Elsewhere I've seen some reporting on cooperatives report lower satisfaction on some metrics, usually suspected to be exactly because worker cooperatives tend to give employees more of a stake and so stress levels around the future of the business may be higher.
At the same time, it is flawed to focus on any purported notion that they don't optimize for "worker happiness" because workers decide what they optimize for. And so that may or may not be "happiness" for any given coop, but it certainly does mean optimizing for what workers care about.
Comparing that to, I presume the notion of e.g. the Soviet Union as representative of "communism", where workers had near no say in what the dicators imposed on them, seems to be a rather crass and gross misrepresentation when used as a comparison for workers coops where they do have a say.
E.g. https://www.fiftybyfifty.org/2021/06/workers-at-cooperatives...
Elsewhere I've seen some reporting on cooperatives report lower satisfaction on some metrics, usually suspected to be exactly because worker cooperatives tend to give employees more of a stake and so stress levels around the future of the business may be higher.
At the same time, it is flawed to focus on any purported notion that they don't optimize for "worker happiness" because workers decide what they optimize for. And so that may or may not be "happiness" for any given coop, but it certainly does mean optimizing for what workers care about.
Comparing that to, I presume the notion of e.g. the Soviet Union as representative of "communism", where workers had near no say in what the dicators imposed on them, seems to be a rather crass and gross misrepresentation when used as a comparison for workers coops where they do have a say.