Comment by dimal

6 months ago

Why? Most large corporations I’ve dealt with are highly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Good ideas get lost in silos or bogged down in bureaucracy. Whether it works or not seems entirely dependent on whether the company has a moat around their revenue stream, which allows them to be inefficient everywhere else.

For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee control of everyday decisions could actually allow the company to adapt and change more easily. The ones making decisions have skin in the game, both as workers and owners.

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dimal

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mytailorisrich  6 months ago

If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.

Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?

In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.

  • dimal  6 months ago

    Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? According to the article, they only became a coop recently, so having a CEO capable of firing everyone didn’t work out for them.

    They took investors, who agreed to the rate of return on their investment. That doesn’t sound like charity.

    Now, your example of a CEO that wants to fire everyone assumes that that’s the right decision. How well has that kind of thinking worked for other firms like Boeing? That type of authority structure introduces its own set of distortions, which usually skew towards shareholders, and often not towards long term sustainability.

    As a worker, I would be against that decision for selfish reasons as well as for rational reasons. It sounds like a bad idea. If they want to sell commodity glassware, then that’s a race to the bottom. But they’re selling quality, which requires humans with skill.

    > In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

    This needs to be backed up. Mondragon in Spain has thrived for decades. In America, mutual aid societies used to provide health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits before being squeezed out by other groups who were better at things like regulatory capture.

    There is a long history of cooperative ownership that goes beyond the stereotypical hippie grocery store. I think it’s too quick to dismiss Duralex.

    • aaplok  6 months ago

      > Were they a coop when they went bankrupt?

      They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy.

      The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP structure is this company's last chance, literally.

      6 replies →

  • dragonwriter  6 months ago

    > If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.

    "The company" is a fiction. Real parties are, e.g., employees, capital owners, suppliers, and customers (and, to the extent that any of those are corporations or similar convenient fictions, the same kinds of groups with respect to those entities.)

    With a pure labor coop (which an SCOP isn't quite, put similar enough that it works as an approximation for discussing general traits), "capital owners" and "employees" are the same group, rather than different groups whose interests are frequently adversarial.

    > Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?

    Quite possibly, though because of this exact issue (and generally the need to buy out ownership shares of terminated employees), labor coops are less likely to go on hiring binges that force them to rapidly and massively downsize to survive when the conditions that drove the binge change.