Add the-long-run.md: the Furubotn-Pejovich worry, the French and
Italian evidence, the plywood "failure of success", and four rules:
the reserve takes its share of pay above the going rate, asset-sale
gains go to the reserve, qualifying development can be spread over
five years with abandonment charged to those who chose it, and
accounts earn Treasury+2 only while at risk. Update capital accounts,
worker ownership, the pilot's measures, open problems and the index.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QWPs69B8nQZjtPEUXMKzZx
@@ -39,16 +39,19 @@ The members' share is then split again, between cash now and the account:
- **Lower-income members can take it all in cash.** For a low-wage worker, being taxed on money they can't touch can cost them tax credits and health-care subsidies. So any member whose household income is under twice the poverty line can take their whole share in cash.
- **The rest goes into each member's account.**
Members can also raise their own salaries instead of taking profit, but that doesn't get around the reserve. It takes its share of pay above the going rate too (see [Investing for the Long Run](the-long-run.md#the-rules)).
**A worked example.** A 40-person co-op makes $600,000 in profit after paying everyone's salaries. It puts $180,000 in its permanent reserve and $60,000 in the federation fund. The remaining $360,000 is divided among members by share weight. Say the members' share weights add up to 36. A member at full share then gets $10,000: $5,000 as a check and $5,000 added to their account.
## How the account grows
- **Interest is set by formula, not by vote**: the one-year Treasury rate. If current members voted on it, they could set it to zero on accounts that mostly belong to people who've left. Or senior members could set it high to pay themselves out of the firm. A formula stops both.
- **Interest is set by formula, not by vote.** A current member's account earns the one-year Treasury rate plus two percentage points in years the co-op makes a profit, and the plain Treasury rate in loss years. Once a member leaves, their balance earns the plain Treasury rate. If current members voted on the rate, they could set it to zero on accounts that mostly belong to people who've left. Or senior members could set it high to pay themselves out of the firm. A formula stops both.
- **Why the extra two points.** Money in a current member's account is at risk: it shares in losses and ranks behind lenders. If it only earned what a risk-free government bond pays, every member would take as much cash as they could, and the co-op would have less of its own money to invest. Once you leave, your balance stops sharing in losses, so it stops earning the premium. See [Investing for the Long Run](the-long-run.md#the-rules).
- **Losses are shared.** In a year the co-op loses money, the loss is charged partly to the reserve and partly to members' accounts, in the same proportions as profits. Your account can go down, just like shares in any company.
## How it's paid out
- **When you leave**, your balance stops sharing in future losses and becomes a fixed amount the co-op owes you. It's paid in equal parts over up to five years, so one big departure can't drain the firm's cash. Balances under $10,000 are paid all at once.
- **When you leave**, your balance stops sharing in future losses and becomes a fixed amount the co-op owes you, earning the plain Treasury rate until it's paid. It's paid in equal parts over up to five years, so one big departure can't drain the firm's cash. Balances under $10,000 are paid all at once.
- **There's no penalty for leaving.** Mondragon used to cut the payout by up to 30% for people who quit. This model doesn't, because a core promise of [the tenure cap](worker-ownership.md) is that you can change jobs without losing what you've built.
- **Accounts are capped at one year's pay.** Anything above that is paid out every year, in cash or into the member's own retirement account, where it can be invested in anything. Nobody should end up with most of their savings tied to the same company that pays their wages.
- **On death, the account goes to your estate**, paid within two years. It's your property.
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ summary: A working model for building an economy where the people who do the wor
This model doesn't buy, seize or convert anyone's company. Instead it builds new worker-owned companies alongside existing ones, then lets customers and workers choose between them.
- **Workers own their company.** Every member gets one vote. A share of the profits grows with tenure until long-time members split them equally. Salaries still exist, and hard jobs still pay more. Part of each year's profit builds up in a personal account that's paid out when you leave. [Worker Ownership](worker-ownership.md) and [Member Capital Accounts](capital-accounts.md)
- **Workers own their company.** Every member gets one vote. A share of the profits grows with tenure until long-time members split them equally. Salaries still exist, and hard jobs still pay more. Part of each year's profit builds up in a personal account that's paid out when you leave, and part goes into a permanent reserve that keeps the business investing. [Worker Ownership](worker-ownership.md), [Member Capital Accounts](capital-accounts.md) and [Investing for the Long Run](the-long-run.md)
- **A small public bank lends to worker co-ops.** It charges market rates, so it only succeeds if co-ops can really compete. Its whole job is to be willing to lend to a kind of company other banks won't. [The Bank](the-bank.md)
- **Co-ops funded this way stay co-ops forever.** They can't be sold to conventional owners, and members can't vote to cash out what earlier members built. [The Lock](the-lock.md)
- **It runs as an honest experiment.** A one-time $350 million pilot aims to fund about 400 new co-ops. The success measures are published before the first loan. If, after twelve years, co-ops stay open about as well as similar conventional firms while paying their members fairly, and the bank earned at least what Treasury bonds would have, Congress votes on growing it. If not, it shuts down automatically. [The Test](the-test.md) and [The Pilot, in Numbers](pilot-spec.md)
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ An honest list of what the model hasn't solved yet, most dangerous first.
1.**Adverse selection on founders.***(The most dangerous.)* The lock removes the exit, and profits are shared with every member. In the success case a co-op founder ends up with somewhere between a fifth and a twentieth of what a conventional owner of the same firm would ([The Founder Problem](founder-problem.md)). For founders without wealth the gap in what the bet is *worth* is smaller, but at the top it's decisive. If the strongest founders go conventional, the bank's portfolio is the rejected pool, and the test fails for reasons that say nothing about co-ops. The pilot publishes founders' backgrounds so this can at least be seen.
2.**The horizon problem.** Members near retirement have little reason to vote for long-lived investments whose payoff arrives after they leave. [Member capital accounts](capital-accounts.md) credit members for the profits they earned, but not for the future value those investments create. Options include crediting accounts for growth in the firm's value, or letting departing members sell their stake to incoming members (never to outsiders). Neither is designed here yet.
2.**The horizon problem.***(Mostly answered.)* Members near retirement have little reason to vote for investments whose payoff arrives after they leave. The evidence from France and Italy finds no underinvestment where co-ops must keep a reserve, and [Investing for the Long Run](the-long-run.md) closes the main routes around this model's reserve: pay above the going rate, sales of assets, and development spending. Still open: nothing forces a co-op to maintain its equipment once its loan is repaid, reserve money could be wasted on bad expansion, and it's unsettled whether 30% is enough and whether the account rate is right. Letting members sell their places to incoming workers was rejected, because that is how the plywood co-ops ended up sold.
3.**Members' savings sit inside their employer.** [Member capital accounts](capital-accounts.md) are capped at a year's pay and protected by a solvency test, but they rank behind the co-op's creditors. Fagor's 2013 bankruptcy shows what that can mean. Federation-backed insurance is an option, not yet a design.
@@ -119,6 +119,7 @@ A useful yardstick: among the SBA's mature loan groups from 1992 to 2004, loans
- **Who got loans.** Approval rates and loan terms by the founders' race, gender and personal wealth. If collateral-based lending quietly shuts out the people co-ops mostly serve, it should show.
- **Who gets the profits inside each co-op.** Profit shares, founding shares and membership approvals by race and gender, so that an in-group of early members can't quietly take most of the pool.
- **Who founded them.** Founders' previous earnings and work histories, using linked government records where they're available, compared with the founders of the matched firms. If the strongest founders stay away ([The Founder Problem](founder-problem.md)), this is where it shows.
- **Investment.** Spending on equipment, buildings and development per worker, how much of each year's profit is kept in the business, and the return those investments earn, compared with the matched firms. If co-ops starve themselves of capital, as economists have long predicted ([Investing for the Long Run](the-long-run.md)), this is where it shows.
- **Local effects.** Business openings and closures in the counties where co-ops were funded, so any damage to existing local businesses is visible.
- **Results by industry**, including care work like home health and cleaning, where most US co-op members work today.
summary:Why economists expected worker co-ops to underinvest, what the evidence actually shows, and the rules that keep members who are about to leave from starving the firm.
---
# Investing for the Long Run
Picture a machinist who is 60 and plans to retire in three years. Her co-op is voting on a $2 million production line that will take four years to start paying off, then earn money for fifteen. Whichever way it's paid for, part of the cost comes out of the profits she shares in while she's still there, and almost all the benefit goes to people who work there after she's gone. Why would she vote yes?
That's the **horizon problem**: a member's stake in the firm lasts only as long as their job, but many good investments last much longer. In a conventional company the problem mostly doesn't arise. A shareholder who plans to sell next year still wants the company to invest well, because the share price reflects the future profits the investment will earn. A co-op member has no share to sell. [The lock](the-lock.md) makes sure of that.
This page explains why economists worried about this, what actually happens in real co-ops, and how this model handles it.
## The worry
In 1970 the economists Eirik Furubotn and Svetozar Pejovich, studying worker-run firms in Yugoslavia, argued that such firms would pay out too much and invest too little, because members can't take the value of an investment with them when they leave. The same year Jaroslav Vanek, one of the leading academic supporters of worker management, predicted underinvestment in firms that finance themselves from collective savings (both summarized in [Novkovic, *Journal of Socio-Economics*, 2008](https://www.theholmteam.ca/Novkovic-coopDifference2008.pdf)). Taken to its extreme, the prediction is that such firms slowly starve themselves of capital.
It's a serious argument, and the design has to answer it rather than hope it away.
## What actually happens
**The predicted underinvestment mostly doesn't show up in the data.**
- **France.** The largest comparison so far used two big, representative samples of French firms across many industries, including services. Worker co-ops were as productive as conventional firms or more so, used their equipment and labor efficiently, and weren't inefficiently small. Contrary to the textbook prediction, they grew as fast as conventional firms or faster ([Fakhfakh, Pérotin and Gago, *ILR Review*, 2012](https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/ilrrev/v65y2012i4p847-879.html)).
- **Italy.** A study of a large panel of Italian worker and social co-ops tested the prediction directly. It found the opposite of what the theory expects: the more of a co-op's capital was held in collective reserves that no member can withdraw, the *more* productive it was ([George, Fontanari and Tortia, 2019](https://ideas.repec.org/p/trn/utwprg/2019-20.html)).
**But there's a catch, and it matters.** These co-ops don't get to choose freely. Italian law requires every co-op to put at least 30% of each year's profit into a reserve that members can never take out ([Italian Civil Code, art. 2545-quater](https://www.brocardi.it/codice-civile/libro-quinto/titolo-vi/capo-i/sezione-iv/art2545quater.html); [Lomuscio and Tortia, 2023](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a7eb/90b586cb2adb63c321f1ca616afefb27eb70.pdf)). Mondragon did the same thing by its own rules. So the honest reading isn't "the horizon problem is a myth." It's "**a required reserve seems to be enough to keep it in check.**"
Mondragon's history shows the pressure is real. When its co-ops set their own reserve levels, the share of profit going into reserves swung from 35–53% in the 1960s down to 11–29% in the 1970s. One co-op, Alecoop, which employs students who leave every three years, faced losing its capital as each group took its money out, so it raised its reserve share to 60%. In 1989 Mondragon raised the minimum reserve for all its co-ops from 20% to 50% of profit ([Morris, *The Mondragón System*, 1992](https://www.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/mondragon-3.pdf)). Where the horizon pressure bit, the answer was a bigger required reserve.
## The fix that backfired: selling your place
There is an obvious way to solve the horizon problem completely: let members sell their membership when they leave. Then, like a shareholder, a retiring member benefits from every good investment, because it raises the price of their place.
The plywood co-ops of the Pacific Northwest did exactly this. Each member owned one share, and shares could be sold to new members. For decades they were among the most durable worker-owned firms in American manufacturing. Economists who later studied the share prices found membership had been extremely profitable ([Craig and Pencavel, *American Economic Review*, 1992](https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v82y1992i5p1083-105.html)).
Then success worked against them. Workers nearing retirement found their shares had risen from $1,000–2,000 to $25,000, $50,000 or more. Young workers couldn't afford to buy in, so retiring members sold to conventional lumber companies instead ([Lindenfeld and Wynn, 1995](https://geo.coop/articles/why-some-worker-co-ops-succeed-while-others-fail)). Observers called it "the failure of success." It wasn't the only cause of their decline. The whole plywood industry moved south from the 1960s on, and many conventional mills in the Northwest closed too ([Pencavel, lecture notes on worker co-ops, 2018](https://cleo.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/John-Pencavel-Notes-for-Students_WorkerCoops2018A.pdf)). But the co-ops that were sold while still profitable were sold because their members could sell them.
The retiring plywood workers weren't doing anything wrong. They were making a free choice with property they legally owned. This model simply doesn't create that property. A tradable membership turns the co-op back into something owned and sold, which is exactly the claim [the thesis](thesis.md) says this kind of firm exists to prevent. And it prices the next generation of workers out, which is how the plywood mills ended up being sold.
## Who pays for an investment, and when
The horizon problem bites when the members voting today pay for an investment whose benefits arrive after they leave. How much it bites depends on where the money comes from.
**1. The reserve.** At least 30% of every year's profit goes into the co-op's permanent reserve (see [Member Capital Accounts](capital-accounts.md#where-each-years-profit-goes)). No current member can ever take that money home, so spending it on a long-lived investment doesn't take anything out of our machinist's pocket. The reserve is money that already belongs to the co-op's future, and it gets spent on the co-op's future.
**2. Members' accounts.** Money members leave in their [capital accounts](capital-accounts.md) isn't lost when they leave. It's paid back to them with interest. So if the co-op keeps more of this year's profit in members' accounts to pay for the new line, the machinist gets her money back when she retires. Her real cost is the wait, and the risk that the co-op fails.
**3. Spreading the cost over time.** A business doesn't count the whole price of a machine as a cost in the year it's bought. It spreads the cost over the machine's working life. A $2 million line that lasts 20 years counts as $100,000 of cost a year. This is called *depreciation*, and it's how ordinary accounting already works. The profit split is based on profit after depreciation, so the machinist isn't charged for the years after she leaves. The bank does the same with repayment: loans for buildings and long-lived equipment are paid back over the asset's working life, up to 25 years for real estate, the same limit the SBA's main loan program uses ([SBA, types of 7(a) loans](https://www.sba.gov/partners/lenders/7a-loan-program/types-7a-loans)).
**This doesn't fix everything.** Depreciation spreads the cost evenly, but the payoff isn't even. If the line takes four years to start earning, the machinist is charged for three years of it and sees none of the benefit. That's the residual horizon problem, and it's why the reserve matters so much. The investments with the slowest payoff are the ones the reserve should pay for.
## Where the gaps are
That leaves four ways the horizon problem can still get in.
- **Paying it out as salaries.** The reserve rule applies to *profit*, and members set their own salaries. A co-op could raise everyone's pay until there's no profit left, and the reserve would get nothing. Newer members have an extra reason to like this: their profit share starts small and grows with tenure, but their salary is paid in full from day one.
- **Pay that isn't salary.** Pensions promised for the future, retiree health cover, generous severance. These push costs onto whoever works there later.
- **Selling off the furniture.** The lock stops anyone selling the *firm*, but not its assets. Members about to leave could sell the building, book the gain as profit, split it, and leave their successors paying rent.
- **Development that pays off late.** Designing a new product or building software costs money now and pays later, but it's usually counted as a cost in the year it's spent. So the members voting today pay for all of it.
## The rules
**1. The reserve's share applies to pay above the going rate, too.** This isn't a cap on wages. Members can pay themselves whatever they decide. But the reserve takes its 30% of everything members receive above the going rate, whether it's called profit or pay.
- **The going rate for each job** is the higher of two numbers: the median pay for that occupation in the co-op's own metro area, from the government's wage survey (the Bureau of Labor Statistics' [Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/oes/)), or the local living wage for a full-time worker supporting one child, from [MIT's Living Wage Calculator](https://livingwage.mit.edu/). The living-wage floor matters. In home care the median wage can be close to poverty pay, and a co-op that raises its aides to a living wage shouldn't owe anything for doing it.
- **It's checked job by job.** Paying one group below the going rate doesn't make room to pay another group above it. The co-op's auditor assigns each job its occupation code from what the person actually does, not from their title.
- **It counts total pay.** Employer retirement contributions above 6% of pay, bonuses, and severance beyond the co-op's standard formula all count as pay. Co-ops can't promise pensions or retiree benefits they don't pay for in full each year.
- **How it's settled.** Thirty percent of the excess is moved from members' [capital accounts](capital-accounts.md) into the reserve. No new cash has to be found, because the members already took that money as pay. If a member's account can't cover it, the rest comes out of their future account credits.
- **There's a precedent.** US tax law already treats salaries that aren't "reasonable" as disguised profit ([26 U.S.C. § 162(a)(1)](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/162)), so owners can't dodge tax by calling profit pay. This rule stops the same disguise being used to dodge the reserve. The tax test is judged case by case. This one is a fixed formula, so it's cruder but much harder to argue about.
**2. Gains from selling assets go to the reserve.** If a co-op sells a building, equipment, a brand or a patent for more than its value on the books, the whole gain goes to the reserve, not into the profit split. A sale to an insider, or a sale-and-lease-back, is checked like any [insider deal](pilot-safeguards.md#the-hidden-boss).
**3. Development projects can be spread out, like machines.** A co-op can designate a specific development project *before* it starts spending on it: designing a new product or a better production process, or building software. For the profit split only, its cost is then spread over up to five years, the same way a machine's is.
- **Only real development qualifies.** It has to meet the test international accounting standards already use to decide when development creates a real asset: it's technically doable, the co-op intends to finish it and can, and it's likely to earn money ([IAS 38](https://www.ifrs.org/issued-standards/list-of-standards/ias-38-intangible-assets/)). Those standards specifically exclude training, advertising and start-up costs, and so does this rule. Those stay costs of the year they're spent.
- **The people who chose it carry the risk.** If a project is abandoned or written down within five years, the cost that hasn't yet been charged comes out of the capital accounts of the people who were members when it was designated, including former members whose payouts haven't been made yet. Payouts take up to five years anyway, so the money is usually still there. That makes the rule useless for pushing costs onto the next group of workers.
- **Limits.** The total cost still waiting to be charged can't exceed half of the co-op's average profit over the last three years, measured before any spreading. Only co-ops with an independent audit can use the rule, and the auditor checks each open project every year.
- **It only changes how costs are divided between this year's members and future ones.** It doesn't touch the co-op's tax return or its reports to the bank. The co-op publishes both numbers side by side.
**4. Accounts earn a fair rate while they're at risk.** A current member's account earns the one-year Treasury rate plus two percentage points, credited in years the co-op makes a profit. In a loss year it earns the plain Treasury rate. Money in a current member's account is at risk: it shares in the co-op's losses and ranks behind its lenders. Paying only a risk-free rate on it would push every member to take cash instead. **Once a member leaves, the balance earns the plain Treasury rate.** It no longer shares in losses, so it's no longer at risk, and nobody should collect a premium from the work of people they no longer work alongside. For comparison, Italian law lets co-ops pay members up to 2.5 points above the rate on its postal savings bonds on the capital they've put in (Lomuscio and Tortia, 2023), and Mondragon paid 6% plus an adjustment for inflation (Morris, 1992). The details are on the [capital accounts page](capital-accounts.md#how-the-account-grows).
## What's still open
- **The end game.** A co-op whose members are mostly close to retirement and not being replaced could let its equipment wear out. The reserve can't be taken, and the rules above catch most of the ways to pay it out. But nothing forces a co-op to *maintain* what it has once its bank loan is repaid.
- **Too much investment, not too little.** Reserve money can't be paid out, so there's a risk it gets spent on expansion that doesn't pay. Fagor, Mondragon's appliance maker, expanded across Europe and China, mostly on borrowed money, including buying the French appliance maker Brandt in 2005. Then the Spanish housing crash took away its main market, and it went bankrupt in 2013 ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagor)). Outside a bank loan, nothing here tests whether a big project is worth it.
- **Whether 30% is enough.** Italy requires 30%. Mondragon found 20% too low and moved to 50%. This model uses 30% as a minimum that each co-op can raise. [The pilot](pilot-spec.md#what-gets-measured) measures investment per worker, and the return it earns, against matched conventional firms. So if co-ops invest too little, or waste what they invest, it will show.
- **Is the account rate right?** Two points above Treasury is well below what investors expect from a small business, so members may still prefer cash. Paying the co-op's own return on its assets instead would reward good investment directly, but it would also make the account more volatile. Which is better is unsettled.
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ Where does the profit share actually go? Part is paid in cash each year, and par
Why the cap: uncapped tenure weighting builds a gerontocracy of shares and chains people to their first employer. Capped at a career-fraction, people can change companies, move cities, start over, and still reach a full share with plenty of career left.
- **Base salaries still exist**, set by the company. A brain surgeon won't work somewhere without a high salary, and shouldn't have to. Hard jobs and in-demand jobs still pay more. The incentive to do difficult work survives intact.
- **Base salaries still exist**, set by the company. A brain surgeon won't work somewhere without a high salary, and shouldn't have to. Hard jobs and in-demand jobs still pay more. The incentive to do difficult work survives intact. Pay isn't capped, but raising salaries doesn't let members skip the co-op's reserve: it takes its share of pay above the going rate too ([Investing for the Long Run](the-long-run.md)).
- **Governance is up to each company.** Workers pass bylaws deciding what requires a vote and what doesn't. Some will use direct democracy, some representative systems, some will delegate almost everything to management they hire and can fire. "Workers vote on every decision" is a strawman and always was.
The concrete case: the average employee where I work generates roughly $150,000/year in profit after all costs. That money currently flows upward to private equity. A firm with those economics, built as a co-op, sends it to the people who made it.
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