Most employee ownership schemes in the US are not cooperatives or collectives, but Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Stock Purchase Plans . Basically, they allows employees to either buy or earn stock in the company they work at. However, just like how buying stock on the stock market doesn't give you meaningful influence on a company (unless you get a whole lot), neither do these internal stocks. Workers have different amounts of stocks based on either tenure or how much stock they purchase from the company. I worked at a company where the stocks wouldn't even vest for 5 years.
Thus, workers' interests are bound to the company (since their assets are bound up in the company's value), without necessarily getting any control over it. So, ESOPs can undermine worker solidarity as actions that could impact the company's bottom line (like unionization or strike action) could then directly hurt employees' retirement assets.
If the workers could collectively use those stocks to elect a representative of the worker's shares you can generate class consciousness with it. The general idea being that you create class war in the workplace because having the shares creates a monetary interest in paying attention to company decisions and what your representative is doing, which means workers learning significantly more about how their company is run and the difference of interests between the workers and the bosses. The idea being that this would generate massive amounts of class consciousness.
Without that representation though it just leads to worker confusion over their interests. It leads them to assuming that they share the interests of the capitalists.
Most employee ownership schemes in the US are not cooperatives or collectives, but Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Stock Purchase Plans . Basically, they allows employees to either buy or earn stock in the company they work at. However, just like how buying stock on the stock market doesn't give you meaningful influence on a company (unless you get a whole lot), neither do these internal stocks. Workers have different amounts of stocks based on either tenure or how much stock they purchase from the company. I worked at a company where the stocks wouldn't even vest for 5 years.
Thus, workers' interests are bound to the company (since their assets are bound up in the company's value), without necessarily getting any control over it. So, ESOPs can undermine worker solidarity as actions that could impact the company's bottom line (like unionization or strike action) could then directly hurt employees' retirement assets.
If the workers could collectively use those stocks to elect a representative of the worker's shares you can generate class consciousness with it. The general idea being that you create class war in the workplace because having the shares creates a monetary interest in paying attention to company decisions and what your representative is doing, which means workers learning significantly more about how their company is run and the difference of interests between the workers and the bosses. The idea being that this would generate massive amounts of class consciousness.
Without that representation though it just leads to worker confusion over their interests. It leads them to assuming that they share the interests of the capitalists.