I’m going to come to the conclusion that people are simply uneducated. Simply based on the responses I’ve already gotten.
Let me prop up a very common thing that people love to absolute hate - rich companies. Particularly, Wal-Mart. They say everything and anything to bash the company. While some of the things said is valid, like running small businesses out and maybe corporate doesn’t have all of the answers and the Waltons are particularly greedy.
Yet when I decided to google Wal-Mart’s operating expenses, we’re talking hefty amounts to run all of the stores it has, plus it’s operations overseas. It’s still a lot and I felt a ting in the back of my mind that maybe there is a bit of a reasoning for why a company as big as Wal-Mart has to do things like cut down expenses or lower wages a little.
And people simply don’t understand how that part of business works. They’re not in the shoes of the people operating a big company and they don’t understand how much and what it takes to run a giant franchise. They think it’s as easy as being sat in a position and all of the money the company is withholding is all in some giant vault, that’d be withholding billions that they can distribute or something.
So is all of the hate that something like this gets a little exaggerated because people don’t understand or is it justified?
In order to understand where people are coming from when they criticize this system, you must understand the difference between a worker co-op and a privately owned company.
Most people think,
But to those of us criticizing the current system, that’s like saying dictatorships and republics are “just different examples of governments,” and that aside from a different managerial structure, both kinds of government fundamentally serve the same purpose.
They don’t. When it comes to dictatorships vs representative governments, the entire social contract is different. The entire relationship between government official and citizen is different.
And so is the relationship between worker and manager.
Free Speech
The citizen in a dictatorship and worker in an… autocratic company (for want of a better word) must both self-police their speech, asking “will this get me prosecuted/fired?” Just as a dictatorship will throw you in prison for using a harsh tone when praising the dictator, taking a harsh tone with your boss can lose you your job. There’s a pretty good NPR article about what bosses are legally allowed to fire you for. And even having different political beliefs is on the list. Actual starvation can be inflicted on both the disobedient worker and the disobedient citizen when their environments are run autocratically.
Meanwhile, the citizen in a democracy/republic and the worker in a cooperative have no such limitations. Their speech is only limited by a general, “do not harm others” guideline that gets spelled out on a case by case basis – in courts, if we’re talking about democracy, or by committee if we’re talking about co-ops.
Voice
Again, in both an autocratic company and an autocratic government, the citizen has no control over where money is spent and doesn’t get to choose which contractors/suppliers the organization uses.
Contrast that with democratic workplaces/governments, where voters are constantly discussing the budget, audits, social security, how to trim waste, how much to pay local farmers for ingredients, etc…
Meaning not only must you agree to become subservient in order to continue working at an autocratic company. You also get no voice in the organization that sustains itself (at least in part) off of your labor. The only decision with regards to the dictatorship is not how it’s run or who it benefits. Only, “don’t like it here? Run for the border and hope you don’t get shot on the way.” And your only decision in the autocratic company is the same decision: “don’t like it here? Quit your job here and hope you can get hired at a new company before you become homeless.”
These are irreconcilable differences.
You don’t say “well, whichever government comes out on top must be the fittest, strongest government. Let the arena of war be an impartial judge deciding which governments are superior.”
To the contrary, you most likely recoil in shock when a dictatorship invades a democracy. You most likely cheer on every strategic victory the democracy achieves.
Because the state of existence of a citizen under a representative government is considered worthy of protection independently of whether it helps that government achieve military victories. The rights of a citizen are considered more important than the question of whether a government that protects and respects those rights can be efficient.
All we ask of you is to consider the same for a worker. To consider the possibility that a worker might have certain unalienable rights that must be protected even if it’s hypothetically inefficient (in reality co-ops are more efficient, btw. So in order to even consider this choice, one must first commit the fallacy of affirming the disjunct. Just like democracies are also more efficient. The only reason democratic workplaces are less common is because unlike viruses, cancer, and companies owned by individuals and/or shareholders, co-ops do not have the capacity to induce rapid grow by destroying their host and hoarding their host’s resources.) Anyways, consider the possibility that the worker has rights. Consider the possibility that the worker who sustains a company ought to have some voice in how the company should be operated.