What is Demand Coop and why tech workers should join one

> In many existing demand cooperatives, such as rotating savings groups, there is often a trusted central coordinator — frequently an older community member — who helps maintain accountability and keep the interests of the group aligned.

Aligned with what? Whenever a central position is formed with power over something, even if it’s only a steering power, it will be sought out by power-hungry people and manipulated.

This thin proposal would be more interesting if it could give any discussion about the difficult points and how they’d address them rather than waving it all away under the guidance of a benevolent individual at the center.

To say I’m skeptical of an organization that wants to choose how to spend my money for me is an understatement.

Essentially, we need more unions - I'm not sure we have to invent new names for these things. These won't be your parents' unions, or the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV—the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.

I've been (unintentionally) part of two union drives in my own life and have seen friends in an unrelated field participate in a third. They make perfect sense in moments like our current one, where owners can hire dozens of attorneys to jeopardize your job while you of course are limited to whatever legal representation you've been saving up for.

There are actually really interesting tech intersections here, possibly. 8 years ago I published an article[1] that ended with some speculation about the possibility of automating organized consumer action to permit, for example, people to coordinate to force companies to drop abusive terms in contracts. The co-op model is in the same family.

Back in the day, my basic idea was basically this: the reason that consumer companies can impose unfair terms on people is because it's basically only a small amount of money to an individual, and it's costly for people to coordinate. For example, the expected cost to me of some company's arbitration clause is small, because the probability of any individual into a dispute with them is low. But in the aggregate it's bad: over a million customers (say) it's almost certain that one of those customers gets royally screwed by it. So: what if all those million customers of company X could all agree to automatically cancel their service contracts with X, if and only if enough other people also agree to do so that a simultaneous cancellation would cause real pain to the company's bottom line. And then enforce that agreement with automation. Some basic game theory suggests the objectionable clause immediately goes boom.

[1] https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 ... sorry for the academic journal paywall

There seem to be a lot of enthusiasts of this kind of idea, and certainly there must be 100 people like this here on this forum in the US. Can they point me to one such one here that is high performance?

Dumbest idea i've ever seen. Complete misunderstanding of how the tech world works.

The idea is: if sufficient consumers banded together and coordinated their spending power, they can drive decisions in the executive suite of the companies.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It's neither the spending of consumer nor even the spending of business that drive decisions. The only thing that drives decisions at that level is capital allocation - not spending allocation. Wealth drives these decision - not spending.

So if all these tech workers want to band together and do something about it, they would create their own ETF or mutual fund, and put all their wealth into that fund and then have the manager of that fund direct that capital based on their mission.

Of course you will see that this won't work because there just isn't enough capital here to move the market compared to the other capital allocators who are just trying to maximize returns.

This is just asking for the job to be hurriedly outsourced to where this is not a thing, if not eliminated altogether. It makes sense only for jobs that are tightly geographically constrained and are not subject to work visa imports.

Interesting, but - it says it's a co-op, but this is a word with a legal definition. Every co-op I know publishes what it's legal entity is, how voting is done, etc. This just has "click to join". If your pitch is that you have more integrity than typical companies then you have to, you know, "walk the walk".