Suppose I have studied for years to become a pastry chef. I set up my own bakery, investing my time, energy, and labour into procuring equipment and building up a reputation as a delicious place to eat. I run the entire operation myself as the sole worker. Eventually, after years of turmoil, word of my exceptional pastries spreads and my bakery becomes the number one spot in town. Soon there’s a line up around the block, long enough that I have to turn away customers on the regular.
Not wanting to have to send people home hungry, I decide that having someone to wash my dishes and somebody to tend to the counter would buy me enough time to focus on the main reason people come to my shop: my delicious pastries.
I do, however, have an issue. I worked really hard to build my bakery up to where it is today, and don’t want to have to give up ownership to the two people I want to bring onboard. They didn’t put in any effort into building up my bakery, so why should they have an equal democratic say over how it’s run?
Is there a way I can bring on help without having to give away control of my buisness?
Furthermore, what’s to stop the two new workers from democratically voting me out of the operation, keeping the store, name, brand, and equipment for themselves?
Your story is of a person living in a capitalist system and working as an owner-proprietor, i.e. you are petty bourgeois. In your immediate relation to production, you are neither exploiter (with no employees) nor exploited (you pay yourself whatever you want and put the rest into the means of production that you also own).
Your question is then to ask whether it is fair for employees you hire under a capitalist system to have an equal say in the business even though they haven’t been there as long nor paid to own the means of production.
The first thing to get out of the way is that socialism is not an isolated and awkward transition from a private business to a worker’s co-op. It is a wholesale transition away from private ownership, wherein owners of businesses have quite dictatorial powers over employees (and others) due to owning the means of production, influence over cops, the government, etc. As a system, capitalism is generally not owner proprietors. If everyone were petty bourgeois like this there would be no exploitation and capitalism itself simply wouldn’t exist in the first place. Capitalism requires profit maximization at the expense of employees. It consists of a series of competing companies run by owners that employee workers. As the system has advanced and owners own more and more, those owners don’t even really do work alongside workers. They aren’t petty bourgeois, they are haute bourgeois, they spend their time on schemes for moving capital around. And all of them make their money via the systematic underpayment of workers.
The bourgeois do not do this simply because they love their employees to be poor. They are forced to do so by the market system itself. If they pay their workers too much, they will be outcompeted by the other companies providing the same product. So the ruthless minimization of wages continues, culling businesses that choose to be more humane. And so we see people driven down to subsistence, or at least different forms of it.
The escape from this system is the reappropriation of control over production to be in the hands of those who actually produce. This requires oppression of the current owners, not because of personal animus but because they will violently oppose this attempt. Such is the case historically. They will murder you and your entire family rather than give up power.
Finally, in systems run by socialists, where societal changes were being made, the petty bourgeois have frequently maintained their positions, or had them modestly transformed. It really depended on circumstance. Usually, the horrors and brutality that had been visited upon the people, the workers, the peasants, corresponded to how the bourgeois, the landowners were treated. A well-liked owner proprietor was usually not a target and often just kept doing their thing.
So, the first point is that you are not describing socialism. You’re describing an attempt to create a worker’s co-op under the capitalist system.
So, assuming your question is about how to form a worker’s co-op under the capitalist system in a way that seems more fair, don’t worry! This is a common question. Sometimes owners retire and create a co-op in one fell swoop, knowing that their personal wealth is fine and their former employees deserve to own what they run. But you’re saying this is mid-career, where you haven’t yet even had workers to exploit and are still working alongside, yes?
In that case, there are several options, most of them amounting to accruing buy-in. Workers gain ownership of the company over time by working for it. Their tenure amounts to shares, basically. There are stratagems for handling pitfalls, like capping shares so they become horizontal after some period so that someone that worked there 25 years doesn’t have more vote than someone who worked there 15, for example. Most Institute a transitional period for decision-making. For example, staff votes equally on certain decisions but not others at first. Over time, as workers accrue ownership, they gain more decision-making power.
These are some ways to navigate an individual petty bourgeois person’s desire to have a co-op without losing their personal sense of ownership over that they’ve built up as owner-proprietor.