this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Antiwork
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A community for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
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Essential Reads
Start here! These are probably the most talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
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What I like about this solution is that it does to some extent directly address the problem of negotiating power. I am skeptical about the practicality and sustainability though. For example there was a worker owned brewery I was aware of, which had an employment scheme in which accumulated time in the company translated into shares of ownership. The brewery became successful, and the now somewhat wealthy workers preferred to keep their wealth rather than continuing to distribute it to new employees, and so they voted to sell and accept a payout. I'm not sure this is an easily solved issue; it seems that any financial endeavor will have winners and losers, and the winners will do what they can to retain their position.
This is because co-ops these days still have to compete in a capitalist market, and need to be ruthless to remain competitive. I'm not saying this is good. Just that it's not a problem inherent to worker management - it's a problem with the system they have to work under.
If this worker management extended to the whole economy - i.e. socialism - then these incentives would no longer exist. The economy would no longer be a competition requiring ruthless tactics.
Isn't this solved if you can't sell your shares?
I don't think it would be. What happens when someone leaves the company or is pushed out? Automatically lose their shares? Who determines what proportion of shares or pay you get for which roles or level of seniority? What about nepotism? Ownership implies control, control gets used to advance your own interests.
This is far enough down the line with enough positive progress to be had in the meantime (e.g. German-style employee representation in boards, greater share grants to employees, etc.) that I'm comfortable figuring that one out later.
My gut feel would be that you share profits while you work for the company and lose the shares when you leave. There would be a fairly equitable allocation of shares irrespective of roles with employees to vote for greater allocations if needs dictate. Nepotism would be dramatically reduced compared to today with a more democratic workplace. Much like I like my countries democratic, I like my workplaces democratic - the interests of the workers are the interests of the nation.
In that case there's an issue with long term decision making and hiring; if you are planning to leave soon and will have no stake in the future of the company, there isn't much incentive to take it into account when voting on decisions. Likewise there is reason to be much more reluctant to hire unknown people for this reason - why let an unaccountable person have influence over crucial decisions? In the case of a worker owned company that has become very successful (say to the point where everyone is paid $150 an hour), those grandfathered-in workers are in a situation where the value of their employment contract greatly exceeds the market value of their labor itself. Even if they are prevented from selling that directly, they still have control over revenue so long as they retain their position. The natural response there I think is to want to heavily favor new hires that you are personally connected to; where you already have an interest in their enrichment, and who have external reasons to be invested in your interests and the interests of the company, which is why I mention nepotism and think it would be a bigger problem. Removing the possibility of selling something doesn't remove the ability or incentive to use that thing to enrich yourself, the pressure is all still there.
Why would they be? My gut feel is that for this sort of thing to work without problems cannot be done with a single simple change or rule, because that one change isn't going to be able to convince people to favor the nation above the wealth and status of themselves and their families, or remove all the conflicts of interest that exist between those. Especially not people used to the current system. I think it would be more effective to redistribute wealth independently from employment to keep things simple and let markets keep working without too much unexpected distortion. With a higher baseline and less desperation it would be more feasible to form worker collectives to begin with, without a need for state mandates enforcing them to be operated in a particular way.
You're comparing that unfavorably to today, where 1 person who may be leaving is making that decision compared to a group of people who are far less likely to all be leaving. My proposal is an improvement on the current state.
They're accountable to the workers that voted then in to that position and can vote them out. This is compared to what accountability today?
With decision making being democratised across employees who have a vested interest in the success of the company, this would be a smaller problem than today where one unaccountable manager can make a unilateral decision.
Because the vast majority of the population works for a living. Handing the wealth and reins of power to unproductive owners as we do today is massively detrimental to the economy. People would be democratically acting in their own self-interest.
In a more equitable society, there would be less motivation to collectivise, but whatever gets the job done. To reach that point, we'd need to engage in some pretty fundamental restructuring of the economy though - I'm not sure why we wouldn't just keep on trucking toward better outcomes rather than stopping half way.
The Mondragon Corporation is an interesting example of a cooperative scaling up https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation