Socialism: make membership work where people don't stay long

Add high-turnover.md: in home care, a 12-month probation and the three-quarters rule could fail a co-op doing everything right. Make membership automatic after a short probation, take the buy-in from profit shares rather than pay, count agency hours and push-outs, and phase the rule in. Align the lock, the pilot's safeguards and measures, worker ownership, the index and open problems. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QWPs69B8nQZjtPEUXMKzZx
2026-09-24 02:03:06 -06:00
parent 78650c8ee7
commit a77d985135
7 changed files with 115 additions and 5 deletions
@@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ All of this is written down and filed in a public study registry before the firs
 1. **Fair survival.** Does the co-op stay open and keep treating its members fairly? A co-op counts as *failed* if any of these happens:
   - it closes, or falls below three members or a minimum level of sales;
   - for two years running, its members' median pay per hour (wages plus profit share) falls below 85% of the matched conventional firms' median;
-   - it stops being a real co-op: fewer than three-quarters of its work hours are done by members, or its workers are kept on probation past the limit.
+   - it stops being a real co-op: from its third year, fewer than three-quarters of its work hours are done by members, or its workers are kept on probation past the limit, or it pushes people out before they'd become members ([When People Don't Stay Long](high-turnover.md)).

   The pay rule matters. Co-ops can survive a bad stretch by cutting their own pay instead of cutting jobs, and the best existing study couldn't rule that out. A co-op that survives by paying its people far less than the business down the street hasn't passed.
 2. **The bank's money.** At the end, after every loss, write-off and running cost, and every dollar spent on business help, has the loan book earned at least what the same money would have earned in Treasury bonds over the same years? Anything less means taxpayers lost money compared with just holding bonds. Loans still outstanding are valued at what a buyer would pay for them. Loans that were restructured to avoid default are marked down, so going easy on struggling borrowers can't hide losses.