Unsurprisingly HN is full of people who are sure that this would be bad for society and that it should be up for the "market to decide" - because if co-ops were good they'd be more common, not like there's any societal context that could keep them from being more popular
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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this HN comment at the top illustrates the perspective:
worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit,
In other words, The market system as it currently exists maximizes profit over worker welfare, and that's why these coops are not successful. That's a fairly damning indictment of the market.
Yeah there were so many condemnations of the idea that brought up "but they'd maximize worker welfare!" like it's a bad thing
I think it's very telling that the discussion is all just around giving employees share options in what is otherwise a typical top-down company, rather than discussing actual co-ownership and bringing democratic practises to the workplace.
It really doesn't seem to even occur to a lot of people that there are different ways to do this stuff