Originally Posted by banzai_f16
That's a shame, and I'm sorry to hear it.
Their driving goal in life has just shifted from a healthy work environment and good bikes to doing whatever it takes to provide shareholder payouts for the top 5% of society.
It's a shame, really. I wonder what happened? I always love the co-op success stories, and I thought that Burley would always be one of them.
Now that they've incorporated, your next Burley product will be made in Taiwan; it's all in the name of corporate profits, after all.
Incorporating isn't the same as going public, they don't *have* to go straight to Taiwan (tangent: watched last week's
30 Days last night, was a cool episode); there's always ownership stake/shares in any enterprise, whether a collective w/ equal ownership among all workers, any private company or partnership, w/ ownership distributed according to investment, and on out to crazy public markets. You can still be an incorporated collective, just each member of the collective has an equal number of shares that would presumably vote equally to ratify (or not) whatever the board wants. Companies put restrictions on shares all the time, even public ones, to restrict/protect voting rights. Either way, if the environment is changing w/ change in ownership structure, that can be a bummer.