Worker Coops v Employee Ownership
Simon Ball (Blake House)
Public
Seen by 165
Maybe worth a discussion about the recent proliferation of employee ownership trusts and their promotion.
Broadly, I can see them as a kind of 'better' alternative to trad business organising, but am finding myself becoming more and more mystified as to why they get roped together with worker co-ops (and indeed dominate the 'start a worker coop' page on the coops uk website - bizarre).
Do we have any resources that can be pushed as an alternative to employers who want to hand over the keys? Presumably with furlough ending soon there may well be a deluge of companies that may find worker co-op conversion appealing.
Maybe we need to have something in place to counter all of this employee ownership cash/propaganda?
Is there something already in place?
Ross Hodgson · Tue 18 Oct 2022 4:10PM
The loomio update prompted me to this thread, which is obviously old but still relevant. Trying to use something negative to post something more relevant. Think within worker coops and the new federation, it'd be useful to focus on what we want/need. Within Coops UK this discussions has often been around the need to have a model that also gets the tax breaks that employee ownership gets, and campaigning for that. I think they will still do that, but not as a strategic priority.
What if we stopped thinking about the tax break situation, but just focused on the model that absolutely could ensure an owner could be paid out securely in handing over to the workers, but we were just open that actually this isn't as tax efficient, but it is better for the workers. Absolutely its great what Stephen and VME have done to push the barriers here, and we can learn from that. My feeling is we should focus, and ask a new worker coop federal, to focus on having a model to use, not the wider legal/political campaigning which is a waste of energy right now, and a distraction from having a set simple legal model/process, that EOT provides for employee ownership.
I realise you could equally say thats about financing as legal structure. Just feel we could have more wider success if we focused on what we had, not the possibility we might get the same finance breaks as EOTS, because we wont.