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Genuinely speaking, do you really think Amazon will continue to operate if the “workers” took it over from the (evil) executives and owned all the power?

In my opinion, it’ll fall apart in no time, because not a single decision will be made to progress work and to solve problems, and every problem will be a vote to people who don’t understand the consequences and will prefer to serve their personal needs. Am I wrong?

It is a straw man that democracy means every problem is put to a vote. Workers can jointly decide to delegate decision-making to executives and managers. The difference in worker coops is that these executives and managers are ultimately democratically accountable to the people doing the work

So you’re saying someone will want to act as an executive, but without getting the executive pay?

Why would anyone want to do that stressful job and responsibility, instead of just being a cog in the wheel and typing on a computer or moving boxes? Who decides who does what? And what happens if the managers disagree with half the “workers/owners” when a decision has to be made that benefits a part but hurts another? Who has the authority to put their foot down for the “greater good” even though half the workers don’t like their decision?

The executives can be paid more. In a system where all firms are worker coops, it would be a much more compressed difference between the least paid and most paid worker in a firm than the absurd pay differences we see today.

A manger in a worker coop has the same decision-making rights as in any company. The difference is that they are democratically accountable to the workers instead of being accountable to the employer, an alien legal party. Essentially, workers hold all voting shares

You said a bunch of nice things, but you ignored the core of the problem. If workers hold all voting shares, what happens when they’re split on an issue? Who can tell them to STFU for the better of the company?

Another similar question: What if there’s an issue that will lead to half of them getting fired? Like, say, a technological advancement? So if work can be optimized by 200% by adding computers, but then 50% of the people are useless then. Wouldn’t the workers vote to stay employed/paid instead of saving the company that can be destroyed in a competitive market where better, faster companies can emerge if this company doesn’t adopt the newer tech? Who will make that decision?

Better to have them making the decision than capitalists, who make more money the more they pay workers less

“Better” is in your opinion. I need answers based on concerns and problems that happens in the real world. A fast-paced world.

Assuming the revenue of the company doesn’t have massive growth (which is the normal situation unless a breakthrough happened), we need to hire more people who have the skills needed to keep up with the market. So, assuming we want to keep everyone (including useless people who’d rather have beer instead of reading a book to learn the new stuff), the income of everyone will just go down over time. Eventually, with no one getting fire there won’t be enough money to go around to feed them. What am I missing here?

Worker coops are better ethically not just based on opinion. The workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs. By the usual ethical principle that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party, the workers should jointly be legally responsible for the produced outputs and liabilities for the used-up inputs.

1. Worker coops can fire people.
2. Worker coops can charge initial membership fee when a new worker joins.

OK, at least we agree we can fire people. That answers my question. The circumstances aren’t important. This idea that people can’t be fired is just ridiculous.

Do you think communities will be happy seeing their friends/family being fired, and not understanding why? This actually reminds me of the movie Casino (1995), where Robert De Niro fires that Texan guy for incompetence, and then hell breaks loose due to relatives not understanding how that works. This is human nature. People will always prefer to keep an incompetent relative vs firing them for a good reason, no matter what.

Agreed. It’s a nepotism problem. I’m just drawing the picture that removing money from the picture basically makes relationships the new currency. It’s basically how life used to be a long time ago, and those who were closer to the leader got better jobs with perks. People will always find a way to benefit and will centralize power eventually. I can’t say much about hypotheticals and whether your coop will fix that, but in my opinion, history suggests that we’ll just end up with a new system of power.

I never said anything about removing money.

What you are talking about is called social capital accumulation, which is a problem in any system.

A justification for worker coops is the moral principle of assigning legal responsibility to the de facto responsible party. In an employer-employee relationship, the employer receives 100% of the legal responsibility despite the employee being inextricably co-responsible. This violates the aforementioned principle

Well, I don’t think you can use written laws to fight human plans to centralize power. I guess our current system is proof of that. People will always find a way to centralize that power to benefit themselves and their groups.

But anyway. I guess we’re getting into a dead end. This is becoming opinion stuff at this point, whether this will work. I’ll have to think more about this stuff.