Imagine if Amazon was run as a cooperative, and the money generated by the workers went to them instead. Amazon could literally hire 10 times as many people, and have each employee work 1/2 a day a week while getting the same salary they get now. The only reason that's not happening is because a guy named Jeff takes the lion share of the profits.
@yogthos On the other hand, could a cooperative build an enterprise attracting so many customers as Amazon?
@kravietz I really don't see why it couldn't, and even if not I still don't think that would justify Amazon
If it could, why it didn't? That's the first question I'm asking myself in those endless discussions where a popular but inferior X is compared to unpopular but allegedly superior Y...
@kravietz because US is not set up to facilitate cooperatives? The whole system is designed to foster businesses owned by the capitalists. Take a look at percentage of cooperatives in US, it's tiny, and getting things like start up loans is intentionally far more difficult for cooperatives.
Seems a bit weird to assume that the reason Amazon isn't a co-op is for any other reason.
We have a global market, they *could* have appeared in any other large economy like EU.
Yet they didn't, the closest to Amazon like Alibris however offer significantly inferior delivery times and service (first hand experience, I did switch to Alibris purely for ideological reasons).
P.S. not arguing, more of trying to understand it...
@kravietz still exactly the same problem though, most of EU is very much focused on fostering traditional style businesses as opposed to coops. If we lived in a world where cooperatives were the norm, then Amazon would've most certainly have been a cooperative instead.
UK has a very strong coop traditions and EU has multi-billion programs for fostering *any* kind of startups you wish.
Yet, there are few globally recognized brands that started here, not to mention being coops.
@kravietz well that's interesting because one of the things Labor is campaigning on is making UK more coop friendly.
For example, one of the platform promises is to provide workers with first right of refusal when the company is sold.
Again, the West is capitalist through and through. I don't think it's fair to claim that coops have the same opportunities here.
You speak of West like there was some other countries blooming with coops ;)
These changes don't seem to be - pun intended - game changers. It's easy to start a run a coop in UK, just like any other business. Red tape is close to zero.
@saper @kravietz I suspect so, people tend to naturally organize into hierarchies, and large scale organizations tend to have similar structure to them.
I don't necessarily see that as a problem. What's important to me is ensuring that everyone in the organization has a vote about the overall direction of the organization, and that profits are shared fairly amongst the workers.
@saper @kravietz pursuing members interests is what I refer to when I talk about worker representation. Maybe we're just using different terminology here.
I see a coop as an organization where everybody owns a percentage of it, and they have a say in what they work on, how they work, and when they work.
I see everybody in a coop as a worker. People just happen to have different roles, but I don't see some roles as being strictly more important than others.
@yogthos @kravietz sorry, but that's wrong. Let's not waste time on terminology. If you think that #cooperative model is something worth pursuing, I'd have a look at the real examples of cooperatives run for example in Europe (those I have mentioned, cooperative banks, insurance companies etc.).
For banks, for example, one big disadvantage of a small cooperative bank (like many in Germany) is that single fraud case can nuke 10 years of members' efforts.
@kravietz @yogthos cooperative is built to pursuit **members** business interests; not workers. There are workers' cooperatives, where members are doing the work, but this is just one of the forms of the cooperatives.
Building cooperatives, consumer (purchasing) cooperatives seems to be most common forms.