Google employees

are not owners

Google employees rightfully demand solutions to gender harassment, mandatory arbitration, pay inequities and lack of transparency, but they are hardly “owners” of Google. It is the two Google co-founders who control a majority of stockholder voting power through supervoting stock.

True worker-owners are members of cooperatives where one worker has one vote in the enterprise. There are hundreds of such worker-owned cooperatives in the United States and extremely successful ones around the world, such as the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain.

Human Agenda just returned from Mondragon where tens of thousands of worker-owners in 102 mutually supporting cooperatives democratically make all enterprise decisions; can hire and fire their managers; receive a pro-rata portion of profits based on their work, not their stock; possess immediate access to all enterprise accounting; and have structured the highest to lowest paid at 6 to 1. Related Articles Letters: Why blame Newsom? | Success story | Champion of ethics | Contradicted column | Legacy of failure | Reflecting us all

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Google could use a little Mondragon.

Richard Hobbs

Executive Director, Human Agenda

San Jose