Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by solidninja 700 days ago
Well maybe "taking over the market" is also a monopolistic and anti-competitive practice and if we had say, working regulation that forbade the existence of these behemoth companies then the landscape of value would look a little different.
2 comments
Eddy_Viscosity2 700 days ago
This is maybe an underappreciated point, an employee-owned company with in a monopoly (or near monopoly) market position will act just as aggressively to screw over their captured consumer base as any other private ownership model. The employees may be better off, but the rest of us will suffer the same.
link
throwaway7ahgb 700 days ago
Agreed, COOPs don't fundamentally change human behavior which has doses of greed. A large COOP monopoly will suffer the same fate as others'.
link
shkkmo 700 days ago
This is an assumption and one that I believe is faulty. Humans' caring is often related to the degree of connection. Employees at a company are more closely connected to their customers than investors and are thus more likely to care more about those customers.

Monopolies are still bad either way, but I doubt that the failure modes at employee owned monoploes is the same as at outside investor owned monopolies.

link
photonthug 699 days ago
Yeah. Saying "COOPs don't fundamentally change human behavior which has doses of greed" is like saying that a kingdom works the same way as a democracy since hey, it's all just humans. Simply involving more decision makers is a meaningful change. Certainly involving more decision makers that are outside of the business/legal/accounting class is a meaningful change.
link
shkkmo 699 days ago
Technically a worker owned Co-op is different from a company with an ESOP as described in this article. The article it links to has more details: https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-by-the-numb...

There are a multitude of ways that employee ownership can be encouraged, required, or ownership can be limited to employees.

link
throwaway7ahgb 700 days ago
The OP is postulating they would look different but not better. Nobody has refuted the claim that if COOPs were better they would be more popular , but they are not.

Uplifting the entire global financial system to make a COOP more attractive through regulation wouldn't change this.

link