Let's talk about worker ownership

This is my way of announcing the worker-owned Debrief Communications collective

Dustin Godfrey, Brishti Basu, and David P. Ball together form Debrief Communications.

As a society, we purport to hold democracy as among our highest values.

We vote for city councillors, school board trustees, and national and provincial legislators at least every four years, who in turn vote on our behalf on how to govern their jurisdiction.

There are strong critiques of our form of democracy — the embedded role of wealth in determining policy, as a particular example — but we nevertheless do get some say in how our governments are run.

When it comes to the economy beyond government interventions, however, we largely abandon these values.

Well, we abandon those values for the workers who generate value while embracing it for the shareholders who extract that value.

When it comes to the governance of a country, or a municipality or a school district or a province, we value popular opinion. But when it comes to the workplace, we fall back on elitist tendencies denigrating the ~unwashed masses~: the workers just don’t know how to run a company! They’d only vote themselves raises and bankrupt it!

The consumer, meanwhile, has next to no say in how a company produces its goods. One can “vote with their dollar,” but this isn’t a serious point. If dollars are votes, then we’ve got a handful of folks with billions of votes and countless more with less than a fraction of a statistical error above zero in comparison. If your wealth amounts to $1 million, you get 0.1% of the votes a person with $1 billion gets. If your wealth adds up to $50,000, you’ve got 0.005% of the votes of a billionaire.

If consumers could really meaningfully vote on the products they consume or the services they receive, planned obsolescence, as an example, would be a thing of the past.

Power concentration bad, actually

Shareholders, generally speaking, have no expertise in how to do what the company does — they don’t participate in manufacturing, nor do they act as salespeople, or provide service — and they have a significantly greater interest in generating wealth than they do in the quality of a product, except when the quality of a product is so poor that it impacts the generation of wealth.

And yet we defer entirely to their wisdom when it comes to running companies — it’s democracy for them, but not for anyone else.

When we concentrate power into the hands of the wealthy, we set ourselves up for failure. As companies consolidate, competition dries up, and those that remain are able to drive up prices as monopolies selling goods and services and drive down wages as monopsonies buying labour.

The market power they wield shapes how governments respond to economic ebbs and flows, often to their own benefit and to the detriment of people.

In the workplace, the power of the hierarchy means employers can wield layoffs as a weapon to coerce more work for less pay. A distrust of workers leads to more surveillance, which in turn leads to a workforce that is distrusting of, and hostile to, employers.

These conditions are breeding grounds for failure, both in the economy and within companies. Note, for instance, the mediocrity that dominates Silicon Valley right now.

Worker power good, actually

By placing democratic decision-making in the hands of workers, you can improve a company in a number of ways:

1. If people have a stake in the work they do, and if they have agency in how that work is done, they are going to take more pride in that work. A workforce that takes more pride in its work is inherently going to do better work.

2. While there may remain a hierarchy in an organization, that hierarchy isn’t set in stone, and a CEO who is accountable to workers, rather than investors, has more interest in prioritizing workers’ well-being. We know that things like shorter work hours, better pay, less antagonism and surveillance from employers, and just overall better conditions makes workers more productive.

3. Where shareholders prioritize short-term profits, a democracy of workers would prioritize longevity — this is how they make a living, after all.

4. Workers do the work of an organization every day — they are the experts in how to perform a particular service or to produce a particular product, and they should be driving decisions in how that work is done.

Worker ownership also tends to keep profits local, meaning the whole community benefits, whereas profits are often hidden away in tax havens. (That link is to a very good podcast by The Hatchet about Canada’s failure to address tax havens and is well worth a listen in its own right.)

Will worker-owned co-ops still fail? Of course.

Co-ops are democratic in nature, and democracy is always messy. This isn’t a discourse about utopia.

But the evidence typically shows that worker-managed firms perform better than their investor-managed peers.

Even if the two performed similarly, worker ownership is simply more just — it is community-oriented not simply as a cynical marketing ploy but because its membership is part of the community. And it places people before profits.

Announcing the Debrief Communications collective

This is where we get to why I’m writing about this now.

I’ve been working with some friends to launch our own worker-owned operation!

Debrief Communications is effectively scaling up what freelance journalists are already doing.

A freelance journalist is just about never just a journalist. Work is few and far between, and what work does exist pays a non-livable rate, leaving us forced to do work like communications to stay afloat.

Brishti Basu, David P. Ball and I are effectively collectivizing this work to stabilize our own incomes, to better serve clients, and to advance this alternative approach to organization that I’ve been talking about.

I feel lucky to be working with Brishti and David — I’ve got immense respect for the two as journalists, and I know we have aligned values when it comes to the kinds of communications work we’d like to take on.

In doing so, we’re supporting our ability to continue doing the journalism work we love to do.

So if you know of any organization that is looking for writing, editing, or research work, or is looking for media training or media literacy workshops, check us out.

Or send us a note.