Neat project and I love the motivations behind it.
A few friendly recommendations:
• The images on the results pages are in desperate need of optimization. Plenty of 500KB+ thumbnails and even a couple 2MB+ thumbnails I saw in there. Could easily be optimized 90%+ with no loss of quality
• The instant live search can be a little distracting, particularly paired with the heavy loading of the thumbnails
• I know you don't want to create your own full ecomm site, but even just a hover PDP without having to click off could be nice, if you could pull in the key product details. I know the goal is to support the destination sites but it was a lot of back and forth to me
• Any ability to validate that a product is available vs sold out (and note that on the results pages) would be appreciated. Probably 75% of the items I checked on ttgaming.quest were sold out. A banner across items not in stock would be helpful. Or a filter on the search results page.
Curious that you include REI. It's a retail coop model, not a worker-owned coop.
Apropos: the way they ended the REI Adventures program is behavior consistent with a normal big-box chain. That is, announce the end simultaneously to their customers and REI's partner adventure companies, provide refunds to customers, but don't forward the relevant same customer info to the partners for rebooking because that's REI's proprietary data.
If that's also behavior consistent with a worker-owned coop, I have to ask: what is the social benefit of worker-owned over a normal corporate structure? And if it's not, why point the user to REI for a pair of hiking shorts?
REI changed about 25 years ago and it took a while for people to notice/the changes to filter through enough. Was talking recently about similar changes with MEC in Canada with a family friend who joined MEC as member 200-250. He had a chance to be in the first ~25 members but wasn't sure they'd still exist in a year.
I think there still is value in a retail coop model but I think REI strayed from the area where it could work well. They may not have been able to run forever without changing but the way it has changed is a bit sad to see. I suspect there has to be a strong mission statement and way to hold to it for a retail coop to thrive long term. Or maybe just to keep the size small enough to avoid some of the harder questions.
Appreciate the feedback and the info. I included REI in the directory (labeled as customer co-op not a worker co-op) but not in the search results but now I realize that's lame. I'm just gonna take them off entirely.
I think they're saying "If REI makes the list because this is common in the space, what is the benefit of worker owned?" in trying to bolster the case that REI should not be listed.
If many of the worker-owned co-ops would prevent access to relevant customer data to prevent individual workers from developing relations with customer without the co-op in the middle, then that's something that could potentially be addressed by other co-ops in that you could deliberately structure it such that the co-op is either optionally or deliberately a platform for fostering worker/customer interactions rather than co-op/customer interactions.
Because if the co-op exists for the sake of the co-op while splitting profit with the workers, that is different from a co-op that exists solely to maximally aid the individual workers.
Kind of like the back/front of house tip debate. Should chefs be payed as tipped salaries? Should we all get regular wages and evenly split tips? Even in front of house, if Sarah is consistently pulling twice my average tips, it's not really fair to her (or technically her customers) that we split tips because the customers were so taken by her service that they wanted to assist her whereas I'm just some random person from their point of view and contributed nothing to her customers from her point of view. The analogy is that the company wants to split the tips because it benefits them by allowing them to more easily retain employees in situations where they feel it's worth keeping the ones that aren't getting big tips because their performance is "good enough" and they don't want the spend on hiring to replace - the benefit is too the company and the 'worse' wait staff, not the one who's actually responsible for the value add.
Very nice and appreciate the effort you put into making this.
Some Improvements that could help:
the location search could be an actual map with pins which would be easier to use
some kind of tags for the different appareal items would help clarify which one, currently i have to click and search each vendor for things im looking for. Specifically autistic friendly / sensory clothing items.
Seconding location based lookups. I might not be looking for something specific, but if I know of businesses nearby worth patronizing, when I need that good/service, I'll visit them then.
Nice site! Maybe add link correction? Sometimes I found myself going to sites and though target landing page was wrong or out-of-date, surfing the site a bit, found similar or same product still offered. Would have to have some way of trusting / verifying the corrections but some people would find it satisfying to offer fix the bad links I bet.
I read this post while sitting at Broken Clock Brewing here in Minneapolis, one of the 13 listed and my favorite brewery. There are actually 2 in my city. I actually picked up an ownership card and anyone can buy in for $200, but dividends don't start to pay out until some indefinite point where the voting owners decide the business can sustain it.
I founded a software engineering co-op. We're always interested in finding new members. https://508.dev
Right now our main revenue is through subcontracting, and admittedly we haven't pulled a fresh gig in a couple months, mostly because most of us are working a gig which limits our ability to BD - a limitation we've been kicking around how to resolve for ages.
We want to come up with some alternative revenue streams that aren't directly selling our labor. I soft launched one recently (a mock interview thing that I'm not quite ready to link completely publicly) but I'm also really interested in ideas other people have.
My goal for the co-op has been to make it a greater than sum of parts actualizer for each of our potentials. So far it's been pretty good on that front but for me the big win is gonna be if we can get a revenue generating project out.
Anyway, rambling. Feel free to reply with questions or email me (email is better since I'm trying to stay off HN due to internet comment addiction). https://508.dev/join has more info on joining.
Random fun fact: all our internal SaaS is FOSS and self hosted! Excluding discord. Matrix didn't work well for us.
Nice site, although wow I downloaded 60mb of data by searching for two things... I reccomend you just make people click search or smth before fetching api results, otherwise keep up the good work (=
Depending on the security of the sites you link to you might be able to show them locally in an iframe so users are only redirected if absolutely necessary and you can give an easy way back to search results/landing page
It will be intresing an automation that check online for word like “worker cooperative”, “worker-owned” to find new candidate that fit.
Ofc the hard part is confirming if it's genuinely worker-owned, so keeping that step human makes sense. But the discovery/shortlisting could be largely automated crawl the web, score candidates by how many co-op signals they hit, and present the top ones for you to vet.
Would be happy to help prototype something like this if you're interested (i really like your idea).
Really nice project. I wonder if discovery could be partly automated by crawling for worker owned or co op signals, then leaving the final verification to humans.
I've been thinking about this recently: I think our economy is fake.
Restaurants are expensive lately, but still, as a former restaurant owner, even the expensive 10$ takeout burrito I don't think would be possible without the great many laws the supply chain breaks. Undocumented labor from the farms through to the restaurants, for starters. Then the fact that the equipment we use is built in places that don't have our labor or health and safety laws, which lets those places manufacture for much cheaper prices, which feels like cheating.
If we actually had a level playing field and didn't break laws, I don't think most of the luxuries we enjoy could actually exist at anywhere near current prices (and thus not at all).
I never thought I'd see anything like that easily accessible on hacker news. (Edit: I say that because this is a project by independent artists that has no real hope for commercial exit -- monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.)
A lot of co-op talk around this thread, if anyone else has worked in / founded co-ops, I would love to chat, email in my profile. I founded one about 5 years ago and have been kinda shooting from the hip, would love to trade ideas.
The search field loses keypresses on mobile. I haven’t looked at the code, but I’m assuming it uses a React-style value binding but has some synchronous processing before it propagates the new field value back into the state variable. That is a really terrible pattern.
> There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.
I disagree. Co-ops are inherently democratic. Privately owned business is inherently anti-democratic. The difference only becomes starker as the scale increases. That alone makes it seem more ethical to me, before you even get to examining the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power than rule by one, as well as other effects.
Why does it seem more ethical for the organization that makes your daily bread to be democratic?
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
In the long run, you likely also benefit as a consumer from a diverse retail ecosystem, and worker co-ops in general tend to support this much better than traditional capitalist for-profit corporations.
The typical (but not universal) model in worker owned co-ops is for them to fork off new "branches" that are historically related to the original but otherwise independent.
The result tends to be a much more diverse set of businesses, some of which do better than others and some of which are more attuned to your preferences than the others.
Small capitalist for-profit businesses do the same, but we've seen how that ends up, with vertical integration and mega-corporations owning nearly all of them.
I already expressed why I think that more democracy makes workplaces more ethical immediately after where I said that I think so. If you'd like me to expand on this: governments and large companies are more alike than you think. Both of them are huge power structures that control lots of people. And both are quite powerful - your job can have as much of an impact on your life as the government you live under. If unchecked, both devolve into a hierarchical tug-of-war between the interests of its higher and lower rungs. Democracy works against this to ideally create a more equalized power structure.
Now that I established these parallels, my question to you is - why do we as a society treat democracy as sacred and essential in one type of hierarchy but not another? Why don't any of your concerns apply to your government? For instance, would you live in a dictatorship if you got to avoid the difficult and annoying chores of going out to vote, informing yourself politically or listening to politicians endlessly bicker about things?
Your examples seem to just boil down to absurdism. They don't indicate what is so wrong with people voting on things in a company, they're just exaggerations to make the idea seem inherently ridiculous. Bakeries don't spend days arguing about whether they need to offer one of the most popular product variants for sale, and if someone did, this would in no way impede the customer's ability to just buy a loaf of bread thanks. But something like a tech co-op will spend time arguing about which risky investments, future moves and needed sacrifices they're willing to make, walking away from it knowing that this is what they agree is best for everyone. Which frankly seems a lot better than far-upper management decreeing that everyone must now do XYZ even if their only intention is to pump company valuations short-term without any regard for future stability. The fact that co-ops tend to be more stable seems to agree with that.
> I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
You have an illusion of choice right now between sesame or non sesame bread through the low-resolution "voting" mechanism of the market, which doesn't actually consider your desires when counting votes, merely the profitability between your desires and a supplier's margin. If you like sesame, but if it's not profitable enough, too bad, no sesame for you. "They can charge more," "someone will fill the niche," yes we've been told that about capitalism for the last century, yet it's never been true, so I guess it was a lie. Think of all the products people want that we just can't get anymore because some big org decided we can't have it, or better yet, think of how nearly monopolized industries have leveraged their power to move markets towards more profitable directions. Clothes - big, baggy, unicolor blobs. Phones - black squares.
It's not only more ethical for breadmakers to he democratic, it's simply more efficient in terms of delivering what the people want and need. Markets are a low resolution, exploitable mechanism that can lead to contrary incentives. Better to just cast a vote.
By the way I would add that co-ops are more ethical because if it's set up correctly, nobody is profiting from your labor more than yourself. In a traditional org, the vast majority of your productive profit is captured and used in a way you have no say - lately mostly to line the pockets of shareholders and a captured boys club of nepo MBA types that often don't even have that much experience in your industry. In a co-op, you the worker decide what happens with the profit margin on top of your labor. You can use it to have more money for yourself (and your coworkers), or you can invest it more intelligently in the business than an exec thousands of miles away in the private jet your profit margin pays for. This also works out better for your customers and users.
I agree with everything you've written here, and am a big fan of worker-owned co-ops. However:
> Better to just cast a vote.
It's not hard to see "do I buy the sesame or non-sesame loaf this week?" as a much more efficient method of voting and vote tallying than actually voting.
I think the most successful worker owned co-ops tend to appear to the outside world as more or less indistinguishable from a capitalist for-profit, but internally are quite different.
Does adding democracy automatically increase ethical value?
Suppose a group of racists form a coffee co-op dedicated to some silliness like "keeping the brown away from your brown". Or a group of homophobes that votes that their new t-shirt line should all riff on "killing fags protects families".
Are those companies more ethical than a privately owned org that just wants any capable worker and any customer with currency?
Closed democracies can and do make all sorts of evil decisions all of the time.
>the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power
I don't think that's a clear victory for ethical behavior. A sufficiently motivated democracy (as above) could easily use such a mechanism to check the single ethical person's power from "ruining their vision" by suggesting something so asinine (in their opinion) as compassion or accessibility.
For more information on why I think democracy makes things more ethical, see the other reply I left in this thread.
But to address your counterexamples:
1. None of your examples are countered by private organizations, they can and do make decisions motivated by ideology all the time. In fact, whenever you see real news of companies doing or supporting insane things, you can almost certainly be sure these companies are privately owned and that the insanity is passed down from the top.
2. For the rest of companies that really don't care about ideology and only care about making money, there's the argument that making money isn't a neutral standpoint, but one of chaos that just supports whatever is profitable. If putting people into concentration camps based on their race became culturally accepted, you know that discount stores will start selling clothing with hateful graphics, news sites would put up real-time counters and tech companies would develop exterior cameras with racial scanning and automatic reporting to cater to consumer demands.
3. Most crucially, democracies usually have a moderating effect on people's viewpoints. It's trivial to find companies ruled by crazy people with many normal subordinates going along because they need to make a living. It's a lot more difficult to find one that's stacked with insane people that produce insane decisions on average. Democracy lends itself to compromise, authoritarian rule lends itself to sycophancy that reinforces whatever comes from up top, no matter if it's sane or sensible.
totally. we can badger people to buy from better companies but that seems so tough. better to just make it easier for people to buy from better companies :)
I wanted to buy from worker-owned cooperatives but there was no single place to see what they actually sell. So I scraped the product catalogs from ~60 worker-owned co-op stores and made them searchable.
22,000+ products: coffee, chocolate, clothing, books, home goods, etc. You search, find something, and click through to buy directly from the co-op's store. Nothing goes through me.
There's also a section for finding worker-owned coffee shops, restaurants, and bars by city (110+ listings, mostly US).
Static Next.js site, JSON-backed search. No accounts, no tracking, no ads.
Happy to answer questions about the data or how I identified which businesses are actually worker-owned. Please reach out if you want to add your co-op!
How did you identify how businesses are worker-owned? Curious how it compares to other verification methods e.g. what my co-op had to go through to get a .coop domain as determined by these guys: https://identity.coop/policies/ Wasn't too hard or anything, just wondering what people are looking for to verify co-op-ness
For categories, I guess software engineering would go under "other?" Did you find many services co-ops? I'm aware of a couple other software engineering co-ops/collectives in Europe but none in the USA. Seems to be a bit barren for some reason.
Neat project and I love the motivations behind it.
A few friendly recommendations:
• The images on the results pages are in desperate need of optimization. Plenty of 500KB+ thumbnails and even a couple 2MB+ thumbnails I saw in there. Could easily be optimized 90%+ with no loss of quality
• The instant live search can be a little distracting, particularly paired with the heavy loading of the thumbnails
• I know you don't want to create your own full ecomm site, but even just a hover PDP without having to click off could be nice, if you could pull in the key product details. I know the goal is to support the destination sites but it was a lot of back and forth to me
• Any ability to validate that a product is available vs sold out (and note that on the results pages) would be appreciated. Probably 75% of the items I checked on ttgaming.quest were sold out. A banner across items not in stock would be helpful. Or a filter on the search results page.
Keep up the good work!
Would also like geographical filtering for both local delivery (shipping emissions) and "can I go there"
Curious that you include REI. It's a retail coop model, not a worker-owned coop.
Apropos: the way they ended the REI Adventures program is behavior consistent with a normal big-box chain. That is, announce the end simultaneously to their customers and REI's partner adventure companies, provide refunds to customers, but don't forward the relevant same customer info to the partners for rebooking because that's REI's proprietary data.
If that's also behavior consistent with a worker-owned coop, I have to ask: what is the social benefit of worker-owned over a normal corporate structure? And if it's not, why point the user to REI for a pair of hiking shorts?
REI changed about 25 years ago and it took a while for people to notice/the changes to filter through enough. Was talking recently about similar changes with MEC in Canada with a family friend who joined MEC as member 200-250. He had a chance to be in the first ~25 members but wasn't sure they'd still exist in a year.
I think there still is value in a retail coop model but I think REI strayed from the area where it could work well. They may not have been able to run forever without changing but the way it has changed is a bit sad to see. I suspect there has to be a strong mission statement and way to hold to it for a retail coop to thrive long term. Or maybe just to keep the size small enough to avoid some of the harder questions.
> REI changed about 25 years ago
Changed how? It was always a consumer co-op, never a worker owned co-op. I joined in 1981.
Appreciate the feedback and the info. I included REI in the directory (labeled as customer co-op not a worker co-op) but not in the search results but now I realize that's lame. I'm just gonna take them off entirely.
> what is the social benefit of worker-owned
No capital-risking, and then rent-seeking, middleman, if I’m following.
I think they're saying "If REI makes the list because this is common in the space, what is the benefit of worker owned?" in trying to bolster the case that REI should not be listed.
If many of the worker-owned co-ops would prevent access to relevant customer data to prevent individual workers from developing relations with customer without the co-op in the middle, then that's something that could potentially be addressed by other co-ops in that you could deliberately structure it such that the co-op is either optionally or deliberately a platform for fostering worker/customer interactions rather than co-op/customer interactions.
Because if the co-op exists for the sake of the co-op while splitting profit with the workers, that is different from a co-op that exists solely to maximally aid the individual workers.
Kind of like the back/front of house tip debate. Should chefs be payed as tipped salaries? Should we all get regular wages and evenly split tips? Even in front of house, if Sarah is consistently pulling twice my average tips, it's not really fair to her (or technically her customers) that we split tips because the customers were so taken by her service that they wanted to assist her whereas I'm just some random person from their point of view and contributed nothing to her customers from her point of view. The analogy is that the company wants to split the tips because it benefits them by allowing them to more easily retain employees in situations where they feel it's worth keeping the ones that aren't getting big tips because their performance is "good enough" and they don't want the spend on hiring to replace - the benefit is too the company and the 'worse' wait staff, not the one who's actually responsible for the value add.
The easy reply is: REI is pretty unusual,
and: what are the next two or three “problematic” companies on the list?
Very nice and appreciate the effort you put into making this.
Some Improvements that could help: the location search could be an actual map with pins which would be easier to use some kind of tags for the different appareal items would help clarify which one, currently i have to click and search each vendor for things im looking for. Specifically autistic friendly / sensory clothing items.
Maybe a little leaflet.js w/ open street maps would fit the spirit of the site
Seconding location based lookups. I might not be looking for something specific, but if I know of businesses nearby worth patronizing, when I need that good/service, I'll visit them then.
good idea. i can do this :)
Nice site! Maybe add link correction? Sometimes I found myself going to sites and though target landing page was wrong or out-of-date, surfing the site a bit, found similar or same product still offered. Would have to have some way of trusting / verifying the corrections but some people would find it satisfying to offer fix the bad links I bet.
yeah still lots of cleaning up. it's a little like wack-a-mole and i'm hoping users will find stuff and submit it.
I read this post while sitting at Broken Clock Brewing here in Minneapolis, one of the 13 listed and my favorite brewery. There are actually 2 in my city. I actually picked up an ownership card and anyone can buy in for $200, but dividends don't start to pay out until some indefinite point where the voting owners decide the business can sustain it.
https://www.brokenclockbrew.com/
https://www.workerowned.info/marketplace/beer-brewing
I wonder of there is a version of this but for jobs?
Not exactly what you asked for, but here is a related Wiki entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...
A link at the bottom of the page goes directly to a US directory (of only 476 entities): https://www.usworker.coop/directory/
+100... I'd love to find a spot at a tech co-op but they seem as common as a hen's tooth.
You can work in the technology department of a non-tech company.
I am enjoying being a part of an employee-owned company so far.
That could be just as good but it has the same problem... how to find these jobs.
I know of (and briefly worked at!) a small one; truly unheard of benefits and very good compensation package.
I founded a software engineering co-op. We're always interested in finding new members. https://508.dev
Right now our main revenue is through subcontracting, and admittedly we haven't pulled a fresh gig in a couple months, mostly because most of us are working a gig which limits our ability to BD - a limitation we've been kicking around how to resolve for ages.
We want to come up with some alternative revenue streams that aren't directly selling our labor. I soft launched one recently (a mock interview thing that I'm not quite ready to link completely publicly) but I'm also really interested in ideas other people have.
My goal for the co-op has been to make it a greater than sum of parts actualizer for each of our potentials. So far it's been pretty good on that front but for me the big win is gonna be if we can get a revenue generating project out.
Anyway, rambling. Feel free to reply with questions or email me (email is better since I'm trying to stay off HN due to internet comment addiction). https://508.dev/join has more info on joining.
Random fun fact: all our internal SaaS is FOSS and self hosted! Excluding discord. Matrix didn't work well for us.
Terrific idea. I agree with daheza. Location search would be an awesome feature. The site is blazing fast. Great work. Keep it up.
Incredible and worthwhile effort, thanks for sharing.
Seems some of the results are outdated. For example Ubuntu Coffee Collective in Emeryville is permanently closed.
Stoked to see this site! I agree with others that a map-based search would be neat, to find local coops.
One link correction: 1620 worker is https://www.1620usa.com/ not 1620workwear.com
Nice site, although wow I downloaded 60mb of data by searching for two things... I reccomend you just make people click search or smth before fetching api results, otherwise keep up the good work (=
Depending on the security of the sites you link to you might be able to show them locally in an iframe so users are only redirected if absolutely necessary and you can give an easy way back to search results/landing page
Really nice project!
It will be intresing an automation that check online for word like “worker cooperative”, “worker-owned” to find new candidate that fit.
Ofc the hard part is confirming if it's genuinely worker-owned, so keeping that step human makes sense. But the discovery/shortlisting could be largely automated crawl the web, score candidates by how many co-op signals they hit, and present the top ones for you to vet.
Would be happy to help prototype something like this if you're interested (i really like your idea).
Does WinCo Foods count? https://www.wincofoods.com/employee-owned
Really nice project. I wonder if discovery could be partly automated by crawling for worker owned or co op signals, then leaving the final verification to humans.
I took a brief look at some of the products like coffee and im not sure they are competitive. What exactly is the premium coming from ?
Coffee is much cheaper with slavery or ultra heavy exploitation. Once the workers have a say in it, the prices normalize.
Probably from actually paying human beings for their work
Are you saying that products outside this directory are from people who you don't consider human beings ?
Real coffee beans not genetically engineered to grow fast with caffeine densities high enough to make explosives out of.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims ?
I've been thinking about this recently: I think our economy is fake.
Restaurants are expensive lately, but still, as a former restaurant owner, even the expensive 10$ takeout burrito I don't think would be possible without the great many laws the supply chain breaks. Undocumented labor from the farms through to the restaurants, for starters. Then the fact that the equipment we use is built in places that don't have our labor or health and safety laws, which lets those places manufacture for much cheaper prices, which feels like cheating.
If we actually had a level playing field and didn't break laws, I don't think most of the luxuries we enjoy could actually exist at anywhere near current prices (and thus not at all).
No B2B SaaS D:
<3 Wonderful. I discovered this:
https://catalyticsound.com/artists/
I never thought I'd see anything like that easily accessible on hacker news. (Edit: I say that because this is a project by independent artists that has no real hope for commercial exit -- monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.)
>monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.
I was going to say, I think youtube/spotify et al have been doing this for years, just slap ads on it.
This is super fast. Great job!
A lot of co-op talk around this thread, if anyone else has worked in / founded co-ops, I would love to chat, email in my profile. I founded one about 5 years ago and have been kinda shooting from the hip, would love to trade ideas.
This is awesome- thank you!
The search field loses keypresses on mobile. I haven’t looked at the code, but I’m assuming it uses a React-style value binding but has some synchronous processing before it propagates the new field value back into the state variable. That is a really terrible pattern.
I'm assuming this is US only?
good to see this but all of them pay taxes in the US. we need something like this in Europe as well. think global but act local ...
This is good work.
Ethical consumption in a capitalist economy is unachievable...but we can optimise
There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.
The party vanguard of the worker co-op is exactly as capable of selfish or abusive behaviour as the private owner.
> There is nothing inherently ethical about co-op owned organizations nor anything inherently unethical about privately owned organizations.
I disagree. Co-ops are inherently democratic. Privately owned business is inherently anti-democratic. The difference only becomes starker as the scale increases. That alone makes it seem more ethical to me, before you even get to examining the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power than rule by one, as well as other effects.
Why does it seem more ethical for the organization that makes your daily bread to be democratic?
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
In the long run, you likely also benefit as a consumer from a diverse retail ecosystem, and worker co-ops in general tend to support this much better than traditional capitalist for-profit corporations.
The typical (but not universal) model in worker owned co-ops is for them to fork off new "branches" that are historically related to the original but otherwise independent.
The result tends to be a much more diverse set of businesses, some of which do better than others and some of which are more attuned to your preferences than the others.
Small capitalist for-profit businesses do the same, but we've seen how that ends up, with vertical integration and mega-corporations owning nearly all of them.
I already expressed why I think that more democracy makes workplaces more ethical immediately after where I said that I think so. If you'd like me to expand on this: governments and large companies are more alike than you think. Both of them are huge power structures that control lots of people. And both are quite powerful - your job can have as much of an impact on your life as the government you live under. If unchecked, both devolve into a hierarchical tug-of-war between the interests of its higher and lower rungs. Democracy works against this to ideally create a more equalized power structure.
Now that I established these parallels, my question to you is - why do we as a society treat democracy as sacred and essential in one type of hierarchy but not another? Why don't any of your concerns apply to your government? For instance, would you live in a dictatorship if you got to avoid the difficult and annoying chores of going out to vote, informing yourself politically or listening to politicians endlessly bicker about things?
Your examples seem to just boil down to absurdism. They don't indicate what is so wrong with people voting on things in a company, they're just exaggerations to make the idea seem inherently ridiculous. Bakeries don't spend days arguing about whether they need to offer one of the most popular product variants for sale, and if someone did, this would in no way impede the customer's ability to just buy a loaf of bread thanks. But something like a tech co-op will spend time arguing about which risky investments, future moves and needed sacrifices they're willing to make, walking away from it knowing that this is what they agree is best for everyone. Which frankly seems a lot better than far-upper management decreeing that everyone must now do XYZ even if their only intention is to pump company valuations short-term without any regard for future stability. The fact that co-ops tend to be more stable seems to agree with that.
> I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.
You have an illusion of choice right now between sesame or non sesame bread through the low-resolution "voting" mechanism of the market, which doesn't actually consider your desires when counting votes, merely the profitability between your desires and a supplier's margin. If you like sesame, but if it's not profitable enough, too bad, no sesame for you. "They can charge more," "someone will fill the niche," yes we've been told that about capitalism for the last century, yet it's never been true, so I guess it was a lie. Think of all the products people want that we just can't get anymore because some big org decided we can't have it, or better yet, think of how nearly monopolized industries have leveraged their power to move markets towards more profitable directions. Clothes - big, baggy, unicolor blobs. Phones - black squares.
It's not only more ethical for breadmakers to he democratic, it's simply more efficient in terms of delivering what the people want and need. Markets are a low resolution, exploitable mechanism that can lead to contrary incentives. Better to just cast a vote.
By the way I would add that co-ops are more ethical because if it's set up correctly, nobody is profiting from your labor more than yourself. In a traditional org, the vast majority of your productive profit is captured and used in a way you have no say - lately mostly to line the pockets of shareholders and a captured boys club of nepo MBA types that often don't even have that much experience in your industry. In a co-op, you the worker decide what happens with the profit margin on top of your labor. You can use it to have more money for yourself (and your coworkers), or you can invest it more intelligently in the business than an exec thousands of miles away in the private jet your profit margin pays for. This also works out better for your customers and users.
I agree with everything you've written here, and am a big fan of worker-owned co-ops. However:
> Better to just cast a vote.
It's not hard to see "do I buy the sesame or non-sesame loaf this week?" as a much more efficient method of voting and vote tallying than actually voting.
I think the most successful worker owned co-ops tend to appear to the outside world as more or less indistinguishable from a capitalist for-profit, but internally are quite different.
Does adding democracy automatically increase ethical value?
Suppose a group of racists form a coffee co-op dedicated to some silliness like "keeping the brown away from your brown". Or a group of homophobes that votes that their new t-shirt line should all riff on "killing fags protects families".
Are those companies more ethical than a privately owned org that just wants any capable worker and any customer with currency?
Closed democracies can and do make all sorts of evil decisions all of the time.
>the way democratic organizations obviously do a better job at checking any single person's power
I don't think that's a clear victory for ethical behavior. A sufficiently motivated democracy (as above) could easily use such a mechanism to check the single ethical person's power from "ruining their vision" by suggesting something so asinine (in their opinion) as compassion or accessibility.
For more information on why I think democracy makes things more ethical, see the other reply I left in this thread.
But to address your counterexamples:
1. None of your examples are countered by private organizations, they can and do make decisions motivated by ideology all the time. In fact, whenever you see real news of companies doing or supporting insane things, you can almost certainly be sure these companies are privately owned and that the insanity is passed down from the top.
2. For the rest of companies that really don't care about ideology and only care about making money, there's the argument that making money isn't a neutral standpoint, but one of chaos that just supports whatever is profitable. If putting people into concentration camps based on their race became culturally accepted, you know that discount stores will start selling clothing with hateful graphics, news sites would put up real-time counters and tech companies would develop exterior cameras with racial scanning and automatic reporting to cater to consumer demands.
3. Most crucially, democracies usually have a moderating effect on people's viewpoints. It's trivial to find companies ruled by crazy people with many normal subordinates going along because they need to make a living. It's a lot more difficult to find one that's stacked with insane people that produce insane decisions on average. Democracy lends itself to compromise, authoritarian rule lends itself to sycophancy that reinforces whatever comes from up top, no matter if it's sane or sensible.
totally. we can badger people to buy from better companies but that seems so tough. better to just make it easier for people to buy from better companies :)
Consumption itself is unethical.
I wanted to buy from worker-owned cooperatives but there was no single place to see what they actually sell. So I scraped the product catalogs from ~60 worker-owned co-op stores and made them searchable.
22,000+ products: coffee, chocolate, clothing, books, home goods, etc. You search, find something, and click through to buy directly from the co-op's store. Nothing goes through me.
There's also a section for finding worker-owned coffee shops, restaurants, and bars by city (110+ listings, mostly US).
Static Next.js site, JSON-backed search. No accounts, no tracking, no ads.
Happy to answer questions about the data or how I identified which businesses are actually worker-owned. Please reach out if you want to add your co-op!
Awesome project, keep doing this!
Hey, this is pretty cool and very fast. So there is no database? How do you handle the scraping etc? Do the businesses know you are doing this?
One thought, it might be good to list all of the products together,rather than only being able to view them by each business. Nice job :)
How did you identify how businesses are worker-owned? Curious how it compares to other verification methods e.g. what my co-op had to go through to get a .coop domain as determined by these guys: https://identity.coop/policies/ Wasn't too hard or anything, just wondering what people are looking for to verify co-op-ness
For categories, I guess software engineering would go under "other?" Did you find many services co-ops? I'm aware of a couple other software engineering co-ops/collectives in Europe but none in the USA. Seems to be a bit barren for some reason.
Very cool! I've submitted a co-op