I'm very interested in Obran, which is a worker cooperative that converts and holds privately held businesses into coops.
I'm very interested in Obran, which is a worker cooperative that converts and holds privately held businesses into coops.
Seems like a lot of potential for scale and impact. Anyone know of similar organizations?
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I think human nature is such that any cooperative can work up to a limited size, kind of like primitive tribes - up to 150 people. In order to do your part honestly, you have to know most/all members personally, otherwise an incentive to slack on the job is too tempting...
And then one sees the manager/coordinator, sitting on their ass in air conditioned office, while most others are sweating outside (in case of farms) or in the workshop/garage...
You're right that cooperatives above a certain size can't be direct democracies. I do think we need to be able to cooperate at scale in a democratic way, like representative democracy - otherwise how do countries work? (Not very well some might argue) but if we don't develop an alternative to the googles and amazons of the world then we'll never outcompete the current system.
Direct democracy is possible at scale with technology.
I'm sure there are certain issues where direct democracy would be appropriate, regardless how big the cooperative is. But technological reasons aren't the issue. A manager is delegated authority to make decisions because it's inefficient to involve members in every single matter.
The problem is one of scope. I think we've historically delegated more than we should because we couldn't do direct voting well.
For example, I feel that people should have an active say into which categories their tax money goes.
For managers, they don't need to be given the same control they have now
There are also a lot of things where not everyone in a society needs to vote on something. Do men need to have a vote on the type of tampon that is stocked in the bathroom? Do the other departments need to weigh in on the butcher's scheduled hours?
It really does have a limit where once you go more than a couple layers decisions get made by people who are not involved or invested in whatever is being decided.
perhaps it should be treated like a priority list: direct democracy for every single thing won’t work, but perhaps if there’s a monthly vote on the top 10 issues people have (as prioritised by the members of the coop somehow: maybe you get 5 votes to spend however you like in the issues list?) and the rest is delegated
Please don't use terms like 'primitive tribes' - whoever you think of when using this word might want to discuss the definition of 'primitive' with you. Because whoever limits their group size to about 150 ends up being less primitive than those who never question the infinite growth of everything.
I'd argue that this is a benefit. Too many companies are way bigger than they need to be. Instead you could take a more federated approach and have a cooperative of cooperatives. Each location would be it's own worker owned business, and each of these would in turn get to work cooperatively together to decide on branding and larger strategy. You could have representatives from each store and maybe still have everyone vote for a cooperative president.
I don’t disagree with your premise but I do think the latter two should be mostly avoidable as issues. If the workers are involved in the decisions then they would be able to spend (or decide it is not worth the expense) on cooling technology (AC for indoors or any other outdoor/personal solutions). Seems less of an issue than saying corporate doesn’t care etc.