Out the door, I'm a small business owner. Due to the nature of my business we can't fully transition to a worker co-op, but we do full profit sharing and unlimited PTO (just started that this year).
I work 7 days a week, even when I get a day off I can't be more than ten minutes away from the shop in case someone gets sick or an emergency pops up. I've had to cut appointments short, cancel plans, and just give up on having ANY life outside of work. We can't afford to close the doors, we can't afford to lose any momentum in growth or we're going to drop off and fail. And if we fail, that's a bunch of people that lose a job that provides a living wage, and a real chance for them to have a future.
Plenty of posts here oversimplify this: If I can't afford to run a successful business, I have no rights to be running one. But, how many of the people posting those have run businesses? Let alone profitable ones that have survived for nearly a decade, providing living wages to all employees. We're not printing money, and we aren't the only fish in the pond competing for limited resources. It honestly doesn't mean any difference at all to my customers that my staff is taken care of. Literally no one gives a shit, so we can only stay afloat by our own merits. We're god damned great at our jobs (my staff are fucking amazing, and, they don't burn out, but, I definitely am nothing but smoldering ash).
We're small, and in an industry where bigger chains are just starting to devour the market. We can't compete with their pricing, they can buy in orders of magnitude more volume, and suppress their worker's pay to minimum wage. And there's no winning against them. As a consumer, price and convenience are the single greatest determining factors in picking which shop someone goes to. We can offer superb customer service, full maintenance and warranties, and even give out freebies/loaners/etc… to help people when they're short. But, none of that really matters, it only barely keeps us floating when the shop down the street sells for 5% less.
They don't give a shit that they have to rotate through staff constantly. They don't train their staff to answer questions about products or troubleshoot problems. Hell, the staff there are so fucking drained and disillusioned that I've never seen them happy, and that almost seems like a selling point to some of the sadistic fucking customers out there. Some huge fucking number of you (all people, not just specifically antiwork), are fucking abominable humans that take sick satisfaction in seeing we servile plebs miserable in our tasks.
And that seems to be the end goal. Drive every smaller business out, eliminate every single entry level job that pays a living wage, and keep the working class as enslaved consumers that can only subsist by purchasing at the very companies that drove them into poverty. Whether you're going to admit/accept it doesn't fucking matter, you are in a class war, and not picking a side is the complacency that your oppressors have engineered and are counting on.
If you really want better workplaces, start campaigning for real fucking change, or start making noise and protesting. Monopolies are being encouraged, and they are immensely destructive to the average quality of life, fucking do something or watch the world get incrementally worse while you work yourself to death.
Or, fucking tear it down. Organize in numbers like the fuckwit truckers in Ottawa, and make the simple but effective ultimatum. Change through reform, or revolution.
Bottom line, stop fucking expecting the world to change, stop thinking that the small business owner that's clearing about the same as you per year, with the entirety of their life's work as collateral, is your enemy in a system that's oppressing both of you. End capitalism, or, at least end monopolies if you're a fan of half-measures.