Chapter 427 - Worker Cooperatives

Well, since the workers in a co-op earn more if the company is more profitable, the incentives are more or less the same. I've looked through all the literature I could find on the subject, and I have found no concrete evidence that classic corporations outperform co-ops in any meaningful way, as in not statistically significant. Though I did find several studies which suggest that both systems perform similarly. The biggest disadvantage a co-op has is that it's harder to get started, since workers are hard to coordinate and often don't have the seed money to start a new business just like that. Both problems Corco would hope to alleviate with policies like the ones described in the chapter.

Michael Vonica

I imagine that Corco doesn't expect his first attempts to become the be all and end all of all his future policy. He probably sees this as only a beginning, setting everything off on the right path. If the specifics of his systems are found to not be working as well as they should, things can be reworked from there.

Xaver Klein

how will alcer get paid for his idea of a ring bayonett? does he then license it to his worker cooperative? i personally am more a fan of the proportional worker cooperative model anyway, where the shares are not divided equally, but based on how well people perform. that model only needs competition among different cooperatives for skilled workers. so someone who works hard and smart can get a higher share elsewhere, thus incentivising his own cooperative to value his work more. that same method also allows punishing slackers without outright firing them. if enough workers vote that youre a slacker, they can cut your shares a bit. if they do it out of malicious intent like some sort of Clique forming that aims to maximise their own profit at the expense of everyone else, then everyone else can join another cooperative leaving the old factory to die.

Michael Vonica

In the far future, will worker cooperatives, which actually care about and don't exploit their workers, stay competitive with buisnesses that do anything for profit? After all, I would imagine that, if staying competitive means that profits fall in the short term, workers in a cooperative wouldn't be very happy about it. While a less employee responsive business would not care, and could devote all the resources they aren't devoting to their employees to increasing profit. But I don't know how any of this stuff works, and it really isn't all that applicable to the situation in book. I assume that everything will find a way to work.