It’s a meme

  • Devouring@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    You said a bunch of nice things, but you ignored the core of the problem. If workers hold all voting shares, what happens when they’re split on an issue? Who can tell them to STFU for the better of the company?

    Another similar question: What if there’s an issue that will lead to half of them getting fired? Like, say, a technological advancement? So if work can be optimized by 200% by adding computers, but then 50% of the people are useless then. Wouldn’t the workers vote to stay employed/paid instead of saving the company that can be destroyed in a competitive market where better, faster companies can emerge if this company doesn’t adopt the newer tech? Who will make that decision?

    • J Lou@mastodon.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Like I said, its like workers hold all the voting shares in the company, so these issues would resolved the same way that they are resolve in corporations owned by shareholders.

      The rational action would be to adopt the new tech and instead of firing half of the workers, which is socially irrational due to the social costs of unemployment, dividing the remaining work among the existing workers. The extra time that each worker has could be used for producing something else

    • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Better to have them making the decision than capitalists, who make more money the more they pay workers less

      • Devouring@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        “Better” is in your opinion. I need answers based on concerns and problems that happens in the real world. A fast-paced world.

        Assuming the revenue of the company doesn’t have massive growth (which is the normal situation unless a breakthrough happened), we need to hire more people who have the skills needed to keep up with the market. So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?

        • J Lou@mastodon.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Worker coops are better ethically not just based on opinion. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. By the usual ethical principle that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party, the workers should jointly be legally responsible for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs.

          1. Worker coops can fire people.
          2. Worker coops can charge initial membership fee when a new worker joins.
          • Devouring@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            OK, at least we agree we can fire people. That answers my question. The circumstances aren’t important. This idea that people can’t be fired is just ridiculous.

            Do you think communities will be happy seeing their friends/family being fired, and not understanding why? This actually reminds me of the movie Casino (1995), where Robert De Niro fires that Texan guy for incompetence, and then hell breaks loose due to relatives not understanding how that works. This is human nature. People will always prefer to keep an incompetent relative vs firing them for a good reason, no matter what.

            • J Lou@mastodon.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              I never said that people couldn’t get fired.

              The incompetent relative example seems to be a problem with nepotism

              • Devouring@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Agreed. It’s a nepotism problem. I’m just drawing the picture that removing money from the picture basically makes relationships the new currency. It’s basically how life used to be a long time ago, and those who were closer to the leader got better jobs with perks. People will always find a way to benefit and will centralize power eventually. I can’t say much about hypotheticals and whether your coop will fix that, but in my opinion, history suggests that we’ll just end up with a new system of power.

                • J Lou@mastodon.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  I never said anything about removing money.

                  What you are talking about is called social capital accumulation, which is a problem in any system.

                  A justification for worker coops is the moral principle of assigning legal responsibility to the de facto responsible party. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer receives 100% of the legal responsibility despite the employee being inextricably co-responsible. This violates the aforementioned principle

                  • Devouring@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    1 year ago

                    Well, I don’t think you can use written laws to fight human plans to centralize power. I guess our current system is proof of that. People will always find a way to centralize that power to benefit themselves and their groups.

                    But anyway. I guess we’re getting into a dead end. This is becoming opinion stuff at this point, whether this will work. I’ll have to think more about this stuff.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          6
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          See you’re still trapped within the logic of capitalism which maximizes profits and expansion over other concerns.

          So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?

          These are all massive assumptions