Value of a Stock in a Worker Cooperative
In a typical capitalist corporation, the goal of owning stock or shares to see them increase in value and be able to sell. Is this stock valuable to rich people with money to that is not used elsewhere right now? The ability to buy more and more of the stock or shares gives you more power over the company and allows you to sell more as the price goes up.
A Worker Co-operative is a co-operative where one member has one share and only one vote. Thus, instead of buying more and more shares in order to hopefully sell more and more of them, we just have one. This makes the owners more interested in how the surplus is distributed each year.
The surplus can be seen a “Profit” or as an investment.
- The owners may vote to re-invest in the company or in the workers
- A new business line may be seed funded
- The workers could be brought whole on their salaries so that they are properly compensated
- The owners could take a dividend disbursement to share the wealth with themselves
- The surplus could be kept in savings in case the economic outlook is bad
- The community could be invested in
Over time the advantage of not trying to always extract resources from the company and to instead allow the co-operative to flourish becomes the advantage in the marketplace.