[oersted]

It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence.

One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.

[pdonis]

> One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though.

Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.

[oersted]

Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources.

As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.

[pdonis]

> antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time

That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down.

> It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company

That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example.

What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.

[oersted]

I do think it's an interesting idea, I'm just musing.

I think a worker-owned for-profit union might quickly start hiring other kinds of workers and become a regular worker-owned company, because often selling actual end products and services is more profitable than selling one flavour of labour.

Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions? Or that there should be a special kind of corporation that is a for-profit union and has some restrictions of who they can accept and what they can offer?

It's an intriguing twist on communism: instead of abolishing private property and having "the people" (the authoritarian government) own everything, you keep private ownership and free-markets, but you restrict company ownership to the active employees, instead of capital investors and/or initial founders.

I'm not making any value judgement here, again I'm just musing.

[pdonis]

> Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions?

Once the companies start branching out to sell other things besides the service of organized labor, they're no longer just an alternative to unions. In what follows, I'm only talking about the aspect of selling organized labor as a service.

I do believe that workers owning companies that sell the service of organized labor is better for the workers than unions as they exist now in the sense that it would do better at improving the workers' bargaining position with the management of the companies that union workers now work for. But it also exposes the workers to business risks that unions as they are now don't have to face--the companies do. That's an unavoidable tradeoff--if you want more of the upside, you have to be willing to take more of the risk. I think that one of the main obstacles to unions as they are now properly representing workers' interests is their refusal to face that fact. Making the unions into worker-owned corporations would force the workers to face the tradeoff directly and decide which way they want to make it--take the increased risk and get more upside (by becoming owners of the worker-owned company selling organized labor as a service), or give up some upside to avoid the risk (by remaining as traditional employees of the companies they work for now).

> you restrict company ownership to the active employees

I'm not advocating this, at least not as a matter of law. A worker-owned corporation could certainly make it part of its charter that you have to be a worker in the relevant industry or with an appropriate set of skills in order to own a share of the company. In that sense the company would have no employees--every worker-owner's income would be dividends based on share ownership. But other companies would still be free not to do this--to have a more traditional ownership structure in which employees don't usually own any shares.

[Arainach]

>That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down

This is nonsense. Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system. Oil barrel prices were far from the only thing controlled by the standard oil monopoly.

[pdonis]

> Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system.

Not in the cases I gave.

> Oil barrel prices

Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean crude oil, Standard Oil was not a seller of crude oil; it was a buyer. It bought crude oil and refined it into various products that it sold. The prices of those refined products went up after the breakup.

[danaris]

Specifically, during the Reagan Administration, the official policy on how to interpret antitrust law shifted from one major economic school to another—I'm not fully up on the details, but my understanding is that the latter is the Chicago School, and that a big part of the shift is to focus not on how much of the market the company dominates, or whether a merger will be bad for competition or employees, but rather to look solely at consumer prices.

This is a terrible metric to use as a single guide, especially when it is also (in the case of mergers & acquisitions) focused solely on the immediate aftermath of the merger.

Lina Khan was starting to push a shift back away from this deliberate giveaway to corporate interests, but then Trump was elected again, and any hope of that went out the window.