I'd Love To Start A Worker Co-op
I started this blog and continue to write for it in the hopes that it would someday generate significant traffic. I also hope that it will generate an income for me which is at least as much as I currently make from my job so that I can quit my job and focus on building this blog. Currently, those are still just hopes for the future. This blog does not attract many readers, and it does not make me any money.
I think that lots of people who start blogs have roughly those same goals. They are sick of their jobs and hope that their side hustle of a blog will allow them to quit. But I think that's about where it stops for most people. They want to use their blog to replace their income. And if the income from the blog grows, great, its just more money to spend, save, or invest. But there isn't really a bigger goal.
But I hope to use the money from the blog to do something more. I have written about my plans for what I would do if this blog ever takes off in another post, and this post may be just a regurgitation of that post. Hopefully I say something new here, but to the degree that it is basically the same, I just want to say it again.
If I do find big financial success in this blog, I want to use the money to start as many worker co-ops as I can. I have become convinced that worker cooperatives, and generally workers owning the means of production, are a massively positive thing in many regards.
Very briefly, a worker co-op is a business structure in which the people working in the business own the business and make the decisions about the business. This is counter to the vast majority of businesses and corporations we have today. Most businesses are set up so that the owners (who are not the workers) make all the decisions about the business, and the workers simply obey the orders of the owners.
One of the things that nearly all business owners decide to do is to pay the workers as little as they can get away with, and to keep as much of the business revenue or profit for themselves as possible. They also tend to choose not to work in the business themselves, but rather rely on the labor of hired workers to operate the business.
That is obviously totally unethical. It is hard to understand how it isn't called theft. Someone (the owner) who does not produce a thing, keeps the majority of the revenue from the production of that thing by others. Sounds like clear cut theft to me. But this is how most businesses operate. And it is not hard to see how that become the typical practice when you give absolute decision-making authority to a small number of people in an organization. They would obviously choose to do no work and take all the money.
Worker co-ops cut out that owner from the equation. Instead, all the workers in the business are the owners and decision-makers. They use democratic means, such as voting, to decide collectively things about the business. They work together to decide what the business should produce, how it should produce it, and what to do with the revenue.
There are undoubtedly lots of variations on the structure of a worker co-op, so lots of them could operate slightly different from one another. But something I think would be key would be that only current workers would be owners. If a person leaves the job, they lose their ownership stake. That way the people making decisions would have a current vested interest, and not simply want to collect dividends from other people's work. It would also keep the "ownership" from being a thing to be bought and sold.
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There are lots of benefits to the workers having this power. The first would be higher wages. If there isn't some parasite of an owner collecting 80% of the business' revenue for themselves in exchange for no productive work, then there would be lots available to pay the workers a more fair wage. In almost all cases, the difference between the wages under a typical business structure and under a worker co-op would be significant. That much increased wage would not only bring workers out of poverty, but would help them thrive financially. They would be financially secure and even have enough to be able to save for the future. There would also be a ripple effect in the community since the workers with more money to spend would spend that money in the community, further spreading the benefit.
The higher wages and financial security of the workers will lead to them being able to invest more time and money into causes they care about. Those might be local community oriented groups like Lions clubs or Kiwanis, or it might be more large scale and political. Whatever it may be, it will allow workers to have the freedom to make a difference in the world in a way that is meaningful to them. That sort of extracurricular voluntary association is the type of thing that gets cut first when someone is scrambling to make enough money to pay their bills.
There are lots of benefits to worker co-ops, but this post isn't necessarily intended to expound on all of them. I just wanted to give an idea of the types of benefits that there are. But if you are interested in digging deeper into what else they would offer, I recommend you check out the podcast "All Things Co-op". It is a podcast associated with Democracy at Work that discusses any and everything about worker co-ops. It's a really great resource.
But since worker co-ops are so good for workers and the communities where the businesses exist, why aren't they more common? Under our current economic system, businesses of most kinds require a source of start up capital. Almost always, the source of that start up capital is looking to collect a return on that investment. They want to take the profit generated in the business for themselves. That is their whole motivation for getting involved at all. And they do not simply want to collect a modest 5% interest after they get back the actual amount they invested, they want a perpetual free money machine that pays them indefinitely. They never want to stop taking what other people create. And since the workers who would obviously benefit from the worker co-op structure tend to be the typical underpaid worker, they don't just have boatloads of start up capital laying around to contribute.
So in order for these co-ops to get started, someone with start up capital to contribute must establish the business, then release it to operate on its own. It might be reasonable for them to make back their initial investment, and as I had mentioned above, maybe even a modest and pre-defined level of return on their investment, but at a certain point, their involvement would cease. The business would be owned by the workers in the business. Once the business is going, it would be self sustaining, it just needs that push to get started.
That is what I would like to do with the money this blog generates some day. I want to start worker co-ops, get everything going in a sustainable way, then let the workers take over. I would continue that process, starting as many as I could.
I would possibly also include in the constitutions of these worker co-ops some commitment to contributing funding to other new worker co-ops. So in combination with the contributions of other worker co-ops, there would be enough start up capital to spin off even more worker co-ops, ones that didn't require some random person with start up capital to get things going. This would ensure the business model would be self-sustaining and would ensure it spreads and thrives, and that it isn't just a one off fluke of an organization.
I am very in favor of worker co-ops, and so would like to support them by buying products from them. Even if I don't yet have enough money to start co-ops, I can at least buy the stuff I was already going to buy from a worker co-op. But I am not aware of any worker co-ops in my area, so I googled to find a list of all the worker co-ops in the USA, and it looks like there are only around 500 in the whole country. And most of them are either farms or grocery stores. I was hoping for companies that produced the sorts of goods I purchase on a regular basis. The sorts of things produced by the companies in that list were either hard to purchase because of distance and shipping, or because they are the sorts of things I just wouldn't buy either way.
I would love to see that 500 number become tens of thousands. And I want them to produce every sort of thing and provide every sort of service, so that no matter what a person is looking to buy, if they want to support a worker co-op, there is a co-op option to support. Rather than a person buying paper towels or soap or refrigerators or clothes or cars or furniture or anything else from a for profit mega corporation that is bad for workers, they could buy those same things from worker cooperatives that are great for workers. People say that capitalism is great because of all the choice it offers the consumer, but there currently isn't a choice to support worker co-ops in a broad and comprehensive way. I would like to work to make it possible to spend almost all the money you would already spend in a way that supports worker co-ops. And that all requires the proliferation of worker co-ops, which in turn requires start up capital for those co-ops.
Not only would the increased number of co-ops give consumers the opportunity to spend their money in ways that support workers, but it would allow workers to choose jobs at companies that empower them, pay them well, and treat them with dignity. Rather than being required to pick from the terrible options which are typically available, workers would be able to opt for the worker co-op jobs. And since any worker faced with the employment choices of either, 1) work for a company that wants to pay you as little as they can legally and practically get away with, and, 2) work for a company where you work democratically with your co-workers to make decisions about your work and which pays well, they would obviously choose the second option. And the typical employers would need to alter their practices in order to get anybody to work for them at all. And if they don't, then they risk going out of business altogether.
It's the same idea as how union jobs in an area or industry don't just improve the conditions and wages for the union members, but for all the workers around them as well, since there is competitive pressure to keep up. So starting all these worker co-ops would be better for society, even for people who end up having nothing to do with them at all.
I am pretty passionate about worker co-ops and just how powerful a force they are for good. I hope to write about them more in the future, but for now, I just wanted to share my desire to use any large blogging incomes I may someday get to kickstart the growth of the worker co-op sector. Probably just a pie in the sky type of dream, but it is motivating me to get more consistent with this blog. I'd really like for it to become reality.
How do you feel about worker cooperatives? Do you think there are any other business structures that are even more beneficial? Do you know of any worker co-ops that I should check out and support? Let me know in the comments!
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