The Best Way to Fight Uber? Own It.

Summary

Progressives should embrace employee ownership as one of the best ways to challenge corporate power from the bottom up and put supporting the growth of worker-owned firms in the center of our strategy. As the economy becomes Uber-ized and dominant firms in all sectors take up more and more market share, structural reforms like better antitrust regulation and portable benefits are absolutely necessary, but not sufficient, to reversing inequality.

What’s needed is a massive wave of support for shared ownership and community capital. The difference in an employee-owned business from another type of business is simply where the profit goes: Does it flow up to an executive suite and a small set of investors? Or, is it shared by the members of the enterprise, who put in the time and effort to make it successful? The product may be nearly the same from the perspective of the consumer, but the change inside the firm itself is durable, because it’s not subject to the shifting winds of legislators. Community capital allows those of us with the ability to invest to put our wealth into local businesses, rather than exclusively into Wall Street funds.