Spirit 2.0 — The Airline Owned by the People, for the People
1d 12h ago by piefed.social/u/Gust in workreform from letsbuyspiritair.com
The concept is explained much better in the link, but TLDR: People are trying to organize and crowdfund the purchase of spirit airlines assets with the goal of running it as a worker owned business similar to winco or rei. Seems at least tangentially relevant to this community
This is not your point but unfortunately REI is no longer run that way. New leadership a couple years ago who quietly turned it (are turning it?) into your run of the mill corporate enterprise like any other.
Just like they did with MEC in Canada.
Yeah, isn't the union protesting right now?
I would fly the hell out of an airline that had anything but single-minded, relentless shareholder profit in mind. It would be so easy to not suck as a carrier, employer and business when you allow yourself to consider some of those things as also important.
From reading their website, it seems like they are advocating for a consumer cooperative rather than a worker cooperative, with the main difference being the consumers get voting rights as opposed to the workers, which is a very important distinction.
The employees would be granted an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan), which is great, but is not the same thing as the workers having complete and final control over the company they work for.
For public facing companies I kind of prefer this tbh. It also makes sense from a raising funds perspective (more owners to pay in). Employees should have voting rights and Coop or not, the union needs to exist to protect their interest too
I'm so fucking in. Where do I sign up?
I was going to make a joke about not reading the link.
But then the link didn’t work for me. Not sure why. 🤔
I'm intrigued, but I'd need to know more. Do I have to be an "accredited investor"? Would we be buying the entire airline, debt and all, or just its assets? How are day-to-day decisions handled; surely there will be some kind of leadership structure rather than pure democracy on the smaller details, right? And if there is, is democracy enough to prevent corruption, like we've seen in the supposedly democratic American government, or has there been any thought to the game theory behind the bylaws? I know they're not collecting actual money yet, but what are the chances this whole thing is a scam?
I have one major question. What assets? A fair number of airlines don't actually own their planes. They lease them. Mostly airlines buy each other not for the planes but for the routes. So are we the people going to coop routes? This only makes sense if the airline we buy goes everywhere. Spirit Airlines doesn't go everywhere. So the people who'd benefit are the ones who live work or travel to/near the routes that Spirit Airlines services. But you'd probably need more than those people to invest in the coop to keep it operational.
I’ll invest just because I want to see this business model succeed and spread.
I'm sure it would be ran like any other non-profit. Day to day handled by execs, bylaws/policy set by the voting share holders (however that is decided), then likely quarterly reviews/votes.
Basically like a buisness that doesn't need to make money
Largest market chain where i live is run like this.
A consumer cooperative (or customer-owned cooperative).
Its a business owned directly by its customers, who usually become members by paying a small membership fee. Profits are returned to members as bonuses, discounts, or dividends, and major decisions are made democratically, but there is the normal corporate hierarcy running the day to day operations.
Noice!!
It would get sabotaged fooor sure.
Now, that's an interesting turn of events.