Asklemmy

It depends on the form of employee ownership as to whether it works out for the employees.

In trucking, the industry uses the owner-operator model as a way to push costs onto employees and skirt labor laws. On paper, the truckers are their own bosses. In reality, they are effectively employees of logistics companies where the logistics companies can pay their employees less than minimum wage and push maintenance costs onto their employees.

In this case, ownership is used as a tool of oppression.

I've read of a couple small places. Was a coffee shop in the cities around here where they guy running it for 20+ years wanted to get out and the staff decided that rather than a new owner they would raise funds to buy it. Sort of run like a direct democracy with some rules based on seniority and such.

With a Union you still have an adversarial owner who makes company decisions. Coop stuff is voted on by the coop owners, direction of profit is determined by coop mandate.

Eg, we are with a Credit Union for banking, we vote on new policy changes that affect members investments.

For MEC (mountain equipment company) it is coop, we voted who gets to be a board member running the company.

I've lived in and worked at a number of co-ops. I think they're far better for the employee than traditional businesses when implemented in a democratic way. Having control over the workplace and direction of the business is incredibly valuable. It's also important that the co-op members talk to and know eachother. Having lots of meetings and community building is very typical in this type of business.

Also the type of co-op I'm talking about also returns excess profits to the workers (often with a portion taken out to be put back into the business/saved for a rainy day). In this way they are way better than unions, which no matter how powerful do not fully redistribute profits.

I also think worker co-ops are functionally better than worker communes. Co-ops give much more economic freedom to the workers, and side step many of the pitfalls of live/work communes.

Feel free to ask me more about my experiences if you're curious :)

I don’t know much about them but I like the idea and I’d be more inclined to use one.

We have the Co-op in the UK and it’s a household name. They run a bank and local shops but I think do more than that. They’re not employee owned though, they’re consumer owned. I’m not entirely sure what that means but I remember you used to be able to walk into a shop, pay a small amount of money, and then join. Each year you’d get a small amount of money depending on how much profit they’d made.

In a general sense, the difference between a regular workplace with a union and a worker co-op is that the company is, in part, managed and/or owned by the workers themselves. There's varying degrees of this, but the best (and unfortunately least common) co-ops elect their managers. It's my opinion that electing managers is a crucial part of a worker owned economy, but a union is still needed to represent the workers.

A lot of times it takes the form of an ESOP. IMHO, it usually founders trying to cash out from the company. There is still usually a board and CEO, however shares are owned by the employees. The ESOP companies I’ve been involved with did not sell voting shares to employees, which to me was disenfranchising. The benefit was that you had shares and stake in the company, so if the company did well, you did well, however cashing out was tightly controlled.

I suppose they could be great and hope that everyone else has better experiences but to me, I see an employee-owned company and I tend to think it’s a farce.

You might be interested in Mondragon as well.

Here is a transcript from a panel discussion on this topic held last year at Baltimore's museum of industry.

https://therealnews.com/baltimores-co-ops-show-the-power-of-a-solidarity-economy

They have a few examples represented. One is a coffee shop that the owners closed after the workers started a union, but then the union raised the money to buy it out and the owners agreed to sell it to them.

Another is a family-owned hardware store that converted to a worker-ownership model when the owners wanted to retire because they didn't want to ever see a subsequent owner sell to a private equity group or big corporate chain.

There're some great insights provided. The long and short is that it's a lot of work, but very rewarding for those who have the appetite for it.

I would love to know the answer to that as well. I know Artist & Craftsman Supply is employee owned and the employees are very helpful and seem content. I don't know how it is to work there though:

Come join us! We’re always looking for new talent to join our ever growing team. Artist & Craftsman is a very unique place to work. We’re an employee-owned company, so you can think of it as coming to work each day for yourself.

https://artistcraftsman.com/employment/

Scrooge McDuck is an employee of his companies too.