Even when I was living in a very liberal area, there were only a small handful of stores that advertised as worker co-ops. It’s funny too because those co-op stores were all incredibly popular and successful, so I don’t understand why they are so comparatively rare? The organizational structure seems simple to maintain, and has a high incentive for regular workers to go above and beyond since they directly benefit from the business being successful, so what’s the deal? I am speaking from a US centric view, so maybe things are different in Europe, but even with my limited knowledge I feel like they are relatively unpopular there too, but maybe not? I dunno.
The Mondragon Corporation is a federation of worker-owned coops in Basque, Spain that involves 81,000 people and has been running since the 1950s. They have coops for manufacturing, banking, retail and education and they all work together to support each other.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
The book “From Mondragon to America” (available on Kindle and elsewhere) goes into extensive detail about how it works.
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It’s expensive to start a business. You’d need some seed money to start the thing for rent, products, salary and more. If a bunch of people go together, pool their money, sure they might get it to work, but they also share all the risk of failure. Also, who decides if there is conflict? Who has the final say? Not everything can be solved by compromise.
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They’re tricky. While they can be extremely healthy and successful, with extremely high employee morale, they can also be cumbersome and bureaucratic, as that’s the power structure that replaces the traditional hierarchy. So, very much a pros and cons thing, they’re not just exclusively more fun and amazing to work at.
When it works its great though.
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Curiously, the internal economy of a typical “capitalist” corporation is strictly dictatorial, even to the point of Führerprinzip: every sub-unit of the corporation has a manager in charge of it, who has dictatorial control of that part of the company, and is only responsible to their own manager.
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Any given co-op into the hundreds of people or more is going to have noticeably more. There is just literally a greater number of people involved in almost every phase of decision-making. This cannot be made quickly.
Just because corporations are cumbersome does not mean they are going to be just as bad as co-ops in this regard. And just because we like co-ops does not mean we should not try to be somewhat objective about them. They are certainly not simply across-the-board superior in every way, that’s just fantasy. Except at small scales, then the cumbersomeness doesn’t really come into play.
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