Suppose I have studied for years to become a pastry chef. I set up my own bakery, investing my time, energy, and labour into procuring equipment and building up a reputation as a delicious place to eat. I run the entire operation myself as the sole worker. Eventually, after years of turmoil, word of my exceptional pastries spreads and my bakery becomes the number one spot in town. Soon there’s a line up around the block, long enough that I have to turn away customers on the regular.
Not wanting to have to send people home hungry, I decide that having someone to wash my dishes and somebody to tend to the counter would buy me enough time to focus on the main reason people come to my shop: my delicious pastries.
I do, however, have an issue. I worked really hard to build my bakery up to where it is today, and don’t want to have to give up ownership to the two people I want to bring onboard. They didn’t put in any effort into building up my bakery, so why should they have an equal democratic say over how it’s run?
Is there a way I can bring on help without having to give away control of my buisness?
Furthermore, what’s to stop the two new workers from democratically voting me out of the operation, keeping the store, name, brand, and equipment for themselves?
Yeah, this is a core issue that socialists have failed to address with the average person, and I’ve never seen anything concrete from a legislative or regulatory enforcement (let alone a transitionary) perspective; all necessary if you want people to support and vote for, a socialist transition. Expecting people to do the right thing for the greater good is simply an unrealistic fantasy. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs/work” is extremely subjective, vague, and open to wide interpretation. Who decides what a “need” is? Who decides what level the impact the work or labour has on a given business?
This is more of an issue when you’re looking at sole traders and smaller businesses, as the impact of 1 person has not been diluted heavily by their workforce in effort or time. Either way, you’d assume laws would focus around a strong living minimum wage for each employee, and a profit or ownership share relative to the workers impact to the business. If the dishwasher enables you to generate 30% more profit – profit you can not generate without them – they should probably get a share beyond the bare minimum, no? That share should incentivise them to contribute, and disincentivise laziness. But also that share should obviously not be so large as to disincentivise you from hiring a dishwasher to begin with, nor another baker. Economies of scale are critical to achieving efficiency, abundance, and post scarcity. You’d also expect the bakers impact on the business to be larger than the dishwasher, so their profit share to be greater.
This issue is not nearly as difficult to grasp when you get to businesses with dozens to thousands of employees – they are literally dependent on, and can not exist, without their workers (many of which may have had greater contributions than themselves) – and the founder(s) own efforts and contributions to the business have been heavily diluted over time.
I’d suggest digging into how existing worker cooperatives are governed and were initially established https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Worker_cooperatives_by_country