can't everyone just work less?
"Better" is in your opinion. I need answers based on concerns and problems that happens in the real world. A fast-paced world.
Assuming the revenue of the company doesn't have massive growth (which is the normal situation unless a breakthrough happened), we need to hire more people who have the skills needed to keep up with the market. So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who'd rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won't be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
Worker coops are better ethically not just based on opinion. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. By the usual ethical principle that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party, the workers should jointly be legally responsible for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs.
- Worker coops can fire people.
- Worker coops can charge initial membership fee when a new worker joins.
OK, at least we agree we can fire people. That answers my question. The circumstances aren't important. This idea that people can't be fired is just ridiculous.
Do you think communities will be happy seeing their friends/family being fired, and not understanding why? This actually reminds me of the movie Casino (1995), where Robert De Niro fires that Texan guy for incompetence, and then hell breaks loose due to relatives not understanding how that works. This is human nature. People will always prefer to keep an incompetent relative vs firing them for a good reason, no matter what.
I never said that people couldn't get fired.
The incompetent relative example seems to be a problem with nepotism
Agreed. It's a nepotism problem. I'm just drawing the picture that removing money from the picture basically makes relationships the new currency. It's basically how life used to be a long time ago, and those who were closer to the leader got better jobs with perks. People will always find a way to benefit and will centralize power eventually. I can't say much about hypotheticals and whether your coop will fix that, but in my opinion, history suggests that we'll just end up with a new system of power.
See you're still trapped within the logic of capitalism which maximizes profits and expansion over other concerns.
So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?
These are all massive assumptions
Sorry but you're evading my questions.
That's OK. I'm not looking to "win" here. Just think about what I said, and next time you have this discussion, have good answers. Maybe you'll change your mind one day and understand why the world we live in is the way we live in. Not that things can't be improve or that we're drowning in corruption. But that's another topic for another day. Have a good one.
Maybe you’ll change your mind one day and understand why the world we live in is the way we live in.
This from the person who is spouting econ 101 nonsense.
This is all stuff you hash out when you create a co-op. But normally you create a co-op, you don't convert a giant multinational into one.
Even giant multinationals have to be eventually converted to worker coops or federations of worker coops because the workers that work in these companies are having their inalienable rights violated as well
I'm not sure I understand... are you saying that your plans don't work on giant corporations, so maybe you shouldn't propose things like OP did?
Well, according to the post, you want to seize the means of production and eat the rich. Sounds delicious! I would love to know whether you're just a bunch of guys having wet dreams or whether there's a framework where this can really work. Tell me how you're gonna seize Amazon and keep it running like it does now.
It depends on the material conditions what specific action would be required. For example, the legal system could abolish the employer-employee contract that violates workers inalienable rights to democracy and to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. Then, the contract could be reversed so that labor jointly hires capital rather than capital hiring labor. Amazon, in particular, has other issues that should be addressed, but we can ignore that for now
My original questions aren't answered. You're just talking about the temporary procedure, not the long term plan, as in the questions I asked.
That's every bureaucracy that ever existed.
Do you think the shareholders are active in problem solving? Workers include basically everyone but the shareholders. The tech guys, the executives, the managers.