I’ve known a few in the U.S., and even worked at one. Maybe people won’t become billionaires doing this, but why wait for a complete overhaul of society to implement more of what are good ideas.
I’d also like to see more childcare co-ops, or community shared pre-k schools. Wheres the movement to build communities and pool resources around these business models in the US? In short, co-ops are the closest socialist/communist business model that’s actually implemented in the U.S., so why are more leftists not doing this?
People who would start co-ops are usually decent and don’t care about profits that much. They wouldn’t exploit their workers or other obvious strategies that would put profit more important than wellbeing.
All the companies that don’t care about this have much less costs. Thus the companies that don’t care about morality can offer lower prices than the co-ops, and since most customers care about that more than anything else, the co-ops are driven out of business much more often.
All the companies that don’t care about this have much less costs. Thus the companies that don’t care about morality can offer lower prices
Non sequitur. You forgot that the “cost” of satisfying stockholders is far more than the cost of labor even if wages are doubled.
The kind of people who would start a business (to enrich themselves) and the kind of people who value co-ops and employee-owned businesses (to enrich others) does not have much overlap. I love the idea of coops, but I do not have the skills or ambition to start any kind of business.
Don’t forget money. Can’t just decide to fart out a co-op.
Human greed is the common point of failure in any of societal systems. In any system … capitalism, socialism, religious, commune, authoritarian … the common thing that holds it together is concentration of power. The problem that it suffers from is … concentration of power.
No matter what group you create, power eventually gets concentrated to smaller groups of people and it only attracts a certain group of individuals who only understand the need to want power and control over everyone and everything to the detriment of everything else.
Once we find a way to build a societal system that is able to distribute power and keep any one or group of people from dominating everyone else, then we might have a chance of developing a sustainable civilization. In the meantime, no matter what you want to call it or do with it, if the end process just concentrates power to a small group of fallible ignorant humans, nothing will ever work.
They are run out of business, most simply.
The operation that does not focus their profits on building further capital and establishing monopoly will fail in the arms race of those that do.
For example: there are countless community and public efforts establishing childcare and pre-k through pooled resources. They are in direct competition with things like Bezos’ childcare academies. (Personal anecdote: they bought out my kids’ building for public pre-k and evicted them.)
And a successful co-op will get pressure to be bought out like a start-up. (Often starts as a great way to expand! Then the expansion changes the culture, the new location feels corporate and the original location is later shut down and left vacant. -Also personal anecdotes for a grocery co-op and an employee owned operation I once worked at.)
I actually tried to do this with a bar I owned back in the day. It was exciting / hopeful.
It went into effect January 1st, 2020. January for bars is rough because people do “dry January” so we hoped February and March would be good.
We all know what happened. It didn’t survive. Spent a good year or so continuing to pay wages and healthcare out of my own pocket, but I hit a point where I had to call it (mostly because I ran out of money and couldn’t get any more loans).
I plan to try again in the future, once I have the loans paid off and some padding saved again.
I also dream of a day where somewhat self-sustaining communes become more prevalent. Everyone living together on a shared plot and exchanging goods & services instead of money. Maybe it’s a pipe dream? I don’t know. I feel like it’ll become necessary over the next 4 years though.
We’ve gotten so far away from that communal living spirit, culturally. Look at the way people get into snits with their neighbors over little things like fence repair or whatever. It’s been a long time since people depended on the folks next door for survival, and we’ve forgotten how to give a shit. It can be relearned, and there are little candles of that spirit burning here and there still. But it ain’t the old days in the farming village anymore.
Lots of people have ideas, few people actually want to implement ideas. This is why there’s more workers than business owners.
