Totally. The USSR had no worker-owned companies. They all belonged to the state. There was no economy which is based on cooperatives in a free market, yet.
That’s why cooperatism is superior to socialism and capitalism. It’s a free market of worker-owned companies, creating things by running their businesses together.
The free market is a set of principles between companies, not a principle for how companies need to be organized internally. Capitalism is based on single-owned companies. Cooperatism is based on worker-owned companies. Cooperatism is a better free market based economy. It’s capitalism 2.0.
Profits belong to the people who create them, not to people who used to work at the same company in the past. Expecting future employees of a company to work for ex-employees in the future is unfair. Having worked for a company, doesn’t entitle anyone to remain on the paycheck until death, despite not working there anymore.
Living in a country with strong workers rights, this is not how pensions work. The pensions people receive every month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and every company during that month. Pensions are not saved money from companies you worked for, but money coming from the economy at the time of your retirement. It’s a common misconception that the state has a big pile of pension money sitting somewhere that you then get your pension from. That’s just not how it works in reality. Another difference from pensions to receiving money from a company just by owning parts of it, is also that you don’t continue to be on a company’s paycheck when you quit. You need to reach a certain age to receive money and you get that money from the state, not the companies you worked for. That’s how pensions work.
> The pensions people receive every month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and every company during that month.
That might be how your pension works.
Other pension schemes; eg Singapores and some other former and current commonwealth countries pay pension from the returns from 60 odd years of compulsary investment and additional supplementary investment.
That doesn’t change the fact that every month there are people putting money into that fund and people getting money out of that fund. The money you put in, is not the same money you get out of it. It’s still money that people working at that time, put into that fund. Nobody has their own personal savings account inside that fund. You only have a legal claim to a share of that fund once you retire, but that’s not the money from your paychecks and it’s not saved somewhere for you. A pension fund is not a collection of private pensions and it’s better that way. Because with inflation, your pension can increase, even though you didn’t "put in" that amount of money when you were still working. The government is able to increase pensions by shifting money from other parts of its balance sheet or by increasing debts or taxes to meet the pension demand. I’m sorry for Singapore if their state system works more like a private pension, because you don’t know how long you’ll live past retirement age, so you either take too much or too little out of that fund once you have retired and there is no adjustment for inflation. Yes, there are bad private pension systems. That doesn’t change the fact that you benefit more working in a worker-owned compay than in a solely-owned company.
Cooperatives guarantee that only people working in the company benefit from the profit of their own work. If one can stop working and still take a share from the profits, everyone else would have to not just work for themselves and lose part of their profit to an increasing amount of people, who are not taking part in creating that profit. Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people who create it.
I think you may be too committed to dogmatic stances to constructively discuss other possibilities. I think this is no better when it's from the collectivist side than when it's from the capitalist fundamentalists.
> Cooperative guarantee that profit is owned by the people who create it.
I don't think all the value created by workers is realized as profit immediately. Workers can create value which only shows up in contributions to revenue much later. If you and your coworkers figured out the design and manufacturing process for a new product and the product only goes to market after you retired, you helped create the profits even if they arrive after you left the firm.
If the coop structure as you narrowly define it doesn't allow workers to receive the profits of their labor in industries that have a long time to market or R&D cycle, then isn't that a recipe for those high value industries to be inaccessible to coops?
Try to imagine an alternate history where Nvidia was a coop. A lot of the value behind its current high revenue was done many years ago. Cuda was released in 2007. I don't know how much of the hardware has inherited from older designs. If only current workers benefit from the current high sales, has the organization really ensured that "profit is owned by the people who create it"? That seems implausible.
> I don't think all the value created by workers is realized as profit immediately.
And as the worker creating that future profit you are very well aware of that, plus everyone else working on the design and manufacturing is in the same situation as yourself. The good news is: all of you are also owners of the company. So together you can decide how an exit package should look like for people deciding to leave before the design reaches the market and generates profit.
The same situation in a non-cooperative is a lot worse, because you have no stake in the company. The owner might be willing to negotiate an exit package before you even start working there, but they also might not. Plus before working at the company, you have no idea what the profit margins look like and what you might be working on. It’s the worst time for you to agree on an exit pacakge. Also during employment you are in a worse position, because the owner(s) can just let you go, if you are the only one asking for your fair share of future profits. You don’t have a say in the company. Most often they see your current salary as your share of the profit, no matter how much profit your design might create in the future.
I understood from the article that workers remain working for the coop (possibly in different companies) until they retire, and then, the coop provides them with pensions; so they continue to receive value after retirement.
What if they pass away? I assume their shares are sold immediately and the money paid out to their estate.
Now suppose that all the work they did was in the R&D phase (and fundamental to the project) but the final product had not been released at the time of death of the contributor — so the profits had not been realized — thus the payout on those shares would be a small fraction of their true valuation.
Imagine if a novelist died just after submitting their final draft to their editor but prior to the book’s publication. Forcing the estate to sell off the book before it had a chance to hit the shelves — and become a bestseller — would be an outrage, yet the rigid nature of worker co-ops (cessation of work forces the sale of shares) guarantees this.
Where’s the cooperative in your example? Either you are a freelance author who has a contract with a publishing cooperative. In this case you have a contract with that cooperative and during the negotation process both sides decide together what happens in case of death before publication. Or you are an author inside a publishing cooperative, so you own part of that cooperative and decide together with the other authors, publishers etc. what will happen, if somebody dies before the publication of their book. In both cases the author is part of the decision of what should happen in case of an early death.
The example way above was NVIDIA. Suppose the person who passed away was one of the founding researchers at the NVIDIA worker coop. They developed most of the key technologies that go into a graphics card, but they died during the later stages of production ramp up, before the first GPUs are able to hit the market.
The issue is that the deceased researcher's contribution to the project may be so central and foundational that they may be entitled to a large plurality (or even majority) stake, but forcing the other worker-owners to buy out that stake to pay the estate would bankrupt the coop at this critical pre-production stage. Since only active workers are allowed to maintain ownership, allowing the estate to retain those shares and later receive dividends on future profits is off the table. This issue seems to tie everyone's hands and sound the death knell for the coop.
The novelist case was meant to show an extreme non-coop situation. I don't see any compelling reason for writers of books to join coops, since the writing of the book is the only hard part these days (and countless ways to self-publish exist).
I recommend reading more about existing cooperatives. They offer way better packages to their employees than manager-owned companies. This can also include life insurances, health insurances, child care etc. And since everyone working and owning a company, where the profits might come in at a later stage, you can be sure, that these people working towards that goal, will make sure that they have the security they require. Why wouldn’t they? It’s their job and their company. They have everything required to set up the necessary legal work.
The case with the novelist is also easy to answer. Publishers do more than just printing books. They also do marketing, host events, send authors to interviews etc. All of that work becomes smaller if you share it with others. Plus being new to the industry, you can get the help from experienced writers. Cooperating with other people has loads of advantages. I could go on for hours. Also nobody is forced to join cooperatives. Every novelist can decide to remain a freelancer. It’s basically a cooperative with a single worker. A lot of cooperatives are founded by groups of freelancers by the way, because already having a business mindset, having experienced the freedom of owning your own business and wanting to stay in control when collaborating with others, makes cooperatives the obvious choice.
You are always more free, have more options and are treated better when you own the result of your work.
I’ve been waiting for this since the first talk about Unison. Love the huge progress you have made and congrats to the public release of Unison Cloud!
Question: Is it possible to set the region of the database/storage? Or is there any timeframe when this can be configured? For GDPR reasons I cannot use hosting that doesn’t support storage in the EU.
The author is not a scientist, wrote a book called »Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death« and he cites only one single paper. Totally untrustworthy
They publish peer-reviewed articles in decent-quality publications.
How you judge the latter is tougher and very domain specific, but each field usually has 1-2 "target" journals where the best work goes, and another 2-3 "second choice" journals that aren't as prestigious but still have good works. Usually the research topics going to the second choice journals just aren't as sexy as the work that gets into the target journals.
It's a completely separate argument than what I was responding to.
I personally agree with you, but thats my specific lifestyle, and I put my money into other investments. But generally, owning a house is a good place to park your assets if you live a "typical" life.
One of the biggest reasons I want more landOWNER residents? So that my neighbours actually care what's happening in the neighborhood+condo, and do something about.
I'm renting from a Chinese investor. He doesn't speak English and doesn't have a clue what's going on around here, and doesn't care to get involved with helping things run better.
I can communicate my issues with the real estate agent who handles the unit for him, but he's just going to shoot off a short email and move on with his day.
Over 50% of this building is this way. The board of directors has a huge accountability issue because of this, and residents and owners are suffering for it.
If you rent, you care what happens locally, but you have no say.
