Shifting to worker cooperatives and innovation on the business ownership side.
Imagine Amazon as a coop?
Shifting to worker cooperatives and innovation on the business ownership side.
Imagine Amazon as a coop?
The hard parts are:
1. capitalization - once you have investors who have more say than employees, it's no longer very cooperative
2. legal - the structures for for-profit or hierarchical non-profits are well defined and there are any number of experienced law firms that can help structure a business, while for a cooperative not so much
3. structural - there are a thousand books published every year about for-profit businesses. There are comparatively few about starting and running a cooperative. Although the latter have more signal than the noise of the former.
These aren't insurmountable problems, though. They've been solved before.
| Amazon as a coop
A cooperative Amazon would probably work best as a federation of cooperatives.
We have about 18,000 owners, everyone had to work a 4 hour shift every month, and we did something like $50MM in annual revenue competing directly with whole foods.
We would also provide training, startup capital and member labor to people who wanted to start their own coop.
I always felt like a well organized group could take over the PSFC and create a new tech model and then scale from within the existing democratic infrastructure.