>"agency" isn't given very much lipservice in these discussions
>about collective ownership (though, if I remember correctly
>you teach humanities... so perhaps you're aware of and/or can
>point me in the right direction of some writing on that aspect
>of this issue)

I'll be a generalist when the job calls for it, but my academic interest is in the late middle ages and very, very early modernity - so I'm not equipped to anything but an asshole with an opinion about much besides that period. Though I'm re-reading Marc Bloch's "Feudal Society" after a long, long break and it's kind of compelling to see him describe economic relationships that just recapitulate really similar types of exploitation. To me, that kind of points to some question-begging that you're doing here on the order of assuming that there's something natural about the relationship between labor and capital. It's a fair point that running a giant multi-national company requires a different skillset than actually making stuff in a factory, but that kind of skates by some points that worker might want to quibble with, like how we've stopped asking if growing profits should be the primary objective of a business and now only find it ethically appropriate to consider whether it should be the only objective. That transition empowers capital, but it completely disarms labor and consumers and, maybe most urgently, the environment.

Which is to say that I think you're being utterly reasonable in considering that some of the dynamics that drive decisions about labor practices, but maybe ... don't? Like, those guys are going to be fine unless they actually get guillotined, but the system they've erected is actively harming people so interrogating it in a way that makes an "is" into an "ought" is only going to find answers that benefit them. Or, in short, there's no such thing as "the way the world works" if you look at a long enough timeline.

>Tons of people, alone, work on those aspects of Walmart's
>business. It would actually be interesting to survey
>minimum-wage Walmart employees about how much of a priority(or
>purpose?) those aspects of Walmart's business even play in
>their own everyday lives and fulfillment, and whether they
>desire more control.

I guess this is what I'm talking about. Your approach here assumes that maintaining Walmart's economic power is a necessary goal and if you ask a floor worker how much of the hated managerial class' responsibility they're willing to take on, then the answer may be "none". Or it may not. But if they organize and structure the company's objectives in such a way isn't congruent with the Walton's pursuit of trillionaire status, maybe they can have a company that's less productive but is still successful. Only now it's successful in a way that respects the value of people's labor and contributes less to the imminent destruction of the earth. Or not. Again, this is out of my depth - so all I actually have is a disagreement with your framing.

>Perhaps there are a lot of people who have felt/would feel
>similarly, and this is why collective bargaining managed to
>emerge and thrive in American society but not collective
>ownership? Who knows.

I don't. Though if I had to guess, I'd guess that the American legal system is set up to preserve the needs of capital over labor, and so the former will always be legally empowered to thrive while the latter will have to fight for everything. There was a pretty big farm cooperative movement in the midwest around in the middle third of the century. Maybe that would shed some light if there's somebody here (honestly, not me) who knows something about American history.