This is not the first decent workers owned restaurant I've known, so I'm going to answer: yes, it can work.
The sibling commenter's example of Zachary's is similarly the product of entrepreneurs who got it started https://zacharys.com/about-us/our-story/
https://jrwiener.com/cooperatives-and-founder-incentives/
The idea is that cooperatives don't have to treat everyone exactly the same. You can have different "classes" of members. You can have ordinary worker members, but also "founder" members. For example, for an agreed number of years "founder" members can get to elect a certain amount of board seats and get a higher share of profits.
Sure, it moves away from "one-person one-vote" democracy and full equality, but only for a temporary period, and it still gives ordinary workers a much greater say in their workplace than they get in standard companies.
implying what? that "workers" can't start something? Even if we imagine there's a category of people that are suited to be "starters" or "entrepreneurs" that category is still plenty numerous, easily 10-35% of the population, if not more.
I believe I read that Nick's, up north, is also heading worker-owned.
And of course worker-owned doesn't just mean pizza in Oakland.
* Somehow finances have to work, which is usually a harsh reality for some. Ex: Hey we can't pay workers $250/hr without raises prices to above what customers are willing to pay
* Consumers despite "Least common denominator" which is often the result of "design by committee". Usually consumers are after something niche, unique, artistic, and creative, which is the inspiration or vision of an individual.
> As for making business decisions, it’s done democratically. The entirety of the member-owner group votes on major decisions, and the bylaws outline scenarios where employees are authorized to act independently of a vote
I don't see this working in the long term unfortunately unless a majority of the workers have a lot experience with business, especially something as cashflow-sensitive as a restaurant (which typically operate on razor-thin margins). But I do wish them luck in their experiment.
> Somehow finances have to work, which is usually a harsh reality for some
At most places I've been involved in the workers are more careful with money because they are standing together and want the business to succeed. They have transparency into the finances, so they know what's possible and try to make sure not to go overboard.
> Consumers despite "Least common denominator" which is often the result of "design by committee". Usually consumers are after something niche, unique, artistic, and creative, which is the inspiration or vision of an individual.
All of the worker owned places I've been have been exactly this: creative, interesting, and individual. These aren't giant chains designed in a megacorp boardroom.
> I don't see this working in the long term unfortunately unless a majority of the workers have a lot experience with business, especially something as cashflow-sensitive as a restaurant (which typically operate on razor-thin margins). But I do wish them luck in their experiment.
There are many of these and though I don't know the success rate compared to hierarchical businesses in the food industry in particular, co-ops have a higher success rate than hierarchical businesses in general and there's been a lot of research into it, though I don't know if an exact "why" has ever been established. I suspect it's that there's no handful of individuals who can get greedy and ruin things by trying to maximize profit. Even for-profit co-ops generally have a better sense of balance since the workers don't want their business to dry up and if one person gets greedy there are lots of other people to keep them in check.
This doesn't contradict anything GP said. Worker owners are careful with company money because they have to be, due to being invested into it. That's a responsibility that not everyone wants, especially when an organization approaches the scale of tragedy of the commons. How many regular voters bother to read the raw, uneditorialized finances that the government provides?
> co-ops have a higher success rate than hierarchical businesses
This is only true when you're defining success as a binary "does this company still exist." Worker-owned companies are significantly less likely to expand because they would be creating risk but would have to share the additional profits with the new hires. This would especially be the case for a restaurant which doesn't benefit from economies of scale (see Publix supermaket as an example of a worker-owned corporation that does).
Even if Jude's can sustainably pay $30/hour, it would take hundreds of similar restaurants to match the success of a single "nice" privately owned restaurant chain like In-and-Out, which also pays above-market wages to thousands of employees, albeit not as above market as Jude's.
I mean, I feel like a quick survey of the american restaurant landscape implies that consumers are mostly after something reliable for their time and money.
but also the idea that front of house having a say in the business would mean the menu is anymore design by comittee than any other restaurant is weird, especially because menus aren't generally decided by the owner of the restaurant anyway.
But as soon as a working class business tries that, it apparently doesn't work in the long term.
Be careful about extrapolating this out to the rule of countries though, dictatorships can make things go south worse than any other system. At least with FOSS projects, people can fork without fleeing their homes.
Besides, comments here tend to complain about middle management being useless, not leadership.
Ergo, people bitch more about bosses than colleagues, even though there are bad examples of both.
Man may never know.
Dollars to donuts you wrote that bullet point without having read the article:
* the extant worker-owned restaurant discussed in the article is the epitome of "something niche, unique, artistic, and creative," which was "the inspiration or vision of" the owner making a pitch to the staff to become worker-owned. It even mentions getting employees because of the unique approach. I can't imagine they haven't drawn non-trivial consumers to their restaurant for the same reason
* pictures of the food exist in the article
In short: I know "design by committee" food. I've worked with "design by committee" food. That fried chicken sandwich, sir, is no "design by committee" food.
But idk, this just sounds like a worse version of a regular corporation. New employees' stakes will pay out in a way that's competitive with local wages. More profits than usual will have to be paid out rather than reinvested in the business (think high dividend yield, low P/E), otherwise new employees just needing to pay bills won't trust it. If they want to offer some wage and less stake, it's the same.
Works the same as shareholders.
If it was worker owned wouldn't you just pay everyone some reasonable wage that the business can afford and then also split profits evenly?
You seem to be suggesting that workers are cartoonishly naive and have ridiculous demands that cannot simply be met. When in reality they usually just want a living wage, a bit more input on shift planning, things like this. People aren't generally stupid, and if they can get it together enough to form a worker-owned co-op they're not likely to immediately run it into the ground doing stupid stuff like giving themselves a 1000% wage increase.
Personally if it’s owner-run I would assume you would be better picking a lower base wage, then sharing profits (with the profits making up that shortfall).
That way there is also an incentive to be an owner, and the business is more stable - sounds like if they have picked high wages and low/no profit though they are running it hot and risky from a cash flow perspective.
But there aren’t profits for owners to share at the moment - possibly partially because they are overpaying on labour.
The committee that you spoke of have a vested interest in the outcome of the decisions and, in certain cases, the decision must have full support of the board. While this will have problems, it is unlikely to suffer from the symptoms that most people think of when they think of something being designed by committee.
The other thing to consider here is that this is a relatively small business. As such, it is possible to recruit a board that is more likely to share a common vision and train them in operating a business. We are not talking about a fast food chain with tens of thousand of employees and little interest in training beyond the skills to fit a singular role.
I don't know if operating a restaurant as a cooperative is viable in the long run, but I am not going to argue against it from a prejudiced position.
The only successful worker-owned models I’ve seen involve a tight-knit partnership, like a husband as the chef and wife as the bartender. And that is their “part time” job: the majority of their time goes into tough logistical tasks—dealing with suppliers, managing food costs, managing lease, fixing, schedule, and so on.
Unless those workers were looking to make half a million per year I think that's okay.
Somehow finances have to work, which is usually a harsh reality for some owners. Ex: Hey we can't have collective payout to investors totaling $10M this year without raises prices to above what customers are wiling to pay.
This is one of the most interesting parts of business to me. How do a bunch of people below the "head honcho/top dog" collectively agree "you're right, I don't selfishly look out for myself and think I'm worth $99999999/hr, that person does more than me and their skillset is worth more than mine, I will bow out and not contend to ask for more than them an hour"
From there, you get hierarchy
You'll have one person paid the most at the top, and it trickles down
In worker owned, the people at the bottom... why are they ok with being paid "relatively" the least? Why don't they feel like their work is entitled to as much as those making more than them? How are they ok with not looking out for their own self interest at all times?
Some workers just want a stable, sane work environment and are willing to compromise on pay for other benefits. These same people are typically willing to let others do more work for more pay because it makes their own lives easier.
One possible approach: you could do an exercise where everyone gets $N imaginary dollars and they can bid to not do certain tasks. The bid against each task is then the compensation for that task.
Same supplies in technology: you pay your project manager less despite he is the boss of the developers which earn a lot more.
I am literally in a position where I earn like half of what people two levels down of me earn and deserve, nevertheless I lead them and fire them in doubt. I am in a different country of a multi national.
One year I made $260k, more than anyone that actually worked above me at the automall including the CPA comptroller and GM (the other brands at the 'automall' had a bad year while mine had a breakout year due to new models).
I started a year before cash for clunkers came out. I basically was making $200k a year after learning the ropes for 6 months. The owner that year lost over a million dollars.
Not all compensation is based on hierarchy. Commission sales and performance based pay has its advantages.
That may be the wrong way to think about it. Vanishingly few people have enough experience in all aspects of any business to make good decisions without others inputs. So in many cases we are reliant on someone's domain expertise, not to make the decisions, but to get the the right decision point. Once the pros and cons are laid out properly, anyone with a real stake can contribute to the decision.
The bigger the decision, the more people with a stake need to be involved. In the typical business world this shows up all the time: "that's a board-level decision", "we need all the execs to agree on this one", etc.
We don't know the actual implementation, but it's possibly it's just a reasonable reflection of that practice into collective ownership...
That said the two main problems that come up over and over again in our setup are.
1. People don’t understand what being a coop member means legally and financially. They are on the hook for losses for example. 2. It’s hard getting people to volunteer to do needed day to day work. 3. To much drama, every little thing is blown out of proposition and sometime we are forced to use executive privilege to get something done. 4. Coop can distract from delivering the actual services (school).
Consumers want that in theory, but much of the time choose lifestyles that favor the opposite. Basically every suburb is the most generic horrible place possible with a tiny amount of commercial activity relegated to a strip mall in a parking lot wasteland filled with the same few shitty restaurants; where culture goes to die.
The committee can decide to delegate tasks and decisions to individuals and set roles and responsibilities for individuals as well.
There are restaurants that charge north of 800$ per person which are always fully booked half a year in advance with glowing reviews even from the worst critics hellbent on being negative.
You certainly can pay workers $250 an hour without raising prices above what customers are willing to pay depending on the product. Of cause that's not the case at those restaurants, the workers make closer to $30 bucks an hour and the money goes to the owner/investors. Imagining a restaurant with that kind of success where the owners and investors are the workers is a nice thought.
I know of one of these restaurants that always top the list of best restaurant in the world basically gave their main dish washing guy a small owning stake because the owner/chefs like him, and he's now making way more than just $250 an hour washing the dishes. But that is of cause just a case of the rich throwing leftover bones to the dogs eating scraps at the table for shits and giggles, not a case where workers owning a restaurant leads to a fair distribution of the profits for all of them.
99.9% of restaurants cannot charge super high prices, you're just being pedantic.
There’s expensive plates, bowls, silver wear, custom presentation items. High end materials every where. You’re hiring more staff so that you can pay attention to every detail. The wine cellar might have several million dollars worth of wine in it.
Masa Sushi charges $1000/ person and hourly worker pay is $20.
There maybe a rare one but I don't know of a restaurants that charges $1K / person can pay worker $250.
All of them will have a star chef/brand who'll have to leave lot of money on the table. i.e. only way everyone will make $250 is if someone is giving it for free.
I always enjoy these kinds of articles - "Could this radical new way of doing things ever succeed?" where the "radical new way" has a history going back to before the Reagan revolution. We're a really kind of unimaginative people when it comes to talking about how one arranges things in society.
> We're a really kind of unimaginative people when it comes to talking about how one arranges things in society
by asking "how did we get that way?"
https://www.hellskitcheninc.com/#about-us-employee-owned-sec...
I guess this is mentioned on the page to signal that menu price is the final, no need to tip? US' tipping culture is so strange. Normally you don't need to mention anything, people would pay the menu price and you'd include whatever you'd need for paying the staff. That's how it is in the rest of the world.
Edit: I encourage downvoters to actually try to read the linked page before downvoting me. It’s incredibly unreadable.
It's readable. It's not great. I've seen a lot worse (slightly dark grey on lighter grey, faded tan on medium blue, cyan on bright green...)
The new one doesn't tell me an obvious address -- the only one appears to be the handwritten pixelated background image, which is partially blocked on every single page by a foreground photo.
I dig retro and minimalistic pages. This is just bad design.
https://www.start.coop/accelerator
Also in NYC is "The Drivers Cooperative" which is Uber but owned by drivers and they're doing pretty well so far (based on the last annual report).
and what about sweat equity - how do founders get compensated for starting the thing and working for free?
Video about the co-op
Next door is an Indian restaurant that makes very good wraps, and they're friendly. Easy decision.
My favorite pizza shop is a co-op too, Cheeseboard. Supposedly $2.50 for a slice or $20 for a pizza, idk if that's accurate but I remember it being reasonable either way, especially given the quality. Making exactly one kind of pizza all day is more efficient, so it makes sense.
I would love a retrospective on the role of Slack and Discord as tools of revolutionary politics in the last decade or so. Seems like no matter where you fall ideologically, there's a Slack channel or Discord server for you and it's doing the emoji vote thing.
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340463/disaster-anarchy/
https://academic.oup.com/policy-press-scholarship-online/boo...
Honestly, I won't recommend. The quality is sub par.
What about the one person who actually can't afford to do that because they'd already budgeted assuming that money was coming in?
What about if you need to reduce headcount? Do you just all vote on who should be fired in effectively a popularity contest that will cause build up of resentment later on? Draw the shortest straw? In this case, an "owner" is probably best because they can all collectively "hate" the owner and bond together as staff.
What about if someone is secretly planning to leave in the next few months and wants their money now as salary rather than investing in long term projects for the company, etc... They might destabilise the long-term success of the company if they vote not to invest, but be unmotivated and work poorly if they know some of "their money" was invested and they're never going to see it.
There seem to be so many edge cases where the traditional hierarchy structure seems like the best viable solution. There are some examples of co-operatives in the UK, the most famous is John Lewis. I think they work around it by just running mostly like a normal business, paying fairly normal salaries for different roles, but then bonuses for profit sharing.
> the Erreka Group averted layoffs by temporarily trimming wages by 5 percent. It continued to pay workers stuck at home in exchange for the promise that they would make up some of their hours when better days returned.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210103102831/https://www.nytim...
"Insiders claim that some years’ borrowings were ramped up in order to avoid having to think the unthinkable and cut the hallowed John Lewis staff bonus, as profits failed to keep up with the pace of store openings."
It only takes a few years of mismanagement for a partner owned company like Waitrose to borrow too much and step on the landmine of unserviceable debt. The company is then has to be sold and metastasises into a normal company. Obviously the most unjust thing in that story is that upper management probably not only get paid too much while causing the situation but likely negotiate a personally beneficial settlement for themselves as the ship burns and sinks.
0 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/07/12/john-lewis-r... 1 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/11/can-dame-sha...
(Apologies for linking to that website)
I think the biggest obstacle for worker owned businesses is the funding, not the absence of a hierarchy.
Of course hierarchy is unnecessary, but there are a lot of people with resources and vested interest in it appearing otherwise.
The group in the article take the approach of consensus-based decision making. For high velocity work like in a software company, I am more interested in the consent-based decision making processes pioneered by the Quakers and formalized in frameworks like Sociocracy.
Seems net income per employee is only ~$120,000, though. The way you put it might leave people thinking they have $2.4 million to give to each employee, when in reality they have bills to pay.
Isn't that _after_ they paid the employees though?
One dealbreaker for me and far-left thinking is the required authoritarianism of implementing their ideas in society.
If your ideas are so good, go start something yourself, and see if it catches on. If people still want to work for Apple, there must be a reason, despite the lopsided revenue distribution.
The current authoritarianism of the capitalist class is what keeps workers from having capital, by not paying workers the full value their labour produces. They enforce this with laws, courts police and armies.
Workers did in fact also start things themselves and got attacked for it. From monopoly practices to starve co-ops to coups, sanctions and wars against countries that collectivise.
Restaurants are often started as a family business with a “boss” who simply continues to be a boss even as more employees come on board.
“Democracy fails when the people and their leaders fail to realise that the thing they want above all is peace and general prosperity, and that neither of those is a naturally occurring phenomenon.”
Because the peaceful transfer of power as well as respect for the truth, and equality before the law is the absolute foundation that any prosperous democracy needs.
It is true though that an employee will be much more personally invested in that kind of voting than a typical investor given that’s they essentially can’t diversify like an investor can, without being so rich that they make more from investments than working anyway. And that they may choose to give themselves the option of direct democracy to varying degrees instead of representative democracy. In a standard white collar corporate environment that could kick up workplace politics to insane levels.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/24/this-venture-backed-startu...
Also, if you're interested in the intersection between economics and employee-owned co-ops, there is https://www.democracyatwork.info
Do you know any worker-owned food businesses? Share in the comments!
In Preston, UK, we have The Larder. Not sure about the ownership model but it is a social enterprise working on food justice: https://larder.org.uk/
Back on topic: there's also the Cheese Board in Berkeley, CA, and Arizmendi Bakery but not sure if the salaries are as great. There used to be a great bakery in South Berkeley that was worker owned and fairly well known, but the name is escaping me (edit: it was Nabolom Bakery). In any case, that one struggled more with the business side and employee salaries were close to minimum wage.
Another aside: it's interesting to me how lots of tech workers in the Bay Area live in an entirely different Bay Area than me or most people I knew out there -- these two worlds seem to scarcely talk to each other in any meaningful ways.
I'd say up until early/mid-2022 or so you could get by on a surprisingly small amount of money in San Francisco. Watching prices skyrocket over the past 18 months or so has been a wild ride.
Another aside: it's interesting to me how lots of tech workers in the Bay
Area live in an entirely different Bay Area than me or most people I knew
out there -- these two worlds seem to scarcely talk to each other in any
meaningful ways.
Btw the definition varies a good bit around the world but generally a social enterprise is more about the goal of the organization and a coop (or worker-owned) is about who has power the make decisions in the org.
In Ithaca, NY and its surrounds, Gimme! Coffee recently became a worker-owned enterprise: https://ithacavoice.org/2022/07/a-labor-of-love-gimme-coffee...
What happens when they don't want to do the actual work anymore? Do they still keep their partial ownership of the restaurant and hire wagies? What if they can't work anymore? It's not easy to step and fetch for 10 hours a day at age 50. What if they just need to reduce their schedule to 10 hours a week (and not pull their weight)?
What if most people willing to do grunt work also aren't very good at managing a restaurant? At menus, at book keeping? What if people prefer to be served by the cute young things that you tend to see at many chains (even if they're dressed more modestly than those at Hooters)? You know, the same sort of people who are just unlikely to want to become invested in such a place, where they'll be tied down to it?
https://www.brewbound.com/news/left-hand-brewing-now-majorit... (2015)
Not sure how you can be employee owned and have a parent company. I think the Wikipedia page needs some edits.
They say they have ten employees, and the buy-in for ownership is a thousand dollars. But there's no way the start up capital for a quality restaurant in Seattle was only $10k, so either the original founders absorbed those costs or some later employees paid in extra to cover them - either way with no expectation of increased control or return. That's more charity than alternative economic organization.
They also mention that the business has been around for ten years, but isn't profitable - and it's implied probably never has been on any consistent basis, or they would certainly have called that out. Somebody is covering that shortfall, and they're not getting anything in exchange for doing so - very noble, but again that's a reliance on charity for the business to continue existing.
Can a worker-owned restaurant work? Sure, I think there are plenty of examples that prove it. Does this one work? Not as a business, by any reasonable standard.
Why would worker ownership be a charity and why would owners not be sharing the profits regardless of whether they also work there?
RIP.
But if you had a large, 1000+ person company, unanimity would obviously never work. You would have to go by majorities or supermajorities instead.
Start to lose that just a little bit, where responsibility gets diffuse, the original intention gets lost, or you start hiring people who don't have the same understanding, and it all falls apart.
Not every worker wants to have an equal share of the grunt work. Not every worker believes that they contribute equally to the success of the restaurant and are willing to split the proceeds in that way. Not every worker wants to have to live the restaurant as if it's their life.
Worker owned coops have as many failure modes as "evil" corporate ones do. And in some senses are all the more disappointing because of it.
If anybody is gunho about a worker owned business, just go and start one. It's a free market and we can let the empirical results show us what is possible.
If a restaurant is owned by an investment fund, the fund will try to get as much money out of it as possible, regardless of the restaurant's long-term fate. But owned by the workers, they have a common interest in having good and secure jobs for a long time to come, and so can set up running parameters to best ensure that.
Now the _leadership_ is a different matter. If everybody tries to be the head chef,.you get a confusion. But that is distinct from ownership and can be arranged in many different ways, some of which work.
If all business were worker-owned, one would be right to ask whether a nom-worker-owned business could work.
It says any decision needs a 100% vote from all owners on a discord server.
Board management models generally only work if it the restaurant was individually owned at one point and then that owner left
Starting a worker owned restaurant from the ground up is a terrible idea because the end customer doesn't really care and your artificially creating additional managerial barriers to entry when you have to move fast early on
If someone has the capability of leading a worker owned restaurant (there is always a leader even in these models - e.g. a board chair), they are also equally capable of running a simpler ran benign dictatorship with less red tape.
The other issue with board management runned operations is if you want to expand operations (e.g. opening up a second restaurant). It will get political very fast and not work because there will be disagreements on how money should be spent and allocated
A worker owned business is just a more complicated business. It can work but it needs very specific conditions and it's prone to political issues
I have seen though however a benign dictatorship take on funds from investors to expand operations, but that only works if there is a well established culture (e.g. usually the restaurant has built a few successful stores on their own). It's not very that far off from startups taking investor funding
There's a reason we call restaurant entrepreneur as restauranteurs
I run my own nonprofit currently (board management) and have done startup consulting for the restaurant space for over a decade. Restaurants and startups operates on similar principles
A board management can elect a leader/ceo/dictator if they wanted (and from the sounds of it probably should).
Just like having a company run directly by shareholders is probably a bad idea.
Having a company that is 100% Owned by the same people that it employs does not make a decision on how it's run, it just aligns workers and shareholder interests completely.
Works on open source stuff, like Linux kernel, GStreamer, etc.
https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/169124217640185446...
And yes, obviously worker-owned (x) can work. There are many examples among the comments.
- If the business grows and starts needing management skills beyond what a cook or a waiter would have, you will have trouble hiring a qualified manager for same wages you pay to waiters - If you need a loan to expand, lender is likely to want some control over how a restaurant is run rather than leaving it up to workers
If you are content to stay at a small scale where these factors do not matter, sure go ahead.
Waiters generally make more than managers in restaurants in the United States at least.
>If you need a loan to expand, lender is likely to want some control over how a restaurant is run rather than leaving it up to workers
Co-ops get loans all the time. You just need a governance structure of some sort and collateral for a loan.
Next, expansion. I expect expansion is a tricky proposition because it means dilution, which is both a hard sell and a risk to the workers.
People save up for years so they can apply to buy in and work at Mondragon.
Once they've covered all their expenses so they can "retire" from their regular job, they put all the extra income into other RE efforts (namely buying other such strip malls). For lease renewals, they'll usually charge just the market rates. They are very unlikely to hyperfocus on one particular business they rent out to - they have better uses of their time, and don't want volatile income. They want something steady and reliable. They know restaurants have thin margins and may fail.
There's an Indian restaurant in one of the top food streets in my city that people love - a lot of folks consider it amongst the best in the city. I once jokingly told the owner "What will it take for you to open in my suburb?" She said that before she opened where she did, she tried to open at a plaza close to my house, but the rent was too high. I was shocked - that plaza is a graveyard of restaurants and businesses, and is not at all a happening location. Yet a top food street in the city charges less?
It's not a crazy story. It happens often.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/triple-net-lease-nnn.as...
I'm not an expert on commercial leasing, but I suspect a landlord who tried to do that would quickly find themselves with no tenants.
In all seriousness, businesses can move (easier said than done for a restaurant) and commercial leases are very long, 5-10 years.
Ref: Noam Chomsky on Worker Ownership and Markets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RafTFDwImrU
I predict they will find out this is very much not true. I have seen 1000 pages fail to do this.
It's a fine business model for at least this use case, it appears.
That's the great thing about capitalism. You get to try out all sorts of models for running your business and whatever works for you is what you can run with.
The answer is "no" unless all staff work for free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Are they surviving because people inject $1,000 of their money to the business?
”they haven’t made a profit yet”
You can pay workers a million dollars an hour. If you can’t turn a profit then it won’t “work”
So for instance, an employee(s) might sell their shares back to Teamshares or another agency, at which point the worker agency is diminished. Particularly in the former case.
Instead we end up in a system where the employee/employer relationship is inherently antagonistic. If you work at McDonalds, in is 100% in your interest to do the absolute bare minimum possible to not be fired, and in your employers interest to pay you as little as legally possible. This costs more overhead and resources from managers, and dealing with angry customers, and food loss/waste, which could largely be avoided if the employees were invested in the success of the workplace.
It looks at how Toyota took GM's worst plant and made it one of the best using the same workers. And how GM's management refused to learn lessons from that.
I think the current antagonism is something that started with management many decades ago. But now it has a lot of momentum, such that people on both sides are used to it and will carry it forward. I remember reading a great zine piece from a video game tester who'd had a variety of shitty jobs. He finally found one that was really good: good pay, good working conditions, nice bosses. But he felt compelled to steal office supplies in bulk because that's what he'd done at his shitty jobs. He was sort of mystified by it, but he couldn't stop.
However, there are alternatives. I live near an Arizmendi bakery [1], which is a worker-owned co-op. It's great. The food is really good, it's sanely run, and the people behind the counter seem serene and present. It's inspired by the founder of the Mondragon co-op [2].
Or you could look at companies that shift to employee ownership later. Bob's Red Mill was actually started by a guy named Bob who sold the company to his employees in 2010. [3]
I don't think those are going to be utopias. But I do think they lack some of the structural disincentives against sanity and compassion that you find in the typical corporate structure, where every dollar in a worker's pocket is a dollar less in economic rents for the owners.
[1] http://arizmendi-valencia.squarespace.com/
Having worked that gig before, that isn’t how it works. You don’t want to work hardish, you simply don’t get hours. If management doesn’t want to give you more than minimum raises, you leave for something else, and turn over is high. There is still leverage to do good things (both on worker and management side).
A lot of people working there (mainly managers, but some crew) wanted to be owners, McDonald’s had a franchise system in place to do that but you had a better chance of getting one if you actually learned the ropes at another store for awhile.
The startup scenario you mention offers the potential for huge payouts (of course this plays out wildly across a spectrum). A far easier sell to employees, IMO.
For example, if my company has a bad quarter and makes $0 net, does everybody get paid $0? Most people wouldn’t stand for that and would start job hunting pretty quick. The “work for equity at a startup” crowd does it because they can afford to take the risk of $0. Most people can’t or won’t take that risk.
> If you work at McDonalds, in is 100% in your interest to do the absolute bare minimum possible to not be fired
That incentive won't change much under this new system. Joe Average at McDonalds has little to no power to significantly increase the company’s, or even their franchise’s profits. Sure, they could maybe move the needle slightly, but working (say) twice as hard to make 3% more is probably not a rational move.
In white collar jobs and as you move into management then the bonus programmes become more aligned with business unit and company performance so maybe you can move the needle and get paid for it. Companies also have the carrots of promotions and pay rises.
Or:
If it's flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, be the best hamburger flipper in the world
Ice Cube, or Abraham Lincoln, or Dave Ramsey said that. I forgot which one.
It would probably incentivize you to ensure everyone else's work was up to par. This doesn't seem that different from a small startup with heavy equity comp -- everyone is incentivized to work hard, but there are also plenty of times where people want everyone else to work hard but not themself.
In the extreme case, imagine two co-founders. It is common for each co-founder to try and take distracting side jobs / consulting or not quit their dayjob, while the other puts in the hard work to grow the value of the startup. Generally this is a hard-NO from an angel/vc investment standpoint, but outside an external party clamping down, there is an incentive to cheat.
If you hate it, go do it yourself. You’ll either a) succeed and solve your problem or b) develop a much more complete understanding of the problems being faced by someone in a different role.
I think every worker would benefit from being more involved in the business operations, or really any other jobs that help their company/project function.
(of course it’s probably not practical to do so)
Exactly right. All large enterprises I have worked give full freedom to devs to develop alternative to any SAAS product they dislike. As simple as that.
Restaurant work is easy to get in to without having to submit yourself to academic humiliation and corporate humiliation, and since good workers are always wanted, you'll always have a job if you show good work ethic, whereas in other industries your job mostly depends on politicizing at the workplace.
But honestly, the restaurant sector I wouldn't recommend for anybody. The only way to expect a reasonable return on your efforts is to have your own place - and then you'll be working for your landlords who'll keep increasing the rent if they see you're being successful, or wasting decades paying interest on a mortgage. And since customers don't accept higher prices, you can't offer higher salaries. Then you start resenting your employees because they won't stay with you for a long time, and you're always rotating the roster.
Or maybe you have the money to buy a restaurant property in a good location outright. But then the question is: If you have that money, why not continue doing the thing that made you that money instead of investing in the worst sector?
Covid was the wake-up call. A huge part of remaining restaurant workers got laid off or put on "pause" without a salary. They realized that they were expendable to the employers and to the industry, so got new jobs and new careers. No matter what jobs they got, it was guaranteed better than their former restaurant job. With the added bonus that you can actually advance in your career and pay when you're getting more skilled at the job.
I don't know what the future holds for restaurants and eating. Maybe more mix-in with show business, so that people have more incentive to visit and don't mind paying a higher price? Maybe people start learning better to cook? It's not difficult. Maybe better quality microwave/air fryer food, in refrigerators instead of in freezers at the supermarket?