The Proposal on FlexWest

Common Objections and Comparisons

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Is This Socialism

This project sometimes gets compared to socialism or communism, but rarely to capitalism — even though it’s built entirely out of capitalist tools: private ownership, voluntary employment, market-rate pay, profits reinvested by choice. Nothing about it is imposed. No one is required to work here, no government mandate creates or sustains it, and nobody’s existing property or business is being taken to fund it. If you’d rather work for a company organized to maximize shareholder value, or take your chances on the open job market, that option is untouched — this is simply an alternative someone can choose to join, or not.

Compensation and Retention

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Ownership and governance are the structural guarantees. This is what an employee actually experiences day to day: how they get paid, and what happens to them if automation changes or eliminates their role.

How People Are Paid

Employees are paid competitive market rate for their role. On top of that, a profit-based share is added — but it isn’t an open-ended percentage of profit. It’s capped, targeted at keeping total compensation within a defined band above market rate for comparable work (for illustration, something like 10% above competitive pay, though the exact figure is a policy decision for employee-owners to set, not fixed here). Profit beyond what’s needed to reach that cap doesn’t flow into ever-larger individual paychecks — it goes to two other purposes instead: reinvestment in growth, including hiring, and support for community and charitable purposes.

Governance Mechanics

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A trust that’s supposed to hold its purpose permanently also has to survive the ordinary ways organizations go wrong over time. Ownership structure alone doesn’t prevent that — concentrated power, capture, and entrenchment happen inside co-ops, nonprofits, and conventional companies alike. Here’s how this one is designed to resist them.

How Leadership Is Chosen: Sortition

Leadership and oversight roles are filled substantially through sortition — a lottery-style random selection from a broad, minimally-filtered pool of qualified employees — rather than election or appointment. This is a deliberate countermeasure: ordinary selection processes tend to favor people who are good at campaigning and self-promotion, not necessarily people who are good at the job or acting in good faith. Roles carry term limits and staggered rotation, so no one entrenches simply by being good at staying in the role.