this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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I also want to receive stuff for free.
Who doesn't want to join a co-op and receive shares of the company for free. Almost no one wants to start a co-op, financing it, taking risks and responsibilities only to give shares away for free and gain nothing in exchange.
You don't finance it, you take a loan from a bank on the company. If the company folds, it goes bankrupt, not you. You don't take anymore risk than the other workers.
If the company is dead, you're still a human and now just another worker on the job market. You don't go to jail for going bankrupt.
You still take all the risk because the bank is going to say they won't give a loan to a new company without a track record, unless someone is willing to be a guarantor.
Now you share the profits, but all the risk is yours.
Unless you have a bunch of people lined up to start the co-op and they're all willing to pitch in or become guarantors with you, in which case it might just work - but again, the initial people are going to have more skin in the game than the rest.
Then go ahead and start one :D Good luck finding a bank that gives you an unsecured loan to start a business.
Eh, banks give out loans for people to start restaurants all the time, and restaurants are notoriously risky businesses. There's hundreds of worker-owned co-ops in the States, so it's not impossible to find a bank that will fund them.
And if you want a reward for founding a business but want it to be a co-op there are methods thst are reasonable and fair like selling it bit by bit to the employee union at a reasonable price or willing your company to your workers.
** Citation needed.
Looks outside
This unironically
You don't receive shares for free. You receive shares in return for your labour. You don't become an equal member of a partnership as soon as you join.
Y'all are getting shares as part of your compensation?
Then it is not equally owned as the title says.
You're struggling so hard in the comments, just to be wrong.
Why are you so invested in capitalism? Do you own lots of capital or something?
I don't own much capital, but I live in a post communist country and I sure as hell don't want to experience the shit our country already went through once.
Let me guess. Post-Russian? Don't blame communism for Russia's glaring flaws.
Yeah, blame the Russians. As if the Russian revolutionaries were not fighting for the same ideals you believe in. Just by not realizing that eliminating capitalists concentrated all the power in the government and handed power to Stalin on a silver platter.
Once you come up with an economic model that both works economically and does not hand power to elected officials or some other such group, you have my support. Until then, I will keep the safe assumption that socialists have zero idea what they are talking about and would lead us to doom if we gave them the chance.
As someone also from a post soviet country, don't make the mistake of thinking all socialism is the same as Leninism.
So you'd rather support a system where the power is handed to the unelected "officials"? You can see that happening in real time with Musk effectively leading the US. Not to mention almost all forms of democracy have people handing the power to the elected government, so I really don't know what you're opposing here.
Comparing all capitalism to the US is the same as comparing all socialism to the Soviet Union.
There are plenty social democracies in Europe. I advocate for spreading those and making incremental improvements to them where appropriate.
Yet comparing all socialism to the Soviet Union is exactly what you did. The fact that Russian revolutionaries failed to eliminate dictatorship does not invalidate the philosophy of communism, it just demonstrated that Russia was unable to overcome their own social inertia.
Russia was always brutal to their people and to their neighbors, for centuries. They stayed that way as Soviets, and they haven't changed from it as capitalists. Abusing the working class is a violation of communist principles, not an inherent feature.
I literally wrote that I would support some form of socialism. That is not sarcasm. I am not talking about one example, I am talking about economic and game theory principles.
If you analyse the common forms of socialism using those, it is obvious it will always devolve into authoritarianism. The incentives between leaders and the population are too misaligned and the power is too concentrated.
Except 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.
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?
It depends on how it's structured.
Well yeah, but cooperatives generally avoid the possibility of buying voting power because that kinda contradicts the purpose of a coop.
Fair cop.