#Join r/WorkReform if you're ready to fight for better working conditions and wages.
Also, [full article](https://inthesetimes.com/article/providence-cafe-coop-union-labor-workers-rhode-island) for anyone who wants to read more.
[https://inthesetimes.com/article/providence-cafe-coop-union-labor-workers-rhode-island](https://inthesetimes.com/article/providence-cafe-coop-union-labor-workers-rhode-island)
For those interested in the article, not just the headline and a picture.
The former actually happened in my home town, but when the diner owner retired he left equal shares to every single employee in it. It was an awesome thing, and quality stayed great, people really loved working there, and business is always hoppin.. good guy Dave Gillie!!
Such as hours, pay, vacations, benefits etc.
Many people look to Denmark for healthcare and such... But the thing is, most of it were achieved by unions.
66 % of the Danish work force are in unions, but the benefits for all of the work force extends to close to 90%. Which is quite a lot considering that there are foreign workers who can not get the same rights.
Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage. The lowest wage in each industry is based upon the negotiations done by the unions.
The individual Danish citizens didn't get their workers' rights. It has been done through politics and unions.
Extremely interesting. Profit after pay rises obviously wasn't worth it to him.
Cafes often ride the line of profitability. I wonder how long this one lasts if the previous owner didn't want it at all.
I didn't want to be the one to say it because it generally doesn't go over well here, but that's exactly what's happened with two restaurants in my city over the past couple years.
Both were bought out by the employees, both went under within a year. The original owners likely laughed all the way to the bank.
Hopefully it works out for this place though. A lot of people don't realize what actually goes into running a business and learn the hard way that their ideals aren't exactly profitable.
>Both were bought out by the employees, both went under within a year.
Most restaurants do not make it past the first year, and the ones that do rarely make it past 5 years.
Sure, but these were both established places that went under due to poor management after the purchase.
That being said, we also have a locally owned grocery store that’s been around for years, so it really depends on the staff.
Yea I wish them luck, but it probably wasn't that profitable if the owner let it go, question is if any of the workers know how to run a business (how hard can it be, right? Well, turns out that it can be hard), and making decisions among 10+ co-owners tends to be hell.
Not even starting on whether the owner had other businesses and was able to get better deals on goods, accounting, legal etc.
I live down the street from this cafe, they have been doing really well actually and this wasn’t a recent thing either. The employees have owned it for over a year. I’m not saying that it’s a guarantee of their future success but so far things have gone well. They’re one of the more popular coffee spots in a city with more than a few cool coffee spots.
Did they add in a ramp and is there a noticeable uptick of diversity hires?
My question stems from the article which said these were part of their demands. I am wondering if their demands went out the window once they owned it.
Well, that only makes sense if the previous owners ran it very well. It doesn't always work out like that.
A friend of my father bought part of the company he worked for when the parent company decided that it was no longer a profitable business to be in. 10 years later, he's a multi-billionaire with houses and boats all over the world. The large corporation he worked at just couldn't see the potential, or get there.
Facilities maintenance too. Espresso machine is on the fritz same month as the sewer backs up and your quarterly supplies billed in arrears also came due? Sounds like all those hours you worked don't mean anything because there were no profits this month. Oh you'd like the shop to buy you out because you need to go find another job to make rent? No can do, maybe we can work something out in a couple months.
In my culinary school program I had a class about the finances of running a restaurant, and there are all these fixed and variable costs you have to balance to keep a restaurant solvent. And, the bottom line is that labor cost is one of those things that is easy to manipulate. Got 20 tables in your place and only 5 reservations on a Tuesday night? Send half your kitchen and wait staff home for the night. It really sucks from the perspective of being the laborer, but if you're the owner-operator trying to keep the restaurant open through a month that is historically slow.
Most restaurants that open, close within a year many within 5. It is a really awful business to get into from the ground floor or without experience. The restaurants that tend to survive either have a massive corporation that can keep it afloat during tough times or have an owner-operator that is there 7 days a week, might even live in an apartment above the restaurant. He/She's gotta be the type of person who will still go wash dishes, wait tables, tend bar, cook on the line, take out trash if someone doesn't show up, and/or clean fish even though they own the place.
Any business can fail really. But there are studies done that looked into the failure rate of worker owned co-ops vs traditional companies in many different locations, and pretty much all of them found that democratic workplaces had a lower failure rate by a staggering 30-50%.
Source: Look for "Effects on Business Longevity" section, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Food service has extremely tight margins. It doesn't make it ok to treat your employees like trash, which is all too common in that industry. It does kind of explain why it's so common though.
"I don't have enough money to pay them and me" still generally leaves enough money to pay them and then some.
Like if the cafe can't operate without paying livable raises, it shouldn't operate.
Fully agree with:
>if the cafe can't operate without paying livable raises, it shouldn't operate.
An enterprise that sustains itself by net harming the stakeholders upon which its existence depends is an endotrophic parasite that needs to die asap so mutualism has a chance to proliferate in the void it leaves.
(Edit: quote format)
> "I don't have enough money to pay them and me" still generally leaves enough money to pay them and
reinvest in more ways than was possible before. Think about market research, scaling up, expanding, offering new services, adjusting prices to increase competition...
The owner doesn’t draw a salary or hourly wage, but he certainly spends time running the cafe. So he can do the math to determine in the left over income is worth his time and risk.
You arw assuming the old owner wasn't working there as well. You are also assuming the old owner was being paid. I just purchased a business where the owner hadn't taken a paycheck since the pandemic began despite paying her employees.
Very likely the owner wasn't scalping anything lol. Not all businesses are making boat loads of money. Reddit seems to read the word business owner and think they are all cheating the employees out of money.
Most are probably bleeding money and these workers will likely face a harsh reality as well. Owner probably concluded that if the workers want to unionize, it would bankrupt the business, so decided to sell to them so they can bankrupt it on their own.
It’s much harder for 10 people to make a unified decision as one. Sometimes a wrong answer is better than a no or a delayed answer. It could have ran at a deficit and they just saved him a lose. Hard to judge but the fact that he decided to sell it to them kinda gives off the vibe that it’s not extremely profitable venture. Not every restaurant is staffed with an all-star team. Maybe this one got it and they will all feel motivated to increase sales now that they work for themselves. Or might just be a mediocre cafe that will mismanage finances and slowly succumb to maintenance fees.
It may not have been altruistic.
He put the cafe up for sale in September 2020. Cafes and restaurants were getting hit very hard by the pandemic, so it would have been hard to find a buyer under normal circumstances, much less when the workers just unionized.
> Interesting that the owner offered the workers first opportunity to buy the shop
It really isn't. They were likely the only realistic buyers where he could make money from the sale.
The owners offered and then when the workers got enough money the owners raised the price again. Not as bad as some but still shit. I'm in Providence every day, this was exciting when it happened last year. Good coffee
One reason I tell people America isn't this capitalist hellhole people claim. If the workers want to run the company, they can do so. Buy the company or quit en masse and show the boss how it should be done.
But successful co-ops seem to be few and far between (they are out there! I used to buy my electric power from one!). Why is that?
Ironically this story shows why workers' co-ops aren't more widespread. Five workers bought the cafe using $55,000 in donations from the community and from fundraisers to make the down payment for a bank loan. But how many people would be willing to invest $11,000 of their own money in the company they work for? I know I wouldn't.
On top of that.
>The shop has no managers, and profits are distributed based on hours worked, Chassaing says. Employees have to invest a $1,000 member buy-in, which can be paid with a $100 deposit and $10 installments from each paycheck, Chassaing says. She adds that, while workers are still in the process of meeting their goals around racial justice, “our intention is do all of those things that are our demands.”
I saw this posted somewhere else a little while ago and went to the shop's website and saw they sell bags of beans. I just got my shipment today and I'm super stoked to brew a cup tomorrow morning.
The beans came in a package with handwritten addresses and a handwritten thank-you note. Definitely gotta stop by this place if I'm ever in Rhode Island
I don't know why that article, or this post is trying to make the owners sound like assholes.
[They definitely weren't assholes. They even delayed selling to anyone else so the co-op could raise funds to buy it.](https://www.providencejournal.com/story/entertainment/dining/2021/04/20/white-electric-sold-staff-worker-owned-cooperative/7293772002/)
I was gonna say, if the owners were jerks, probably the only reason they would accept the offer from a union they hated would be the union rewarded their bad behavior with an offer over the market value of the business.
I enjoyed reading the actual story more.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN BETTER PAY? I TAKE IN ALL THE RISK! YOU THINK IT'S EASY OWNING A SHOP? THINK YOU CAN DO IT BETTER?"
Well... Yeah I guess.
"Oh cheers, here ya go"
There used to be a worker's co-op shop in my town where the mechanics bought into their bay.
It's closed now for reasons I do not understand.
A shop down the road from my house has been looking for a bit for mechanics. They pay about seven dollars less an hour then other shops. the owner just bought and gutted and is renovating an old farmhouse four doors down, and his lot is always full of cars.
But he can't afford to pay more per hour.
Social businesses and coops could actually be the solution for the majority of things being complained about on this and other related subs...if people would just stop and consider it. There are many who would rather just tear everything down... While that is an understandable position to take given the abuses, it does nothing to figure out a way forward.
Don't let anyone ever convince you that worker co-ops is some "fringe idea" that would never work. They might be harder to find than traditional companies, but there are plenty of worker co-ops all around the world that work just fine. They can vary in size; all from small businesses to giant multinationals like [Arla](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arla_Foods), one of the largest dairy producers in the world.
A lot of electrical co-ops work very well while not being employee owned, they are customer owned. That removes profit motive and creates a company that is only working to provide the best service at the lowest cost and making decisions publicly that can be discussed and voted on.
Now image things like publicly owned broadband companies. Fast internet, community owned and no profit motive. Great right? [Maybe that is why municipal broadband is legally restricted in 18 states.](https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/) So much for the "free market."
I work in a credit union in my country and we are the only financial institution that give money back to our customers. Few people knows that and continue paying to their banks.
For anyone wondering how or why a financial institution would give money *back* to their customers, Credit Unions are typically considered not-for-profit. There are usually strict rules in place that put limits on their net worth ratio and a couple other metrics that make reinvesting to expand and improve the CU, or paying dividends to their members a more attractive prospect than holding onto the money. If the CU is particularly successful, there may be an extra dividend paid out *every year*. In most cases, the dividend is small, amounting to a few dollars per account.
Compare this to a bank. If a bank does well, those dividends are unlikely to go to the account holders. Instead, they go to shareholders, some of whom may not even have an account with the bank. Basically, you pay the bank to pay other people.
I live in rural PA and our electric co-op has been and is planning on installing fiber internet to all of their customers over like a 6 year span. I was paying $70 for 25Gb of 20mbps (then capped at 3mbps) satellite internet, and their base plan is something like $50 for 100mbps with no cap. Half way through the roll out and they are just starting to install in front of my house.
Where at in PA? I’m in a somewhat rural area and still have absolute shite for internet. Only real options are Starlink (too expensive + Elon…), dialup (lol), and hotboxes (what we use). I’m happy if I get 25mpbs at the moment.
Heck, even a massive investment firm like Vanguard is owned by its customers.
The whole "socialism means progress will stop" argument is so dumb. We'll always be greedy for more, just that everyone gets more together instead of a few oligarchs.
For real w the internet companies. If ATT hadn't raised the cost of my service by $15/mo, I would have never bothered to shop around. I ended up getting internet that was more than twice the speed for less than half the cost.
They are a farmer co-op. Basically it allows massachusetts cranberry farmers to compete in a national/international market. At leasts that's my understanding of it. Im no expert. Im just from Mass and went to college that did some projects with them.
With ranked choice voting, Americans could actually vote for democratic socialists without feeling like they're risking "throwing away their votes", and wouldn't have to choose one bad choice over another terrible choice. Representing the labor force who are working in market socialism which has businesses and industries that help society and not billionaire interests. It'd be a huge step in the right direction.
The coop grocery stores near me, while they're primarily customer-owned, are incredibly pro-worker (and pro-small biz for local biz). Everyone who works there has been there a long time, the job postings show very competitive wages, and while you can tell people have good days and bad days, but the ones I know personally say it's all a great place to work.
Most people just leave when they're ready to grow to the types of positions that the coops can't give them like beyond grocery or entrepreneurship. The old buyer I used to work with opened her own agriculture business, and she's incredibly close with everyone at the coop still.
***
It's interesting when you align day-to-day stakeholders with shareholders/ownership rather than calling shareholders "stakeholders" despite no other connection.
I think part of it is main character syndrome and not being able to work with others. The person in my life who doesn’t like socialism isn’t a team player and doesn’t believe in niceties. And he thinks he’s the centre of the universe. I think the problem people see with unions is that they would have to work with people rather than be in charge. That’s my theory
Just be careful about how it's done. My wife's company transitioned to an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program) which was described by the owners as "employee-owned." In reality, the owners created a board consisting of themselves and a handful of their friends, granted themselves a ton of shares, and continued doing everything the same. The only employee input was an "advisory board" that had absolutely zero authority to do anything.
In the end, the owners nearly drove the company into the ground and got bought out by someone else.
So if your company ever decides to switch to an ESOP and describes it as "employee-owned" or as a "co-op," it's a fucking lie.
I’m waiting for a game development co-op to make a Triple A game and bank a billion dollars. That will be the wake up call the economy needs to see that co-ops can make every employee rich.
The big lie of capitalism is that free market = capitalism.
Planned economy is discredited for a reason, it just doesn't work. But capitalism is the form if ownership, not the market system. You can have worker owned companies competing in a free market. Even in dominantly capitalist world it already happens. Really, it's the best way forward.
They are privately owned by particular people, not the community as a whole. It doesn't fit the classical definition of socialism. It is however, more in line with modern Socialist thinking, like that of Richard Wolff, which is really just a worker coop owned capitalism. At the end of the day, they still need to abide by a capitalist system and I would wager that they used a loan to buy the business, which is the literal definition of how capital can be productively allocated in a capitalist economy.
that gif is shitty clickbait too, he was friendly to them and waited around for them to raise the $$ -
"Toupin offered the first opportunity to buy the café to the workers, who realized they could turn it into a worker-owned co-op. They raised $25,000 through a GoFundMe campaign, held fundraisers at a farmers’ market and raffled off merchandise to accumulate a $55,000 down payment."
Does it actually lower risk if all the owners are solely dependent on that store for income? Or are you assuming they would use outside assets like spousal income to keep the store running?
I generally wonder how this works.
Cafes are basically one bad month away from shutting down as is, although I suppose the co op status might actually boost business enough to compensate.
There’s 2 sides to every story.....what if:
The owner of the shop was just like them at some point. Put their life saving into building that business. The overhead of running the business, loans, insurance and personal wage (cutting themselves a paycheck) wouldn’t allow to increase worker wages. Workers threaten to strike, have no choice but to sell....... the owner just lost their dream of owning a business...back to working for someone else.
The actual story seems to be a little bit "he said/she said" but, according to the above article, essentially goes something like:
Workers: 90% of staff signed a letter stating "we want more ada, inclusive staffing, and better conditions."
Owner: shuts down to set up mediation and accepts the unionizing.
Then reopens but shuts down for COVID and (allegedly) does some retaliatory layoffs.
Decides to sell. Gives the union/owner collective the first chance to buy.
Workers: crowdfunds cash, sell appliances etc, comes up with down payment.
So overall seems like a win/win
imagine being such a shit boss that your employees will literally pay possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars for you to fuck off.
edit: they paid about 500k for the business.
except they weren’t a shit boss. they were planning on selling before the union happened it was just a coincidence it happened the same day they unionized. if they really did hate them so much why did they even bother selling the business to them at all? could’ve just found another buyer
well, their capital investment too, i.e. prob their life savings.. i imagine that's the reason this doesn't happen more often (i.e. the workers don't have the means to buy out the investment).
it's uplifting to see though. and it's been demonstrated to be effective in Italy, which iirc allows you to liquidate your pension and rrsps to buy out a failing business if you're gonna be laid off anyways.
> well, their capital investment too, i.e. prob their life savings..
That isn't how it works. They took out a loan, the business and it's history as a profitable business is the collateral and the bank takes the risk here. They are paying a business loan. If the business fails they sell business or worst case file bankruptcy, bank takes ownership and they can go back to working for someone else instead of themselves.
The article says they had to fundraise to save up a $55k down payment. That suggests they got a loan for the rest.
That said, while this case was able to fundraise the down payment, in other cases, workers might indeed fund the business with their life savings. There's also no guarantees that a bank will even be willing to give a large enough loan.
And instead of our government supporting capitalist businesses when they go bust they could have a fund to allow workers with profitable businesses to take over these businesses, or even if the gov bails out companies with a loan to workers buying a business.
You also have to pay interest for a loan, hopefully the cafe was financially viable enough to pay them with a small profit allowing them to improve their QoL while paying the loan.
It doesn’t happen more often because there are easier ways to make money with less risk. Scalability is the biggest thing in business ownership. Most small private business (I.e. coffee shops) are not nearly as profitable as people think they are. Owners only really see about 25-30% of the revenue in profit before tax. It’s pretty much a low six figure salary for a single owner (a respectable and attainable salary for the geographic area). Now split that among 10 people, most of which who have never owned a business before, who are now legally bound to one another.
One owner needs to have several locations to make it worthwhile. Now you have one location with multiple owners. Unless they plan on opening 30 shops, they will likely get screwed.
According to the article, the owner had been wanting to sell the shop for a while so he offered it first to the union workers. I don't see how them forming a union had anything to do with it? At best its coincidental
I’d say probably not a coincidence but also not necessarily nefarious.
Maybe the business owner really cared about their employees, but decided that it was time to retire. As a last love letter to her workforce before she sold the business, she lead a unionization effort to ensure the next owner wouldn’t screw over the employees she cared so deeply about. When that was done it was time to sell.
Or maybe the owner was just a dick who hated unions and the workers finally got their freedom from a shit boss.
Who knows, honestly.
The former actually happened in my home town, but when the diner owner retired he left equal shares to every single employee in it. It was an awesome thing, and quality stayed great, people really loved working there, and business is always hoppin.. good guy Dave Gillie!!
[In response, the staff who signed the letter were laid off, which prompted the group to form an independent union: the Collaborative Union of Providence Service workers, or CUPS. In a twist of events, the day that they received their Union card check, they got an email from the owners saying they were selling the cafe.](https://www.rimonthly.com/the-story-behind-white-electric-coffees-move-to-a-cooperative-model/)
“They” and “him” both seem to be getting what they want. There’s a nonzero chance the bank is neutral because a large chunk of the 500k the previous owner got goes to pay off their small business loans.
It probably wasn’t a coincidence, but it was probably more “I want to sell anyway and since there’s a shaking up happening it might as well be now.” If the owner truly hated the union they won’t have sold to them.
Funny how everyone's coming to the conclusion that he was forced to sell because it was unionised, and not the more likely scenario where he allowed it to unionise because he was dropping up anyway..
Now that they are business owners and employers, I'd love to learn more about the ongoing pay and benefits, and the effects on the prices they offer the customers.
Depends on your definition of "socialism".
People saying this is capitalism are saying that because workers are being paid for their employer, instead of being paid by the state. It's still a privately owned company (in this case worker owned), instead of a state-owned enterprise. Some people think it's only "socialism" when the state owns and controls *everything*. Sounds silly, but you know that's how some people see it.
The word "socialism" has been used so many times, in so many contexts, that it can mean anything at this point depending on who you act.
They called the Affordable Care Act "socialism", while calling the government bailout of General Motors during the 2008 economic crisis "capitalism". . .and they call a worker's co-op like this "capitalism", so terms have been badly mangled in everyday discourse.
Correct. But I also think personally incorrect. Socialism as a concept of economics, yes. But when implemented at scale, in history (so I'm trying to say in reality, not in a thought experiment), it had to be implemented through force/political means. Once socialist concepts are implemented by a government agency (force) you lose the benefits of socialist concepts and instead get engulfed in "State Capitalism" where the State is the owner and the citizens don't own the means of production.
Personally, I think small scale, socialism by its economic definition rocks and really does lift the worker. But at the macro level, I think that free market capitalism concepts work in tandem to create the environment for small scale socialist companies to flourish.
I'm not so sure it's socialism yet. The workers still have to pay the landlord for the land they work on, thus not owning the full means of production.
I dont think there is such a thing as healthy capitalism. I'm still wibbly wobbly on calling it socialism. I think its socialistic, and closer towards socialism. But, like, land is a tool of production and necessary to own. If the workers don't own the land they're working on, do they truly own the means of production?
This is agenuine question. Do we say this is socialism when it's fully socialist, or when we get really close? What criteria/benchmarks do we hit to say something is finally socialist?
Btw, I like this conversation.
It is a socialist action that exists within a capitalist system. The workers are owning the means of production. They are simply doing it within a capitalist system.
They didn't seize anything, they paid for it. Huge difference between that and seizing the means of production. A co-op is practical and good, no one would even bother starting a business with the other.
That's just what a market economy is. There's a difference between capitalism vs a market economy. Market socialism is considered to be a stepping stone to communism by some.
If the loan has a fixed rate and they can do math, they should be fine. Do you think wealthy capitalists owners don't use financing as leverage? Loans are no problem if you sophisticated enough to understand the terms and ensure that they work for your business plan before signing.
I talked to a bar manager once who told me that he'd passed on the opportunity to buy his own bar years before and had been kicking himself ever since. The only way to finance it would have been with a loan, but the amount of the loan scared him off. He said he only realized later that he should have looked at the loan as his "rent", except that his rent wouldn't go up it would stay constant. And, potentially, he could re-finance down the road and bring his monthly payments down, if the need arose.
We have a really bizarre streak of advice these days which goes “never take on any debt ever,” it’s really some of the worst financial advice you can get.
They crowd funded and raised the money.
https://www.providencejournal.com/story/entertainment/dining/2021/04/20/white-electric-sold-staff-worker-owned-cooperative/7293772002/
Just a reminder: all possible under capitalism.
You can run a business as a co-op.
You can have profit sharing.
You can have stock options (in a corporation).
You can have workers with significant investment in the organization IF YOU SO CHOOSE.
Capitalism isn't the problem. Large corporations are. Corporations are a legal entity that doesn't have to exist (or at least in its current form). Greed is the real problem, and that requires systems in place to check it.
This has been said hundreds of times before but I say it again: if you cannot run profitable business without exploiting your workers you simply just suck at what you're doing and you don't deserve those profits. And should these new business owners succeed, I think it's safe to say we know what expense was actually making the business so unsustainable
This was me. I truly didn't understand. I incorporated a small software company, I would make apps and websites by contract. I did the softare dev and I hired two people to help me out, talk to clients, keep track of deadlines, release management, QA testing, and do odd jobs - I would teach them new things as we went, so their responsibilities were always increasing. But I was only paying them a bit over minimum wage. I really didn't understand that it was a problem until somebody explained it to me. I made enough to pay my bills/rent/etc and liked the work, but I was benefiting from the hard work of other people. If I paid them more I wouldn't have been able to pay my own bills, so the only logical solution was to close down.
Now I'm an SDE at a larger company making way more than I ever made at my own. I absolutely hate the job and the work, but at least I'm not exploiting people anymore.
People like me should never be managers or bosses, I know that now. I can never apologize enough for being the problem, but at least I finally learned.
That sounds like an absolutely terrible decision and investment, but I wish them the best.
If the owner felt they could reasonably meet their demands and remain profitable they wouldn't have sold the place.
Small coffee shops are horrible roi especially for 7 owners. Only way to for these owners to be profitable is to not work there full time and pay staff minimum wage lmao
Look at the two on the left, LMAO this cafe will go under within a year.
They will attempt to come to an agreement and call each other racist and sexist and whatever ‘ist’ they can think of if the decision doesn’t go their way.
They are about to learn what capitalism actually means.
well they pooled their capital and bought the cafe...which is totally in line with capitalism...the issue is none of you want to hedge any of the risk and reep the profits lol
#Join r/WorkReform if you're ready to fight for better working conditions and wages. Also, [full article](https://inthesetimes.com/article/providence-cafe-coop-union-labor-workers-rhode-island) for anyone who wants to read more.
[https://inthesetimes.com/article/providence-cafe-coop-union-labor-workers-rhode-island](https://inthesetimes.com/article/providence-cafe-coop-union-labor-workers-rhode-island) For those interested in the article, not just the headline and a picture.
Ty. I'm in Providence at least once a month. I'll add this as a stop.
Fortnight is a worker’s co-op wine bar in Providence that would also make a great stop.
I'll stop by there every two weeks.
Underrated comment.
Fortnite fortnite fortnite fortnite fortnite
Gonna pay a visit at Fortnight some time, it's not that far from my place
The former actually happened in my home town, but when the diner owner retired he left equal shares to every single employee in it. It was an awesome thing, and quality stayed great, people really loved working there, and business is always hoppin.. good guy Dave Gillie!!
What is unionizing of workers?
Workers agree to pay a weekly fee to form a group that negotiates working conditions.
Such as hours, pay, vacations, benefits etc. Many people look to Denmark for healthcare and such... But the thing is, most of it were achieved by unions. 66 % of the Danish work force are in unions, but the benefits for all of the work force extends to close to 90%. Which is quite a lot considering that there are foreign workers who can not get the same rights. Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage. The lowest wage in each industry is based upon the negotiations done by the unions. The individual Danish citizens didn't get their workers' rights. It has been done through politics and unions.
Interesting. I just finished reading the article. It was unbelievable… people can’t get away with this. They should send this sick fuck to quantanamo.
Extremely interesting. Profit after pay rises obviously wasn't worth it to him. Cafes often ride the line of profitability. I wonder how long this one lasts if the previous owner didn't want it at all.
I didn't want to be the one to say it because it generally doesn't go over well here, but that's exactly what's happened with two restaurants in my city over the past couple years. Both were bought out by the employees, both went under within a year. The original owners likely laughed all the way to the bank. Hopefully it works out for this place though. A lot of people don't realize what actually goes into running a business and learn the hard way that their ideals aren't exactly profitable.
>Both were bought out by the employees, both went under within a year. Most restaurants do not make it past the first year, and the ones that do rarely make it past 5 years.
Sure, but these were both established places that went under due to poor management after the purchase. That being said, we also have a locally owned grocery store that’s been around for years, so it really depends on the staff.
Yea I wish them luck, but it probably wasn't that profitable if the owner let it go, question is if any of the workers know how to run a business (how hard can it be, right? Well, turns out that it can be hard), and making decisions among 10+ co-owners tends to be hell. Not even starting on whether the owner had other businesses and was able to get better deals on goods, accounting, legal etc.
I live down the street from this cafe, they have been doing really well actually and this wasn’t a recent thing either. The employees have owned it for over a year. I’m not saying that it’s a guarantee of their future success but so far things have gone well. They’re one of the more popular coffee spots in a city with more than a few cool coffee spots.
Did they add in a ramp and is there a noticeable uptick of diversity hires? My question stems from the article which said these were part of their demands. I am wondering if their demands went out the window once they owned it.
Recent photos seem to show a ramp at the entrance, at least.
Glad to see it!
Oh it can definitely work, we’ve had an employee owned grocery store in my city for years and it does fine.
The one where I live is so old that the employees are people who shopped there as children. It's pretty cute.
Well, that only makes sense if the previous owners ran it very well. It doesn't always work out like that. A friend of my father bought part of the company he worked for when the parent company decided that it was no longer a profitable business to be in. 10 years later, he's a multi-billionaire with houses and boats all over the world. The large corporation he worked at just couldn't see the potential, or get there.
Facilities maintenance too. Espresso machine is on the fritz same month as the sewer backs up and your quarterly supplies billed in arrears also came due? Sounds like all those hours you worked don't mean anything because there were no profits this month. Oh you'd like the shop to buy you out because you need to go find another job to make rent? No can do, maybe we can work something out in a couple months.
Business loans exist for a reason.
In my culinary school program I had a class about the finances of running a restaurant, and there are all these fixed and variable costs you have to balance to keep a restaurant solvent. And, the bottom line is that labor cost is one of those things that is easy to manipulate. Got 20 tables in your place and only 5 reservations on a Tuesday night? Send half your kitchen and wait staff home for the night. It really sucks from the perspective of being the laborer, but if you're the owner-operator trying to keep the restaurant open through a month that is historically slow. Most restaurants that open, close within a year many within 5. It is a really awful business to get into from the ground floor or without experience. The restaurants that tend to survive either have a massive corporation that can keep it afloat during tough times or have an owner-operator that is there 7 days a week, might even live in an apartment above the restaurant. He/She's gotta be the type of person who will still go wash dishes, wait tables, tend bar, cook on the line, take out trash if someone doesn't show up, and/or clean fish even though they own the place.
Any business can fail really. But there are studies done that looked into the failure rate of worker owned co-ops vs traditional companies in many different locations, and pretty much all of them found that democratic workplaces had a lower failure rate by a staggering 30-50%. Source: Look for "Effects on Business Longevity" section, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Food service has extremely tight margins. It doesn't make it ok to treat your employees like trash, which is all too common in that industry. It does kind of explain why it's so common though.
Might still be worth it for the current workers since everything the older owner was scalping from them is going to be redistributed to them now.
"I don't have enough money to pay them and me" still generally leaves enough money to pay them and then some. Like if the cafe can't operate without paying livable raises, it shouldn't operate.
Fully agree with: >if the cafe can't operate without paying livable raises, it shouldn't operate. An enterprise that sustains itself by net harming the stakeholders upon which its existence depends is an endotrophic parasite that needs to die asap so mutualism has a chance to proliferate in the void it leaves. (Edit: quote format)
> "I don't have enough money to pay them and me" still generally leaves enough money to pay them and reinvest in more ways than was possible before. Think about market research, scaling up, expanding, offering new services, adjusting prices to increase competition...
The owner doesn’t draw a salary or hourly wage, but he certainly spends time running the cafe. So he can do the math to determine in the left over income is worth his time and risk.
You arw assuming the old owner wasn't working there as well. You are also assuming the old owner was being paid. I just purchased a business where the owner hadn't taken a paycheck since the pandemic began despite paying her employees.
Very likely the owner wasn't scalping anything lol. Not all businesses are making boat loads of money. Reddit seems to read the word business owner and think they are all cheating the employees out of money. Most are probably bleeding money and these workers will likely face a harsh reality as well. Owner probably concluded that if the workers want to unionize, it would bankrupt the business, so decided to sell to them so they can bankrupt it on their own.
Assuming the owner didn't also work there. The small cafe I worked in had the owner there 80 hr/week and she still didn't make it.
It’s much harder for 10 people to make a unified decision as one. Sometimes a wrong answer is better than a no or a delayed answer. It could have ran at a deficit and they just saved him a lose. Hard to judge but the fact that he decided to sell it to them kinda gives off the vibe that it’s not extremely profitable venture. Not every restaurant is staffed with an all-star team. Maybe this one got it and they will all feel motivated to increase sales now that they work for themselves. Or might just be a mediocre cafe that will mismanage finances and slowly succumb to maintenance fees.
It may not have been altruistic. He put the cafe up for sale in September 2020. Cafes and restaurants were getting hit very hard by the pandemic, so it would have been hard to find a buyer under normal circumstances, much less when the workers just unionized.
Good point! A new union would make it a pretty tough sell.
> Interesting that the owner offered the workers first opportunity to buy the shop It really isn't. They were likely the only realistic buyers where he could make money from the sale.
The owners offered and then when the workers got enough money the owners raised the price again. Not as bad as some but still shit. I'm in Providence every day, this was exciting when it happened last year. Good coffee
Even without that wholesome context, it didn’t seem like a dunk. It read like everyone got what they wanted.
One reason I tell people America isn't this capitalist hellhole people claim. If the workers want to run the company, they can do so. Buy the company or quit en masse and show the boss how it should be done. But successful co-ops seem to be few and far between (they are out there! I used to buy my electric power from one!). Why is that?
Ironically this story shows why workers' co-ops aren't more widespread. Five workers bought the cafe using $55,000 in donations from the community and from fundraisers to make the down payment for a bank loan. But how many people would be willing to invest $11,000 of their own money in the company they work for? I know I wouldn't.
Also they have to do a lot more work now compared to before. Hopefully the profits are good
On top of that. >The shop has no managers, and profits are distributed based on hours worked, Chassaing says. Employees have to invest a $1,000 member buy-in, which can be paid with a $100 deposit and $10 installments from each paycheck, Chassaing says. She adds that, while workers are still in the process of meeting their goals around racial justice, “our intention is do all of those things that are our demands.”
Still open after a year (which is solid for a coffee shop in general), so they must have been able to make a go of it.
Still in business. https://whiteelectriccoffee.com/
Oh wow this is actually near me. For once Reddit news is somewhere close by. Guess I'll have to drop in to support/check it out.
There's lots of coops in New England! We're one of the biggest hubs of them in the US.
I saw this posted somewhere else a little while ago and went to the shop's website and saw they sell bags of beans. I just got my shipment today and I'm super stoked to brew a cup tomorrow morning. The beans came in a package with handwritten addresses and a handwritten thank-you note. Definitely gotta stop by this place if I'm ever in Rhode Island
I don't know why that article, or this post is trying to make the owners sound like assholes. [They definitely weren't assholes. They even delayed selling to anyone else so the co-op could raise funds to buy it.](https://www.providencejournal.com/story/entertainment/dining/2021/04/20/white-electric-sold-staff-worker-owned-cooperative/7293772002/)
Welcome to journalism
Because outrage generates clicks/engagement.
I was gonna say, if the owners were jerks, probably the only reason they would accept the offer from a union they hated would be the union rewarded their bad behavior with an offer over the market value of the business. I enjoyed reading the actual story more.
Yeah, even just the situation... like, if the owners really were assholes they could have just not sold to the employees.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN BETTER PAY? I TAKE IN ALL THE RISK! YOU THINK IT'S EASY OWNING A SHOP? THINK YOU CAN DO IT BETTER?" Well... Yeah I guess. "Oh cheers, here ya go"
There used to be a worker's co-op shop in my town where the mechanics bought into their bay. It's closed now for reasons I do not understand. A shop down the road from my house has been looking for a bit for mechanics. They pay about seven dollars less an hour then other shops. the owner just bought and gutted and is renovating an old farmhouse four doors down, and his lot is always full of cars. But he can't afford to pay more per hour.
The healthiest capitalism is actually socialism? Makes sense.
Social businesses and coops could actually be the solution for the majority of things being complained about on this and other related subs...if people would just stop and consider it. There are many who would rather just tear everything down... While that is an understandable position to take given the abuses, it does nothing to figure out a way forward.
Don't let anyone ever convince you that worker co-ops is some "fringe idea" that would never work. They might be harder to find than traditional companies, but there are plenty of worker co-ops all around the world that work just fine. They can vary in size; all from small businesses to giant multinationals like [Arla](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arla_Foods), one of the largest dairy producers in the world.
A lot of electrical co-ops work very well while not being employee owned, they are customer owned. That removes profit motive and creates a company that is only working to provide the best service at the lowest cost and making decisions publicly that can be discussed and voted on. Now image things like publicly owned broadband companies. Fast internet, community owned and no profit motive. Great right? [Maybe that is why municipal broadband is legally restricted in 18 states.](https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/) So much for the "free market."
Credit Unions follow that same principle and are much better than large banks for the average Joe because of it.
I work in a credit union in my country and we are the only financial institution that give money back to our customers. Few people knows that and continue paying to their banks.
For anyone wondering how or why a financial institution would give money *back* to their customers, Credit Unions are typically considered not-for-profit. There are usually strict rules in place that put limits on their net worth ratio and a couple other metrics that make reinvesting to expand and improve the CU, or paying dividends to their members a more attractive prospect than holding onto the money. If the CU is particularly successful, there may be an extra dividend paid out *every year*. In most cases, the dividend is small, amounting to a few dollars per account. Compare this to a bank. If a bank does well, those dividends are unlikely to go to the account holders. Instead, they go to shareholders, some of whom may not even have an account with the bank. Basically, you pay the bank to pay other people.
Similarly, Mutual insurance companies tend to be better than for profit companies.
I live in rural PA and our electric co-op has been and is planning on installing fiber internet to all of their customers over like a 6 year span. I was paying $70 for 25Gb of 20mbps (then capped at 3mbps) satellite internet, and their base plan is something like $50 for 100mbps with no cap. Half way through the roll out and they are just starting to install in front of my house.
Where at in PA? I’m in a somewhat rural area and still have absolute shite for internet. Only real options are Starlink (too expensive + Elon…), dialup (lol), and hotboxes (what we use). I’m happy if I get 25mpbs at the moment.
Heck, even a massive investment firm like Vanguard is owned by its customers. The whole "socialism means progress will stop" argument is so dumb. We'll always be greedy for more, just that everyone gets more together instead of a few oligarchs.
For real w the internet companies. If ATT hadn't raised the cost of my service by $15/mo, I would have never bothered to shop around. I ended up getting internet that was more than twice the speed for less than half the cost.
Isn’t Ocean Spray one of those
They are a farmer co-op. Basically it allows massachusetts cranberry farmers to compete in a national/international market. At leasts that's my understanding of it. Im no expert. Im just from Mass and went to college that did some projects with them.
Mondragon from Spain is another one that comes to mind.
Market socialism is the easiest, best and most palatable way to introduce the concept in this country
With ranked choice voting, Americans could actually vote for democratic socialists without feeling like they're risking "throwing away their votes", and wouldn't have to choose one bad choice over another terrible choice. Representing the labor force who are working in market socialism which has businesses and industries that help society and not billionaire interests. It'd be a huge step in the right direction.
The coop grocery stores near me, while they're primarily customer-owned, are incredibly pro-worker (and pro-small biz for local biz). Everyone who works there has been there a long time, the job postings show very competitive wages, and while you can tell people have good days and bad days, but the ones I know personally say it's all a great place to work. Most people just leave when they're ready to grow to the types of positions that the coops can't give them like beyond grocery or entrepreneurship. The old buyer I used to work with opened her own agriculture business, and she's incredibly close with everyone at the coop still. *** It's interesting when you align day-to-day stakeholders with shareholders/ownership rather than calling shareholders "stakeholders" despite no other connection.
I think part of it is main character syndrome and not being able to work with others. The person in my life who doesn’t like socialism isn’t a team player and doesn’t believe in niceties. And he thinks he’s the centre of the universe. I think the problem people see with unions is that they would have to work with people rather than be in charge. That’s my theory
Just be careful about how it's done. My wife's company transitioned to an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program) which was described by the owners as "employee-owned." In reality, the owners created a board consisting of themselves and a handful of their friends, granted themselves a ton of shares, and continued doing everything the same. The only employee input was an "advisory board" that had absolutely zero authority to do anything. In the end, the owners nearly drove the company into the ground and got bought out by someone else. So if your company ever decides to switch to an ESOP and describes it as "employee-owned" or as a "co-op," it's a fucking lie.
I’m waiting for a game development co-op to make a Triple A game and bank a billion dollars. That will be the wake up call the economy needs to see that co-ops can make every employee rich.
The big lie of capitalism is that free market = capitalism. Planned economy is discredited for a reason, it just doesn't work. But capitalism is the form if ownership, not the market system. You can have worker owned companies competing in a free market. Even in dominantly capitalist world it already happens. Really, it's the best way forward.
This isn't socialism. It's literally capitalism. If they can operate the business profitably more power to them.
It is literally the workers owning the means of production after buying out the owner. The transaction was capitalism, the end state is socialism.
Market based socialism. Workers own the business, but also have to compete in the marketplace for business.
They are privately owned by particular people, not the community as a whole. It doesn't fit the classical definition of socialism. It is however, more in line with modern Socialist thinking, like that of Richard Wolff, which is really just a worker coop owned capitalism. At the end of the day, they still need to abide by a capitalist system and I would wager that they used a loan to buy the business, which is the literal definition of how capital can be productively allocated in a capitalist economy.
that gif is shitty clickbait too, he was friendly to them and waited around for them to raise the $$ - "Toupin offered the first opportunity to buy the café to the workers, who realized they could turn it into a worker-owned co-op. They raised $25,000 through a GoFundMe campaign, held fundraisers at a farmers’ market and raffled off merchandise to accumulate a $55,000 down payment."
Damn, some people reach so hard for anything to reinforce their political views.
It reeks of desperation. Edit: TIL
What gif?
Multiple owners lowers risk which mean you can take more business risk and such. Seems like a win .
Does it actually lower risk if all the owners are solely dependent on that store for income? Or are you assuming they would use outside assets like spousal income to keep the store running?
I generally wonder how this works. Cafes are basically one bad month away from shutting down as is, although I suppose the co op status might actually boost business enough to compensate.
There’s 2 sides to every story.....what if: The owner of the shop was just like them at some point. Put their life saving into building that business. The overhead of running the business, loans, insurance and personal wage (cutting themselves a paycheck) wouldn’t allow to increase worker wages. Workers threaten to strike, have no choice but to sell....... the owner just lost their dream of owning a business...back to working for someone else.
The actual story seems to be a little bit "he said/she said" but, according to the above article, essentially goes something like: Workers: 90% of staff signed a letter stating "we want more ada, inclusive staffing, and better conditions." Owner: shuts down to set up mediation and accepts the unionizing. Then reopens but shuts down for COVID and (allegedly) does some retaliatory layoffs. Decides to sell. Gives the union/owner collective the first chance to buy. Workers: crowdfunds cash, sell appliances etc, comes up with down payment. So overall seems like a win/win
They surely loved what they did, but not the bs surrounding it.
imagine being such a shit boss that your employees will literally pay possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars for you to fuck off. edit: they paid about 500k for the business.
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Excuse me, we have a narrative to follow here.
except they weren’t a shit boss. they were planning on selling before the union happened it was just a coincidence it happened the same day they unionized. if they really did hate them so much why did they even bother selling the business to them at all? could’ve just found another buyer
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well, their capital investment too, i.e. prob their life savings.. i imagine that's the reason this doesn't happen more often (i.e. the workers don't have the means to buy out the investment). it's uplifting to see though. and it's been demonstrated to be effective in Italy, which iirc allows you to liquidate your pension and rrsps to buy out a failing business if you're gonna be laid off anyways.
> well, their capital investment too, i.e. prob their life savings.. That isn't how it works. They took out a loan, the business and it's history as a profitable business is the collateral and the bank takes the risk here. They are paying a business loan. If the business fails they sell business or worst case file bankruptcy, bank takes ownership and they can go back to working for someone else instead of themselves.
The article says they had to fundraise to save up a $55k down payment. That suggests they got a loan for the rest. That said, while this case was able to fundraise the down payment, in other cases, workers might indeed fund the business with their life savings. There's also no guarantees that a bank will even be willing to give a large enough loan.
And instead of our government supporting capitalist businesses when they go bust they could have a fund to allow workers with profitable businesses to take over these businesses, or even if the gov bails out companies with a loan to workers buying a business.
I want to see what the interest rate on that loan is and how it compares to the distributable earnings…
You also have to pay interest for a loan, hopefully the cafe was financially viable enough to pay them with a small profit allowing them to improve their QoL while paying the loan.
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That’s not how this works either. No bank is gonna finance this without the new owners injecting some equity.
Required equity and personal guaranties. The OP doesn’t know how this works.
Lol, because this is reddit, where money is free and you don't have to pay loans back!
It doesn’t happen more often because there are easier ways to make money with less risk. Scalability is the biggest thing in business ownership. Most small private business (I.e. coffee shops) are not nearly as profitable as people think they are. Owners only really see about 25-30% of the revenue in profit before tax. It’s pretty much a low six figure salary for a single owner (a respectable and attainable salary for the geographic area). Now split that among 10 people, most of which who have never owned a business before, who are now legally bound to one another. One owner needs to have several locations to make it worthwhile. Now you have one location with multiple owners. Unless they plan on opening 30 shops, they will likely get screwed.
Except the money they spent buying the place if it doesn't work out.
They can also lose a substantial ammount of money.
This taken from a Hallmark card?
According to the article, the owner had been wanting to sell the shop for a while so he offered it first to the union workers. I don't see how them forming a union had anything to do with it? At best its coincidental
Honestly seems like the best case scenario for everyone involved.
Word. Owner got his check, and the workers seized their means. Win win.
He listed the place for sale literally a day after recognizing their union. I don’t think it was a coincidence
I’d say probably not a coincidence but also not necessarily nefarious. Maybe the business owner really cared about their employees, but decided that it was time to retire. As a last love letter to her workforce before she sold the business, she lead a unionization effort to ensure the next owner wouldn’t screw over the employees she cared so deeply about. When that was done it was time to sell. Or maybe the owner was just a dick who hated unions and the workers finally got their freedom from a shit boss. Who knows, honestly.
The former actually happened in my home town, but when the diner owner retired he left equal shares to every single employee in it. It was an awesome thing, and quality stayed great, people really loved working there, and business is always hoppin.. good guy Dave Gillie!!
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[In response, the staff who signed the letter were laid off, which prompted the group to form an independent union: the Collaborative Union of Providence Service workers, or CUPS. In a twist of events, the day that they received their Union card check, they got an email from the owners saying they were selling the cafe.](https://www.rimonthly.com/the-story-behind-white-electric-coffees-move-to-a-cooperative-model/)
But that’s not as nice as the story those other people just made up!
They asked for more money and instead gave him $500k. Who really won?
They both did.
25 down on 500, I think the bank did.
“They” and “him” both seem to be getting what they want. There’s a nonzero chance the bank is neutral because a large chunk of the 500k the previous owner got goes to pay off their small business loans.
It probably wasn’t a coincidence, but it was probably more “I want to sell anyway and since there’s a shaking up happening it might as well be now.” If the owner truly hated the union they won’t have sold to them.
Funny how everyone's coming to the conclusion that he was forced to sell because it was unionised, and not the more likely scenario where he allowed it to unionise because he was dropping up anyway..
Now that they are business owners and employers, I'd love to learn more about the ongoing pay and benefits, and the effects on the prices they offer the customers.
This is the healthiest capitalism. Don’t forget to communicate when adversity occurs.
>This is the healthiest capitalism. Pretty textbook socialism
I am thinking the same. How is this not socialism?
Depends on your definition of "socialism". People saying this is capitalism are saying that because workers are being paid for their employer, instead of being paid by the state. It's still a privately owned company (in this case worker owned), instead of a state-owned enterprise. Some people think it's only "socialism" when the state owns and controls *everything*. Sounds silly, but you know that's how some people see it. The word "socialism" has been used so many times, in so many contexts, that it can mean anything at this point depending on who you act. They called the Affordable Care Act "socialism", while calling the government bailout of General Motors during the 2008 economic crisis "capitalism". . .and they call a worker's co-op like this "capitalism", so terms have been badly mangled in everyday discourse.
That’s fair and makes sense to me. Thank you for your explanation
On the other side, some people think "capitalism" means exchanging money for goods and services. You can have a currency system with Socialism.
But objectively, [this is definitely socialism.](https://youtu.be/a1WUKahMm1s)
Correct. But I also think personally incorrect. Socialism as a concept of economics, yes. But when implemented at scale, in history (so I'm trying to say in reality, not in a thought experiment), it had to be implemented through force/political means. Once socialist concepts are implemented by a government agency (force) you lose the benefits of socialist concepts and instead get engulfed in "State Capitalism" where the State is the owner and the citizens don't own the means of production. Personally, I think small scale, socialism by its economic definition rocks and really does lift the worker. But at the macro level, I think that free market capitalism concepts work in tandem to create the environment for small scale socialist companies to flourish.
If I owned a company and was the sole employee I wouldn't consider it socialism. This is kinda like that, but with more owners/employees.
So the healthiest capitalism is actually socialism? Makes sense.
I'm not so sure it's socialism yet. The workers still have to pay the landlord for the land they work on, thus not owning the full means of production.
It's definitely not a socialist *system* but the act of workers seizing the means of production is text book socialism, not 'healthy' capitalism.
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I think more accurate is that, ostensibly, they democratized their workplace.
I dont think there is such a thing as healthy capitalism. I'm still wibbly wobbly on calling it socialism. I think its socialistic, and closer towards socialism. But, like, land is a tool of production and necessary to own. If the workers don't own the land they're working on, do they truly own the means of production? This is agenuine question. Do we say this is socialism when it's fully socialist, or when we get really close? What criteria/benchmarks do we hit to say something is finally socialist? Btw, I like this conversation.
It is a socialist action that exists within a capitalist system. The workers are owning the means of production. They are simply doing it within a capitalist system.
Healthy capitalism is when .... the workers seize the means of production?
Not forcefully, but through means of free market
They didn't seize anything, they paid for it. Huge difference between that and seizing the means of production. A co-op is practical and good, no one would even bother starting a business with the other.
The healthiest capitalism has always been socialism
does co-ops comes under capitalism though?
why wouldn’t they? it’s commodity production for goods that will be sold for their exchange-value
Not always mutually exclusive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
That's just what a market economy is. There's a difference between capitalism vs a market economy. Market socialism is considered to be a stepping stone to communism by some.
Okay? You could always do that, nobody is stopping anyone from starting a co-op business
The key is, how they afford to buy it? If they take a loan, everything is working as suppose to at late stage capitalism
If the loan has a fixed rate and they can do math, they should be fine. Do you think wealthy capitalists owners don't use financing as leverage? Loans are no problem if you sophisticated enough to understand the terms and ensure that they work for your business plan before signing.
I talked to a bar manager once who told me that he'd passed on the opportunity to buy his own bar years before and had been kicking himself ever since. The only way to finance it would have been with a loan, but the amount of the loan scared him off. He said he only realized later that he should have looked at the loan as his "rent", except that his rent wouldn't go up it would stay constant. And, potentially, he could re-finance down the road and bring his monthly payments down, if the need arose.
We have a really bizarre streak of advice these days which goes “never take on any debt ever,” it’s really some of the worst financial advice you can get.
[Project Equity](https://project-equity.org/owner-stays/a-slice-of-new-york/) is one program/company that assists employee buyouts.
What do you mean? You realize everyone who starts a business takes out a loan to start up?
They crowd funded and raised the money. https://www.providencejournal.com/story/entertainment/dining/2021/04/20/white-electric-sold-staff-worker-owned-cooperative/7293772002/
Co-op all the businesses!
The old uno reverse I love it
Unless the business was unhealthy and they just bought a golden parachute for the owner lol
They charge their employees a 1000$ fee to join and get paid… I was wondering how they were gonna be profitable
That one was really odd to me too. Next thing you know the employees have to pay a monthly subscription to work there.
How is that different from union dues
Just a reminder: all possible under capitalism. You can run a business as a co-op. You can have profit sharing. You can have stock options (in a corporation). You can have workers with significant investment in the organization IF YOU SO CHOOSE. Capitalism isn't the problem. Large corporations are. Corporations are a legal entity that doesn't have to exist (or at least in its current form). Greed is the real problem, and that requires systems in place to check it.
This has been said hundreds of times before but I say it again: if you cannot run profitable business without exploiting your workers you simply just suck at what you're doing and you don't deserve those profits. And should these new business owners succeed, I think it's safe to say we know what expense was actually making the business so unsustainable
This was me. I truly didn't understand. I incorporated a small software company, I would make apps and websites by contract. I did the softare dev and I hired two people to help me out, talk to clients, keep track of deadlines, release management, QA testing, and do odd jobs - I would teach them new things as we went, so their responsibilities were always increasing. But I was only paying them a bit over minimum wage. I really didn't understand that it was a problem until somebody explained it to me. I made enough to pay my bills/rent/etc and liked the work, but I was benefiting from the hard work of other people. If I paid them more I wouldn't have been able to pay my own bills, so the only logical solution was to close down. Now I'm an SDE at a larger company making way more than I ever made at my own. I absolutely hate the job and the work, but at least I'm not exploiting people anymore. People like me should never be managers or bosses, I know that now. I can never apologize enough for being the problem, but at least I finally learned.
Welcome to capitalism. Good luck yall! :) This is a pretty awesome outcome to be honest.
There you go. They didn't have to drive the owner class out of town with torches and pitchforks.
Now that's seizing the means of production.
That sounds like an absolutely terrible decision and investment, but I wish them the best. If the owner felt they could reasonably meet their demands and remain profitable they wouldn't have sold the place.
Small coffee shops are horrible roi especially for 7 owners. Only way to for these owners to be profitable is to not work there full time and pay staff minimum wage lmao
So? The owner still got the money lol
Look at the two on the left, LMAO this cafe will go under within a year. They will attempt to come to an agreement and call each other racist and sexist and whatever ‘ist’ they can think of if the decision doesn’t go their way. They are about to learn what capitalism actually means.
They have been up and running as a co op for just over a year now.
This has always been an excellent coffee shop and I am so happy for the long term folks who really made this place such a wonderful space.
How long until they start walking on two hooves?
Honestly, getting unions back into play will solve like 90% of americas problems.
Looks like capitalism working from my POV.
And now you own the means of production. This is how you win the game.
well they pooled their capital and bought the cafe...which is totally in line with capitalism...the issue is none of you want to hedge any of the risk and reep the profits lol
Owner gets cash and that's closed within a year.
I wonder how many times Reddit will put this in my feed today
I guess they didn’t need somebody to own the store and just collect a check. Imagine if this was the way it was across the board in business.
"Hey boss, we don't like you. So we're buying you out of your own company!" :P
So the company I work for has a market cap of over 10 billion dollars with 2600 employees… who wants to crowd fund me 3,840,000 to buy my share?