Comment on I'll care when I work for a co-op that is equally owned by all the workers.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 4 days agoExcept shares don’t represent the amount of ownership of a company. Everyone gets one vote regardless of how many shares they have, thus equal ownership.
They do however represent the ability to profit from it. Which is what the whole “paid enough to care” thing is all about.
I don’t much care if I have equal voting rights to everyone else in a co-op of which my share is worth ten bucks a year in dividends if the founder is making a million a year or something (which I’d say is realistic for a medium sized company). At the same time, the founder is not going to just give away his ownership, maybe in small chunks, but not the majority of it.
As the other commenter put it, it depends on how it’s structured. There are so many ways to set up a coop I won’t get into how shares affect dividends.
Instead I’ll use your example to show why your voting right is worth more than how the profits gets distributed. If you’re making ten bucks from your share and the founder is making a million, then the cooperative has to be okay with that arrangement. If you’re collectively not okay with it then you have the power to change that. The founder can have all the shares in the world, they still have one vote. Since you collectively have the majority of votes you can simply vote to change how profits get distributed and the founder has to accept it because they don’t own the cooperative, you all do.
Since you collectively have the majority of votes you can simply vote to change how profits get distributed and the founder has to accept it because they don’t own the cooperative, you all do.
How do you change it? By voting to take away the founders shares? Voting to make shares worth unequal?
I would NOT want to be the founder of that co-op. Imagine investing hundreds of thousands, taking out loans, and putting in 80 hours a week for the first few years to get the business running… and then a bunch of new hires vote that you shouldn’t get shit.
The only way to have any equality is for everyone to be equal from the start. Which means everyone putting skin in the game. Which means it’s inevitably only well-off people who could have a co-op with any sort of equality.
Law firm partners have buy-ins, that’s like the closest thing to a co-op with equality and everything. Except the issue here is that the buy-in grows as the company becomes more valuable, so at one point new partners might not be able to afford the buy-in at all. If the co-op is worth a billion dollars and you’re selling shares at ten thousand dollars and there’s 1000 employees owning equal parts of the company - they’re all forced to sell at significantly below market share. Not a great place to be as one of the employees. So the buy-in at this stage should be a million dollars for things to be equal. But who tf is going to be able to afford that?
GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
It depends on how it’s structured.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 4 days ago
Well yeah, but cooperatives generally avoid the possibility of buying voting power because that kinda contradicts the purpose of a coop.