fubo , 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

It’s easier to get loans or investment if you can offer ownership of the business or its assets as collateral or equity. That’s easier to do with concentrated private ownership than with a business that starts as a cooperative with shared ownership. So there is a structural¹ bias in favor of concentrated ownership and away from cooperative ownership when starting a new business.

In some successful worker-owned businesses, the business started as a traditional private endeavor and then converted to worker-owned through the deliberate choice of the founders & workers. For instance, the Cheese Board Collective here in Berkeley started as a privately owned cheese shop which was then sold to its workers a few years later. It’s been a cooperative since 1971.

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¹ That is, the system can have this bias, regardless of whether the individuals making up the economy have this preference.