Comment on You don’t have to be Marion Delgado to know which way the wind blows.
sobchak@programming.dev 18 hours ago
Cool project.
I’m confused about the “shares” though. Workers have to pay to join the company? Different workers have different amounts of ownership?
I’m not sure I’m convinced that the strict hierarchies you propose are needed. I’m not sure if there needs to be a single person (or 2?) at the top vs a smaller representative board/council. Not sure if democracy is needed vs just randomly rotating people through a council (would prevent popularity contests, cult-like dynamics, corruption). I seem to recall hearing about some successful companies that were pretty flat and non-rigid where workers would dynamically create and dissolve teams around products/initiatives (I think early Valve was kinda like that; but I guess they still had execs).
Juniperus@infosec.pub 13 hours ago
Hi! Thanks for your feedback.
The original idea for the shares was to only have an “Equal Ownership Share” but I had to change that to 1000 shares of common stock to fit it into the legal definition of a C-corporation. The software will still report the shares collectively as an EOS.
For buying in, I had to reconcile a few things. If you just have “membership” as your mechanism, then what happens if I join the co-op today and tomorrow the whole company gets sold off? Do I get an equal share of the cash? Because that doesn’t seem very fair. Also seems kind of off that someone coming into a company would have full voting rights on day one, it just doesn’t make sense to me that they could change the direction of the company so fast. So IMO you have to have a reasonable system for establishing ownership and trust with the person.
The hard limit of 1000 shares coupled with the fact that they are fixed at “book value” means that nobody can gain control of the company in a hostile takeover, and makes it a lot easier to buy in since they don’t float on speculation. New members will buy and/or be awarded their shares over a “provisional period” as part of their compensation package. The length of the provisional period is set by vote, so it’s up to the members how fast they want to onboard new people. If new people aren’t seeing their shares go up, it’s a problem.
I haven’t written the Bylaws yet but they will establish term limits for all officers, so it’s not like somebody could sit on the CEO position for 30 years.
I’d be interested in hearing what cooperative you know about, as I’m always looking for success stories.
My favorite co-op so far is Mondragon Assembly, which is led by a CEO named Peter Szepanski. They make advanced equipment for manufacturing lines (solar panels and batteries), so they are the best example I’ve seen of a high-tech global co-op. I don’t know what the rest of their management structure is like, but I would imagine they have managers and project leads, at least.
It’s important to note though, that although they make that specialized equipment, as far as I know they do not operate any of those manufacturing lines themselves. Having an entire factory is quite a complicated endeavor, especially when you end with with many different jobs around the facility that need to interact.
As far as the hierarchical management, I included them based on some research that was done into a wind farm installation firm. The short take is that the hierarchy allows structured information sharing and delegation of authority to “subject matter experts” in a way that is far more effective than a flat structure or a council. I will also point out that my model includes a Board of Directors who are the elected council, so it’s not just a top-down model.
I wanted to limit the length of the post for readability but the details really are in the attached documents. I would suggest spending time with the philosophy document if you want to get into more details. I promise I wrote it myself and not with AI.
Anyway, it’s a collaborative effort so feel free to add your ideas or take my ideas as an influence to make something new, make your councils happen! Now is the time to try new ways to cooperate with each other.
Thanks for chiming in!
sobchak@programming.dev 10 hours ago
Cool, thanks for the explanations.
I’ve seen some attempts at worker-cooperatives before where workers had to buy-in, and it kinda put me off. Presumably, workers are looking for work because they need income, and such barriers would select for a certain type of well-off individual, harming diversity. I agree there definitely has to be a provisional period; both in ownership and decision making.
Reading more of the documents, I’m not sure I like that the CEO and President are compensated differently than the rest of the workers. I guess it makes sense from a incentives perspective, but it feels kinda wrong to me. In my mind, the CEO is just another role in a company.
Most of the examples of flat orgs that I’ve heard of were not cooperatives. Early Valve, early GitHub, Gore-Tex, Morning Star (I remember reading “First, Let’s Fire All The Managers” in an Organizational Behavior course back when I was in college, and the idea always stuck with me). At Valve, there were leaders, but it was dynamic (if you can get people to follow you/work on your project, you are a leader). In my career as a software engineer, I’ve also worked in agile processes like Scrum. Though, not dynamic, Scrum is less about “hierarchy” and more about collaboration with some special “roles”/not necessarily leaders (Project Owner, Scrum Master, stake holders, etc). Though Scrum is usually collaboration within teams and not necessarily without hierarchy in an organization.
And lately, I’ve taken in interest in anarchism and alternative ways of organization, such as Boem and Graeber’s works studying the Innuit and pre-history humans; as well as modern anarch-ish communities such as the Zapitistas and Rojava, which were more-or-less successful (aside from dealing with external violence in the case of Rojava) while being radically different. A lot of ways to skin a cat I guess.
Oh, and I read Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work a while back, where he proposed “Worker Self-Directed Enterprises,” that focus on workers being in control of the surplus from their labor, rather than having management control it; arguing that’s the most important aspect.
My worry about having a single person at the top is mostly about corruption I guess. Even if democratically elected, compromised/corrupted union leaders, for example, are not unheard of. I see the Zapatista’s system of “governance”/collaboration/federation as a possible mitigation of this. They go to great lengths to prevent people “getting too big for their britches,” like very frequently (e.g. every 2 weeks) rotating elected representatives. And they have various practices and customs that echo the “reverse dominance hierarchy” that has been observed by anthropologists.
Yeah, I think the biggest hurdle with worker-cooperatives is acquiring capital. Factories and the machines in them are very expensive. I think there are organizations that offer loans to worker-cooperatives, but I doubt on the scale of a factory. I kind of like Argentina’s past “Occupy, Resist, Produce” movement as a solution to this :)
Juniperus@infosec.pub 8 hours ago
Hmm lets talk about the executive compensation first, since I can understand how that might be a point of contention.
First off, it’s not meant to imply that the President and CEO are the only officers to get a bonus, it’s just that those bonuses are key to keeping the company in balance.
There’s not really any point to giving everyone at the company a bonus because they get dividends from the surplus, so they would get that same money anyhow.
Also, the Board of Directors may have an incentive bonus based on health and safety metrics. The CEO can share a portion of their bonus with the management in their organization. Same thing with the President’s office (basicaly HR). It will all be configurable with payroll rules, so you can set up bonuses in your co-op however you like (or not).
The two main leadership roles, the President and the CEO, are actually likely to be extremely stressful in my opinion. The President is basically HR and the software will have a system where members can submit “Issues” and tag a person for resolution. It then becomes the President’s problem to mediate the issue and find a solution.
For the CEO, the success of the entire organization hinges on their decision-making ability and their project management skills. They also have to do things like negotiate contracts with other businesses. None of those things are easy when there dozens or perhaps hundreds of people’s livelihoods on the line.
I guess my goal in sculpting the model the way I did was to make the leadership roles into a “prize” so that there would be a significant incentive for talented people to try out for the role.
A lot of people just want to work on the assembly line, get a paycheck, and go home to their families at night. Others are ambitious and want to lead. There is room for both types of people in this setup (and everyone in between).
Anyway we are definitely in agreement that startup funding is a huge issue. I do think it is solvable with the staffing agreements, even if people have to be patient an put in the work.
sobchak@programming.dev 8 hours ago
I’m not so sure about that. Having worked on assembly lines, most people I worked with were constantly trying to find a way out :) Perhaps that’s just because me and most of my co-workers were young and not crushed by the world yet. It’s truly mindnumbing and unsatisfying work though.
Anyways, I don’t mean to be too critical; just kind of thinking out loud. I find your project really interesting, and don’t want to let perfection get in the way of progress.