this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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If there are limited liability business co op should also be allowed to be limited liability, also large losses where the business is in actuall cash flow trouble don't happen so frequently because they are generally less speculative, and have the option to instead of laying people off to reduce hours or pay temporarily. They largely don't even want the profits, they want to know the can live by their own therms, and work without being needlessly managed by people with no idea of the core business.
Even with limited liability, your shares on the cooperative are always at stake. The cooperative needs money to invest, which comes from their owners, which are the workers in that case (they trade a fraction of their salary to get shares of the cooperative, to participate in later profits). If the business fails, the money is gone and you would have been better of taking 100% cash. You have a combined risk of losing both your income and your savings.
Also, there a conflicts of interest. Look at automation, for example. A worker's cooperative would probably decide against automation, because the workers want to secure their own jobs, but in the long run the cooperative would go bankrupt as competitors could produce more efficiently and charge lower prices. That might be the reasons why such cooperatives are not very widespread.
So it's the same as getting virtual stock as compensation just that you also get control over how the business is run. Which in my opinion makes the business better, you don't seem convinced but you don't seem to have a good reason for why because ..
isn't really an argument against coops, similar shortsighted thinking can frequently be found in other forms of enterprise, if a private enterprise can rationalize automation a coop can as well and they can both fail to come to that conclusion. It's just that control over this automation is in the workers hand, and even if all the workers automate themselves away without finding other places to create value, the profit of that automation wouldn't be centralized quite so aggressively, because all (former) workers share in it. The workers fundamentally don't need to preserve their own jobs, rather they aim to preserve their livelihood.
I can offer a different explanation which partially explains their uncommon existence, which points again to the central conflict under capitalism, which is the unwillingness of conventional banks to approve credit for coops, making it much harder to start anything in the first place, particularly large capital investment like automation.
In the financial sector, cooperatives are very common actually. Germany has a long tradition of "Genossenschaftsbanken" - banks that are owned by their customers. In the US, there is Vanguard for example, the seconds largest investment company, that is also owned by their customers.
Well, customers, not workers. Businesses are successfull when their customers are happy and purchase their goods and services, and they pay also the workers salary. Those cooperatives can have an competitive advantage over other types of corporations, as they don't need to make external investors happy, and are less prone to hostile take-overs.
If workers have significant influence over the business strategy...yes, automation wouldn't kill their shares, but it would kill their jobs and their monthly income, and most likely the yearly dividend is not high enough to replace your salary (unless you are an old worker close to retirement, maybe).
There are historical examples of workers cooperatives, however. In post-war Germany, there were real estate cooperatives where, instead of paying rent, you build new houses and get to live in one of them in return. Today, these cooperatives also collect rent but instead of construction work new tenants are required to invest into the cooperative, to they kind of transformed from worker-owned to tenant-owned.