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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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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
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.
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.
I never said anything about removing money.
What you are talking about is called social capital accumulation, which is a problem in any system.
A justification for worker coops is the moral principle of assigning legal responsibility to the de facto responsible party. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer receives 100% of the legal responsibility despite the employee being inextricably co-responsible. This violates the aforementioned principle
Well, I don't think you can use written laws to fight human plans to centralize power. I guess our current system is proof of that. People will always find a way to centralize that power to benefit themselves and their groups.
But anyway. I guess we're getting into a dead end. This is becoming opinion stuff at this point, whether this will work. I'll have to think more about this stuff.
See you're still trapped within the logic of capitalism which maximizes profits and expansion over other concerns.
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.
This from the person who is spouting econ 101 nonsense.
You haven't presented a valid argument. 2+2 is simple, but it works. When someone says the 2+2=10^50, and money falls from the sky, and everyone being lazy leads to growth, I'll ask them to justify.
Take a step back and evaluate your ego.
Unfortunately in the case of econ 101, you are taught that 2+2=5 most modern econ is neoclassical, which means operating on pre-marx economics and just ignoring marxist critiques of the political economy.
Thats a mighty strawman you invented. Workers are going to do the bare minimum to not get fired when it literally doesn't matter how much they work, their income will be the same. When workers are invested in an organization, they do more work.
Either answer my questions, or go away. This conversation is over.
Your only question is "what am I missing" and the answer is an economics education.
But to address your "concerns" you're operating on the mindset of maximizing profit to compete against other firms maximizing profit, which is only a problem under capitalism (until you reach the monopoly stage)
Nice try evading the question. Try again.
Read the post. Read my question. Tell me what's wrong in my scenario and how it'll work in your "well-educated" mind.
If you understand it, you can explain it to a 5-year old.
Let's see what your next excuse is gonna be.
You literally only have one question, the rest of it is opining.
You're assuming a wage labor model and that people working twice as efficiently and at half intensity would result in decreased production.
wage labor models aren't universal
there is no reasoning stated for why production would go down
You're assuming people would have to be fired to maintain competitive growth. This is based on the logic of firms competing to capture market share. There isn't really a rational reason for this to need to happen under systems were the point is to accommodate human need, not to maximize profit.
I haven't said that people have to be fired to maintain competitive growth. I said that assuming a normal/average growth (and let's even make it simpler for you and ignore growth), and assuming a breakthrough requires many new people to hired to work with a new technology, then the people who are there and who aren't interested in learning the new way of doing things, will just become a burden to the company. Let's do the math:
Let's do the 5th grade math: Same output / More people = less earner per person every time this happens
Meaning: If this trend continuous due to multiple breakthroughs (which isn't crazy, we have seen tons of those in the last 25 years in different sectors), then this company is destined to become bankrupt, especially because people will continuously keep earning less with no lower-bound to that other zero, to the point where it's not enough to make a living.
Nothing you said answers this dilemma. You keep talking about general things and avoid this (very realistic) scenario that keeps happening. How will such a company survive?
Thats it interesting scenario, but why are you assuming that there is a significant segment that won't want to learn, especially when they're no longer alienated from their labor? And why are you assuming that the total laborers will increase with new technology, when you can retrain existing workers?
I dont think your scenario is realistic, it kinda reads as really misanthropic
Because the fraction of the current world that reads every day and learns every day is extremely small. Again, like I said before, how many people around you come back from work and want to read technical books and watch courses instead of chilling, or hanging out with friends? I have two friends who are nut jobs like me and work all the time. EVERYONE else is lazy and just wants to have fun after work, and that's in my circle. This spans over decades in the different jobs and sectors I worked at, in different countries. Do you have a different experience around you? I have trouble convincing people to read for 30 minutes every day.
Are you trying to argue that the majority of people watch educational videos in their free time and read technical books and prefer that over hanging out?
Socialist countries are famous for literacy and education drives
I dont think it is reasonable to assume humans will act the same way in all conditions. I know people who just slack off, and its generally because there is no incentive not to do the bare minimum when you are alienated from your labor
Humans will be humans wherever they go.
But to summarize. You basically want to wreck the current system on the basis that everyone will be diligent, reading all the time, just for the "greater good", more so than their own profit.
And btw, about the "bare minimum". No one has a reason to not do the bare minimum as they don't get fired (consequences). There will always be the lazy guy who does the bare minimum, and everyone will get lazier because they'll get jealous with zero consequences.
No, that's a strawman. People won't all be diligent. But they will be more productive in general when they are not alienated from their labor. This has been proven with a bunch of economic data on socialist countries and data on cooperatives even within a capitalist environment.
You're just literally describing capitalism and being like, what about this problem under socialism? The consequences are youre not contributing. Do you think everyone is suddenly going to be less motivated when they're actually able to realize the product of their labor, instead of having a parasite on top taking it?
Yeah... right. People will stop being lazy even though they can be, and will just work day and night to benefit others. Very convincing. I've seen all kinds of people who were put in cushy cushion jobs for decades and didn't learn shit. Never heard of boomers?
Under capitalism, you can do the bare minimum, but a job cut will always hit you first if you make yourself worthless to the company. Is it perfect? No. But the incentive is clear, at least.
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.