Comment by herrherrmann
10 hours ago
It’s not just about hiring people who care to begin with, but caring for the business is much more natural if you’re a co-owner and can directly benefit from the organization’s success. Compare that to the gig economy where workers are worn down, paid as little as possible, and thrown out at a whim. In worker-owned businesses, workers are more motivated and more retained (there are also studies around this, afaik).
That "caring" a coop member has gets prioritized after addiction, health issues, family obligations, and so on.
You still need a mechanism for dealing with workers that e.g. just don't show up. You also need that mechanism for co-owners of an LLC, and so on.
That literally does not address my point at all. By including words like "more" rather than "always" you're basically admitting that there are non-zero circumstances where workers don't care or don't stay, which is all the point I made. You could justifiably quibble with "often", but you absolutely will not get away without a firing process.
I’m not saying these problems are non-existent in co-ops, but that the underlying attitude and mechanisms (co-ownership, more communication on eye level, generally smaller scope) help making co-ops more robust for these situations of “mismatching expectations”. Of course, people might need to leave or get kicked out of co-ops for various reasons and there are ways to manage that as well.
It’s also not a competition about who can win the argument: I think we’re both making our points and it seems like you have a more pessimistic (realistic?) idea of who the workers are. My experience with co-ops is anecdotal, of course.