jheapsandClaude Opus 5.5
059299db74
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QWPs69B8nQZjtPEUXMKzZx
2.9 KiB
title, section, order, summary
| title | section | order | summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ownership and the Floor | Beyond Co-ops | 110 | Ownership ends the skim, but a floor ends the hunger. Low-margin work needs both, and the floor can't wait for the co-op sector to grow. |
Ownership and the Floor
This is the correction that matters most, and it took the longest to see.
Equal ownership within firms does not produce equal outcomes across them.
A worker-owned cleaning company still operates on cleaning-company margins, maybe $8k of profit per head. A worker-owned software firm throws off $150k per head. Both workers are owners. One of them still can't feed their kids.
Profit-per-head is set by technology and demand elasticity, forces ownership rules don't reach. Cleaning productivity has barely moved in forty years: one person, one mop. Ownership of the surplus doesn't change how much surplus exists.
So:
- Ownership ends the skim. It is the right answer to extraction: a large surplus flowing to people who didn't make it.
- A floor ends the hunger. The home health aide, the childcare worker, the line cook: their problem was never that private equity was skimming their $150k. Their problem is there is no $150k.
You need both. They do different jobs. And because the model doesn't force anyone to convert, this section matters more, not less: the co-op sector will grow slowly, if it grows at all, and the floor doesn't wait for it. One in six Utah kids goes hungry, and a lot of their parents work in sectors where there is barely any surplus to own.
The floor, in pieces:
- A strong minimum wage.
- Targeted subsidy for essential low-margin work, paid to workers, not firms. Somebody has to clean the nursing home for the poor. If the sector can't pay, the public does, directly, so the buyer can't absorb the subsidy by bidding less. Who decides what counts as essential, and how to keep every low-wage industry from claiming it, is in Who Decides What's Essential.
- Funded automation research aimed at exactly those sectors. If productivity can't rise on its own, raise it. This is explicitly a transition strategy: support the workers until the technology lands. Say that out loud, or you end up permanently subsidizing a job you're simultaneously trying to eliminate, and the subsidized workers start lobbying against the automation. (This is what happened with coal.)
- A transitional public temp corps. Companies apply for subsidized labor. The state supplies temps and funds the automation in parallel. Everyone knows going in that the job has a sunset. Voluntary, real wages, open to anyone who wants a bridge.
The endpoint: a society where work is not the price of being allowed to eat. Where people who don't work are taken care of, and people who work are people who want more: the finer things, a bigger share, the reward for doing what's hard or what nobody else will do.