[HN Gopher] List of Worker-Owned Tech Cooperatives Worldwide
___________________________________________________________________
List of Worker-Owned Tech Cooperatives Worldwide
Author : cheshire_cat
Score : 359 points
Date : 2022-05-21 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| 5555555 wrote:
| qrush wrote:
| Love this. I'm starting a food co-op in my area [1] and I can
| safely say "P6" [2] is real - cooperation amongst co-operatives
| has been the biggest way I have learned (for free!) about how to
| make this effort real. Co-ops and co-op culture are huge refresh
| from the tech industry and there's much to learn that feels like
| the antidote to VC/the current trend of capitalism.
|
| [1] https://charlesriverfood.coop
|
| [2] Principle 6: Cooperatives serve their members most
| effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working
| together through local, national, regional and international
| structures.
| zja wrote:
| I'm optimistic about worker coops, and would love to see them
| become more commonplace. I've noticed a lot of tech coops are dev
| shops, which kind of makes sense, but I hope more product focused
| tech coops become successful as well.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I'm studying business in the hopes of helping people start co-
| ops. Don't know if there's enough of a market to do it for a
| living, but I would deeply wish to.
| uoaei wrote:
| This is a nonprofit who helps companies transition from
| private (capitalist) to cooperative (socialist) ownership
| structure.
|
| https://project-equity.org/
| carapace wrote:
| I know of Windings: "an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) is a
| legal business structure that utilizes shares ... ESOP shares are
| only available to employees of the company"
|
| https://windings.com/about-us/employee-owned/
|
| > In 1998, as part of Ryberg's retirement strategy, Windings Inc.
| formed an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) for a planned
| purchase and transition of Company stock to the Windings
| employees. Ryberg retired in 2006, and by 2008 the company became
| 100-percent employee-owned.
|
| https://windings.com/about-us/history/
|
| They make "custom electric motors, generators, and related
| components".
|
| Would they go on the list?
| aetherson wrote:
| This is perhaps not the perfect moment in time to try to start a
| business where a large share of your compensation is in
| equity/ownership.
| goodpoint wrote:
| A coop can provide 100% of the profit in salaries, or dividends
| or equity or goods - whatever is more effective.
| aetherson wrote:
| But in terms of getting a company off the ground right now,
| you'll have difficulty getting financing and as companies
| start off they generally have no or limited profits to
| distribute. In times when financing is easy, perhaps that's
| no big deal -- get easy access to capital to pay a liquid
| salary, and then give people equity for a share in future
| profits.
|
| Right now, however, I would be very wary of starting a
| company, especially if you're planning on starting a type
| company that limits your ability to seek investment.
| yucky wrote:
| ...and 100% of the losses.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Most cooperatives are limited liability companies. Just
| like most private companies.
|
| The only difference is in who the owners are. Pretty
| simple.
|
| Just like any other companies they can be profitable or
| unprofitable or even go bankrupt and shut down.
|
| If a limited liability company goes bankrupt nobody is
| going to take your house. That's the whole point.
|
| That means you would lose your invested capital (as it
| should be), but you are not being hit by 100% of the
| losses.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Does this mean that the more you hire, the poorer
| existing employees become due to dilution?
| sokoloff wrote:
| Draw an accounting fence around the 100% employee-owned
| coop. Any losses could only come from capital invested or
| retained earnings (losses to the employees) or from bad
| credit extended to the coop. It's true that the latter
| represents an opportunity for there to be losses that
| don't hit the employee owners, but that's typically only
| after the company is wiped out, so it's a "good news, bad
| news, but mostly bad news" situation if being an LLC is
| coming into play.
|
| For an on-going operating company, 100% of the gains and
| losses accrue to the owners (employees in the case of a
| 100% employee-owned entity). That's working as
| intended/designed/desired.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Igalia has plenty of mentions here in HN
| ruffrey wrote:
| I encourage anyone interested in this concept to check out
| Opolis. I have been happy so far. Seems to be one of the few
| companies actually making this happen right now.
| ankaAr wrote:
| I have friends working in gcoop, it was working for years and
| they are very nice people sharing their knowledge with the
| community.
| dwmbt wrote:
| your comment about its success is written in past-tense, does
| this mean it's no longer stable or alive? just curious.
| l0rn wrote:
| Greetings from ctrl.alt.coop, Berlin. Glad to See us on the list.
| It's the best working environment ive ever been in
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Worker owned co-ops are 100% compatible with capitalist regimes,
| since they're just people freely consenting to a work/ownership
| arrangement. I think they're cool experiments, if anything.
|
| With that said: if they're so much better than traditional firms,
| they why haven't they taken over the world? That is, if they were
| so good, greedy shareholders and investors all over the world
| would demand that their firms restructure into Cooperatives, and
| firms that _weren 't_ Cooperatives would tend to lose out in the
| marketplace (being beaten by the more efficient Cooperatives).
| But we don't see this happening.
|
| This seems like strong evidence to me that they don't offer a
| superior arrangement (at the firm/system level) for producing
| goods & services more efficiently.
| emixam wrote:
| The problem really comes from the capacity for a coop to raise
| funds. A coop is a non-capitalistic company so very few
| investors are interested.
|
| There is no valuation other than amount of shares x value of
| share. Voting power is not dependent on share (1 person = 1
| vote).
|
| Making an exit is thus not a possibility. Investors have little
| interest to finance a traditional company that would only yield
| dividends (if it does, which is not mandatory).
|
| The problem of speed is also often cited: democracy takes more
| time. While I think that's true, I haven't felt that was a
| limiting factor. Financing is a much bigger one.
| boulos wrote:
| They might be net positive for the workers within the co-op (at
| the median anyway) versus taking on outside investors and
| giving them a slice in search of larger scale.
|
| For diversified investors, it's more valuable to have some of
| your companies return higher gains even if others don't work
| out. For an employee though, their income is totally
| concentrated in their one job.
|
| The employees can be rational in not wanting investors, and the
| investors are rational in not wanting to invest in those firms
| (at terms the co-op would accept).
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| mr90210 wrote:
| Love your comment!
| dwmbt wrote:
| now that you mention it, i would love to see a long-form
| conversation between a coop engineer and a DAO engineer!
| granted, they likely work in different arenas, but i'd mostly
| be interested in hearing about the work dynamics and how they
| manage each other, not so much the clients/products they take
| on.
| [deleted]
| dabsurdo wrote:
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I deeply wish this was more of a thing. If you look at the way
| law firms work, this is how they take their specialized knowledge
| and keep more of the value they create for themselves. I don't
| see any reason we can't/shouldn't have a similar model in
| software engineering be the de-facto now that the field is mature
| enough to support it.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| Law firms don't have economies of scale. Two partnerships can
| serve N clients roughly as well as one larger company could.
| Most software has huge economies of scale, so it's unlikely
| small partnerships would be successful long-term unless they
| filled a tiny niche (read not-very-profitable) that wasn't
| worth pursuing by a bigger company.
| edge17 wrote:
| By the definition, software isn't an economy of scale. Unit
| cost doesn't decrease by magnitude as output increases. A
| utility company is an example of economy of scale.
| treasurebots wrote:
| Economies of scale don't just have to be areas where unit
| marginal costs decrease as volume increases, they can also
| be areas where fixed costs dominate marginal costs, which
| is the case for many software firms because marginal costs
| are usually very small
| slavik81 wrote:
| Economies of scale exist when the average cost decreases as
| the number of units increases. The average cost for N units
| is the sum total of all fixed and per-unit costs divided by
| N.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Creating GitHub.com takes the same amount of time whether
| they have 1k customers or 1M customers
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| or creating 1000 gihubs
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Law firms don't have economies of scale. Two partnerships
| can serve N clients roughly as well as one larger company
| could.
|
| That's not really accurate. Larger law firms can have more
| specialized attorneys; they can offer clients a more
| comprehensive set of expertise - not only in areas of law,
| but geographically ('let me call an IP attorney in the Paris
| office'); they can have larger personal and business
| networks, which provide access to more resources, more
| business, enable them to broker more solutions for clients,
| and which give them more influence.
| segmondy wrote:
| Start one.
| leereeves wrote:
| Don't law firms, like software companies, usually have a small
| inner circle of founders and key staff who make the decisions
| and keep most of the profits?
|
| And don't law firms treat the average staff lawyer worse than
| software companies treat the average developer?
| ghaff wrote:
| Not necessarily founders but BigLaw has partners at various
| levels and then associates plus various support staff. And,
| yes, BigLaw (like investment banking) has a reputation for
| really working associates hard in addition to having
| something of an up or out structure. Which probably works OK
| for law because a lot of the associates probably went to law
| school because they weren't sure what else to do with their
| liberal arts degree--and don't necessarily want to stay in
| law long-term anyway.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Up or out is right. But the most common "out" path is to a
| corp legal department. Better hours, and now the partner
| that used to work your ass off buys you lunch to court your
| business.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. Though I know a _lot_ of lawyers who migrated into
| non-law positions after a few years, including politics
| (also usually for a few years depending on their leanings
| and the climate--e.g. White House) but also a variety of
| other things. As you say, there are also a variety of
| corporate legal positions including government affairs
| and the like in addition to straight law jobs.
| tomrod wrote:
| Partnership Consultancies exist. But neither law firms nor
| standard consultancies typically have staff in on ownership.
| ncphil wrote:
| In the US, at least, all members of a law partnership (or
| professional corporation) must be licensed attorneys. That's
| baked into both state law and rules of professional conduct,
| and is a serious limitation on organization that tech
| professionals are not saddled with.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| Law firms are not co-ops. They are partnerships where a small
| number own and control the company.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Producer co-ops are similar in that respect.
| missedthecue wrote:
| One major difference is that a law firm makes money by
| selling billable hours whereas a tech company makes money
| by producing, selling, and distributing an actual product.
|
| You don't see law firms raising millions to open shop, but
| it's almost a pre-requisite for serious tech companies. A
| law firm can be profitable from day one. This difference
| makes it much harder to use the co-op model for tech
| companies unless all the workers are independently wealthy
| and don't need VCs.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| What would be the difference from a company owned by five
| individuals that also do all the work and a coop formed by
| five individuals?
| jsonne wrote:
| Because the model of a law firm is maybe 10 senior partners
| own the company and there's 200 attorneys and several
| hundred assistants and paralegals under them. Its not much
| different than most modern corporations having a bunch of
| shareholders and a board in practice.
| guerrilla wrote:
| More than five individuals do all the work or they wouldn't
| have hired other people. A coop is owned by all the
| workers.
| jasode wrote:
| _> What would be the difference from a company owned by
| five individuals that also do all the work and a coop
| formed by five individuals?_
|
| Parent is probably talking about "BigLaw" (thousands of
| lawyers) and boutique law firms (hundred lawyers or less).
| Most lawyers at the firms are _employees_ (i.e. the
| associates) and not _part-owners_ (i.e. the partners). They
| are not co-ops.
|
| Even in a tiny local law firm of 5 partners/owners and no
| junior associates, they'd still have the staff paralegals
| and secretaries as _non-owner employees_ so they 're not
| really co-ops either.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| FWIW, farming co-ops are often more similar to the lawyer
| model, in practice: A small number of owners who hire out
| lots of manual labor.
|
| You could certainly have a similar model for software co-
| ops, using contracts for various non-central parts of the
| work.
|
| Most worker co-ops also include a probationary period for
| new hires before they become part owners (because to do
| otherwise would be a bit insane). A really long
| probationary period with a low chance of conversion
| starts looking a lot like the lawyer model...
| Gaessaki wrote:
| A shameless plug for our Montreal-based multistakeholder food
| delivery coop: Radish Cooperative (https://radish.coop).
| jtr1 wrote:
| I'm fascinated by multistakeholder cooperatives, but can't seem
| to find much reading material on the mechanics of them. Any
| recommendations?
| michaelthompson wrote:
| what does multistakeholder cooperative mean?
| qrush wrote:
| Multi-stakeholder co-operatives are co-ops with more than
| one "owner" class. For example, a multi-stakeholder food
| co-op could be owned by both consumers of the store, and
| the workers of the store. The co-op's by-laws determines
| how the groups differ and how the equity share (and
| patronage dividends) work out.
| jtr1 wrote:
| My understanding: there are a lot of varieties of coops,
| consumer coops (REI, the Green Bay Packers, in some
| respects) are primarily owned by their customers,
| purchasing coops like ACE Hardware are owned by a group of
| businesses to increase buying power, and most relevant to
| this thread, worker coops are where workers own the
| enterprise. Multi-stakeholder cooperatives blend multiple
| forms of ownership to try to align the incentives of the
| enterprise with everyone who has a stake in its success. To
| me, it sounds really hard to get right, but also
| transformative if you can, so I'm very interested to learn
| more!
| missedthecue wrote:
| Credit unions are also examples of customer owned
| cooperatives
| tomatowurst wrote:
| can somebody explain how these organizations handle a bad actor
| or collusion towards bad goals?
|
| Say somebody comes along and wants to use Oracle suddenly, what
| sort of measures exist to prevent that from happening, how is
| arbitration, enforcements and distribution of profit calculated?
|
| The only successful corp i can think that is similar to this is
| Valve but it isn't quite worker owned, it seems to distribute
| profits more fairly.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Whether it's a hostile board takeover, or a bad hire in a CxO
| position (or even any regular employee with influence), those
| risks exist everywhere.
|
| Actually, I think a co-op is better protected.
|
| A co-op should have founding principles, and acting against
| them should raise red flags.
|
| For distributing profits, etc, again, standard legal docs. Here
| in Quebec, there are orgs who can help with that (reseau.coop).
|
| The biggest challenge is growing: I'm in a 5 person co-op. In a
| previous life, I was in a 25-person collective which became
| hell to manage, as everyone wanted to be heard, but few wanted
| the responsibilities.
|
| So in our current co-op, two of us tend to enforce the bottom
| line, in our respective areas. I mean, legal structure and org
| structure, while there may be influenced, can be pretty
| orthogonal.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| > The biggest challenge is growing: I'm in a 5 person co-op.
| In a previous life, I was in a 25-person collective which
| became hell to manage, as everyone wanted to be heard, but
| few wanted the responsibilities.
|
| yeah but you see the problem here? without a central
| leadership, everybody will have equity and you can't really
| steer the ship anymore.
|
| I don't know too much about reseau or how it functions but i
| have a lot of difficulty with say a SaaS being run like a
| coop. 25 developers divide equally the loot? But there will
| be disagreements and disproportionate equity right off the
| bat. How do you remove somebody who plays politics and is
| able to win consensus but you know its going to impact your
| business? How do you arbitrate disagreements over
| distribution or spending of resources or the manner in which
| they conduct operation?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > How do you remove somebody who plays politics and is able
| to win consensus but you know its going to impact your
| business? How do you arbitrate disagreements over
| distribution or spending of resources or the manner in
| which they conduct operation?
|
| Who is this "you" in "your business"? The business is as
| much "theirs" as it is "yours". If they can convince enough
| people of a course of action, even if somr are not
| convinced, why do you assume that the course of action will
| be bad?
|
| The biggest weakness of traditional companies is exactly
| that a sibgle hair-brained boss can wreak havoc on the
| whole organization below them. Democracy solves this
| problem, it is much more resistant to a bad actor than
| autocracy is.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I think top-down and bottom-up organizing styles create
| essentially two different, but similar, versions of this
| particular failure mode.
|
| In top-down there's always the risk of someone coming in
| and making a long string of bad decisions and essentially
| wrecking everything by leading everyone on a wild goose
| chase, while in bottom up the risk is someone
| _obstructing_ good things happening by either being a
| drag or exercising whatever veto or FUD power they have
| (whether designed or organic) to prevent action. This
| looks less dramatic as it 's happening but stagnation is
| just as powerful a force as havoc in the long run.
|
| There's a really tricky balance to strike somewhere in
| there.
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >So in our current co-op, two of us tend to enforce the
| bottom line, in our respective areas. I mean, legal structure
| and org structure, while there may be influenced, can be
| pretty orthogonal.
|
| In some sense, then the two of you may extraordinary - a
| combination of ethics, IQ and integrity. Your biggest
| challenge will be handing over the reigns when you are ready
| to leave (usually only due to bad health or age, it's life
| long thing). More specifically the task has to begin decades
| before you leave. If it's not done (often the case) the
| enterprise's morals rot, even if it continues to be
| financially successful.
| abyssin wrote:
| I can't provide a generic answer but in my experience, there
| were two mechanisms. First, people are hired partly based on
| their political values and through word of mouth, which limits
| ways for bad actors to join. In the same vein, the pay is below
| market-rates, which reinforces the phenomenon of ideological
| homogeneity. Second, decisions are made through consensus using
| formalized methods. Frequent meetings that are prepared in
| advance following a set of rules, disagreements that are
| discussed using techniques that minimize the subjective
| dimension of it and are solution-oriented, elections without a
| candidate (in French: "election sans candidat"), etc.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| but what happens when its not in the interest of the business
| to make consensus based decisions? like what you described
| can quickly devolve into "how do we get everybody to keep
| their responsibilities unchanged and still make payroll?" vs
| "how do I delegate responsibilities and adjust payroll to
| resources that generate revenues vs expenses"?
|
| I just have a hardtime believing this could work.
| Corporations reflect militant hierarchy for a reason because
| effective decisions often cannot be made through consensus or
| utilitarian drivers. Corporations thrive when they are lead
| by profit incentives of executives who are beholden to profit
| incentives of liquidity/capital lenders.
|
| You simply do not see a "collective" trade publicly.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The business are the owners. And, unless they are woefully
| mislead or incapable, the owners will vote what is in their
| best interest. If the best thing for the business is NOT to
| grow, because a majority are happy with the current state,
| then the business _shouldn 't_ grow, especially if that
| would require sacrificing the desires of some of the
| workers.
|
| This is identical to how privately owned companies are
| often run, especially family owned small businesses, which
| can be extremely successful.
|
| Profit is at best a proxy for success, it is not a goal in
| itself.
| Blahah wrote:
| It does work though.
|
| In the UK for example, we have the John Lewis Partnership
| (10.5billion GBP revenue), Co-operative group (11billion
| GBP revenue), and many in the 50+ million revenue bracket
| like Suma Wholefoods.
|
| We've also had many major public or private corporations
| rescued from collapse by worker co-operatives that were
| able to maneuver out of problems that the centralised
| organisation could not. See for example Meriden and
| National Express.
|
| Also, many people's financial services are provided by
| building societies and other co-operatives. Many of the
| largest banks have been these kinds of organisations at
| least once. HSBC for example.
|
| That's just in the UK - it would be astonishing if there
| weren't many more examples disproving your conjecture from
| every other country.
| keskival wrote:
| It works though, and typically when these cooperatives grow
| large enough they easily outcompete the privately owned
| businesses where the profits are siphoned out to people who
| contributed nothing and who have no knowledge or clue about
| the actual business. In cooperatives the owners actually
| know what is happening on the ground because they work in
| the company, and the profits don't flow out of the
| business.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
| orzig wrote:
| I'm very interested in this but also want to understand a stark
| reality: Co-ops have existed in concept and practice for 100+
| years but haven't gone mainstream (representing <<1% of employers
| with no clear exponential growth)
|
| Why? Are there lessons we need to carry forward when creating new
| ones?
| dv_dt wrote:
| One of the more interesting articles I've read about talks
| about the fact that there are a lot of domains that you need to
| work all at once together to form a coop. And they were
| experimenting with ways to "franchise" coops into structures
| that help that.
|
| https://ownershipmatters.net/newsletter-item/tim-huet-arizme...
| interfaced wrote:
| If you're founding a coop, you're probably more interested in
| organizational theory than doing the work. There are cost
| savings when it comes to group buying or trade; so works well
| for farmers. But to do this for software is not about building
| better software IMO.
|
| You can kinda see a hint of this in the spelling of Toronto as
| Tkaronto. I don't think this benefits the list. It's a kind of
| meta work, a convenient distraction from doing something of
| value.
|
| If you're a builder you'll preoccupy yourself with the thing
| you're building. If you're driving by an ideology, you'll spend
| most of your time there, and legal frameworks will be of
| secondary concern, a means to an end.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > If you're a builder you'll preoccupy yourself with the
| thing you're building.
|
| If you're one person building a thing that one person can
| build, that might be true.
|
| If you're building a thing that needs or merely benefits from
| having more people doing the building, you almost certainly
| need to think about how to structure and coordinate what
| people do. That's true even if your decision is "no structure
| and no coordination".
|
| Sometimes, that process will be implicit (and likely a more
| or less direct reflection of the personality of the initial
| builder). But for the most, once you start involving other
| people (or they involve themselves), organizational structure
| and behavior starts to become a thing you have to start
| paying attention to. Getting it wrong can destroy whatever
| you're trying to build.
| jcims wrote:
| > All worker cooperatives have two common characteristics: 1)
| member-owners invest in and own the business together, and
| share the enterprise's profits, and 2) decision-making is
| democratic, with each member having one vote.
|
| I think you'd have to find examples of companies that only do
| #1 or only do #2 and look at their outcomes versus companies
| that do both.
|
| My guess is the root cause of what you've observed is the
| distributed decision making and the attendant latency and
| diffusion of responsibility it brings.
| k__ wrote:
| I'm currently reading a book about coops, and the author said,
| the main problem is missing know-how.
|
| Most skilled people will go were the money is, so coops are
| usually filled with low to mediocre workers.
| jtr1 wrote:
| Would you mind sharing the name of the book?
| k__ wrote:
| Oh, yes.
|
| "Produktivgenossenschaft als fortschrittsfahige
| Organisation: Theorie, Fallbeispiele, Handlungshilfen" by
| Burghard Flieger
|
| I think, it's only available in German. The translated
| title would be:
|
| "Workers cooperative as organization capable of progress:
| Theory, case studies, and procedural guidelines"
| jtr1 wrote:
| Ah okay, thanks! I wish I read German, or that there was
| a cooperative for translating books about cooperatives
| into English XD
| rowanajmarshall wrote:
| I don't think this is the book parent was referring to, but
| Developer Hegemony by Erik Dietrich describes an almost law
| parnership-like model for developer shops.
| jtr1 wrote:
| I'll check it out!
| l0rn wrote:
| Co founder of ctrl.alt.coop Here.
|
| I think Main reason is that coops so do not fit Well in our
| profit maximizing Economy. We do produce profits but due to the
| Nature of our organization there is no incentive for Investors
| that seek high margins. ( In fact we dont allow external
| Capital in to remain in Control of our decisions). So linear
| growth it is.
|
| I think a lot more growth than you Like is Made by exploitation
| of the workforce. Without doing that you have a Harder time
| prooving yourself in the Market.
| [deleted]
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I want to say a lot of it is that legal and financial
| structures don't support it very well, it could also be said
| that since it's such a small minority of businesses (I want to
| say <1%) that education resources on it are also scarce.
|
| For example getting funding to turn a business into a coop,
| let's say it's a one man owned business who is going to retire
| and has no family, so he offeres to sell it to the employees so
| they can turn it into a coop. Financially almost no investors
| would take that bet, the banks wouldn't really give a loan to
| 10+ people who make salaries, really the main way this could
| happen is if the owner took a hit and did something like a
| persona loan and let them pay him back from the profits over
| the course of 10 years.
|
| I've also heard that there isn't much information on how to
| start or run one, like looking for books in the library can
| often fall short or you will only find something outdated. I
| think the lack of information is part of it as well as it's
| been so disincentivized for so long that most we can find are
| either run in a hippie commune style, or created by a small
| town government to provide services a corporation wouldn't
| (Best internet I've had was due to them having set up a coop),
| on top of that I can only think of one college that even
| teaches coop structure and that's Mondragon in spain[1] but on
| searching deep enough I also found U of Wisconsin[2] has
| something too, that's still not a lot.
|
| [1] https://www.mondragon.edu/en/international-
| mobility/mondrago... [2] https://uwcc.wisc.edu/
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Co-ops and partnerships can work well for businesses that are
| very low capital intensity. A law firm is the typical example,
| but software development can also be very similar.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| From what I've read it's mostly that it's more difficult for
| coops to access capital. Banks and investors are extremely
| hesitant to provide capital to an organization where the
| employees can just vote to use the money to give themselves all
| raises.
|
| They'd much rather extend loans to traditional businesses with
| owners who are willing make cutthroat, unpopular decisions and
| fire employees if it's necessary to defend and preserve their
| capital.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I think one of the reasons is that there can be too many people
| implied in taking decisions.
|
| Another reason might be that if somebody is a co-owner with
| many others in an enterprise, he might not feel motivated to
| work.
|
| In socialist countries the quality of most products and
| services was poor because no one cared and no one fel obligated
| to do a good job, since the enterprise was owned by all the
| people. Instead there were many small thefts from the
| workplace.
| keskival wrote:
| In normal stock companies all (voting) stocks vote, and those
| can be distributed globally to all sorts of people and
| institutions who have no idea about the reality on the
| ground.
|
| By comparison the decision-making in cooperatives is much
| better grounded in reality and has fewer disinterested and
| uninformed participants.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It's not about voting, it's about vision and taking
| decisions to accomplish it. That's why companies have a
| CEO, CFO, CTO and many managers.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| What if I told you you could have the CEO elected by the
| workers, rather than randos whose only interest in the
| business is making money off of it?
| keskival wrote:
| Yes, that's how it works for larger cooperatives where
| direct democracy can become problematic. Even in direct
| democracies in societal level, presidents are typically
| elected, and there are ministers and managers by
| necessity. The same goes for cooperatives.
|
| It's one person one vote applied to the corporation. In
| principle there's no reason why we should demand any less
| democracy inside corporations than what we demand in
| societies at large.
|
| It's curious how many of these comments in this post
| could be reframed to be basically: "democracy can never
| work" or "democracy is clearly an inferior system to
| feudalism".
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| One of the largerst supermarket chains in Spain (Eroski) is a
| Coop and IMO they have the best service overall. Maybe not
| the chapest but cheap, their white label brand has very good
| stuff plus very clear and well though nutritional
| information, good variety, etc.
| jtr1 wrote:
| Brando Milanovic wrote up a pretty clear-eyed description of
| the problems with worker-owned enterprises, even in states
| that market socialists look to as better examples such as the
| former Yugoslavia [1]. He speaks with some authority, as both
| an economist and someone who worked in one of those. To me,
| it seems like there are important unsolved problems with
| worker-managed enterprises at scale (exceptions like
| Mondragon notwithstanding), but I'm speaking as an armchair
| observer. I agree with the aims involved (workers should
| enjoy the full fruits of their labor and have control over
| their working conditions), but it seems there are still
| challenges to scaling this sort of organization up.
|
| 1. https://glineq.blogspot.com/2021/11/socialist-enterprise-
| pow...
| ex_amazon_sde wrote:
| Private companies and banks see coops as the devil [for very
| obvious reasons] and fight them using regulatory capture and
| not engaging in business with them. It's pretty well-known in
| the coop world.
|
| Coops sometimes mitigate this disadvantages by networking with
| each other.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Bold claim but i don't think there are enough budding coops
| to even bother with such behaviour.
|
| Regulatory capture hurts all new startups and is unlikely to
| be aimed specifically at coops
| gruez wrote:
| >fight them using regulatory capture and refusing to engage
| in business with them
|
| Can you provide concrete examples?
| zasdffaa wrote:
| you have a few examples of this?
| sitkack wrote:
| Same with credit unions. In fact if I were a coop going for a
| loan, I'd first to go a credit union.
| qrush wrote:
| From my perspective as someone currently forming a startup co-
| op: It simply takes longer. You cannot go it alone and it
| requires a community effort. Democracy is harder than autocracy
| (which most companies are, by default). Bank loans and more
| require collateral from an individual, which a co-operative by
| design deflects against (so there's co-operative friendly
| lenders).
|
| I'm hoping the trend goes in a different direction for tech
| companies and they see that there's an alternative - but the
| fundamentals of co-operatives won't (and shouldn't!) change.
| davidjfelix wrote:
| There are several states that have adopted a worker-coop LCA
| (Limited Coop Association) law from the ULC LCA
| https://www.uniformlaws.org/committees/community-home?Commun....
| There are also a couple of states not listed here that adapted
| the ULC draft to better fit existing corporate laws, for example,
| IL.
|
| Coops interest me a lot because of the autonomy and I think
| codified autonomy is critical to longevity of health within an
| organization.
| amelius wrote:
| How does this work when a worker enters or leaves the
| cooperative?
| tra3 wrote:
| Coops is one of the structures that the author talks about in
| "Developer Hegemony". The bulk of the book is about the inverted
| pyramid that modern software development houses are (with
| production being at the bottom, and manager on top).
|
| I really like this passage:
|
| > "Consider a law firm. Do the founding partners go out and hire
| a Lawyer Manager to order them around, and then do they hire a VP
| of Lawyering to order the manager around? Do they then hire a CEO
| to rule over everyone and a CFO to handle the finances and a COO
| to schedule court dates and such? Of course not. There's no
| historical precedent for all that fluff. Rather, they handle
| facets of the business themselves. What they can't or don't want
| to handle, they delegate to subordinates that they hire. The
| partners don't specialize in finance, sales, marketing, or
| operations. That would be silly. But they understand enough about
| it to act as the boss."
|
| ...and this one:
|
| > "It turns out that treating knowledge work pursuits like
| manufacturing operations doesn't work particularly well. But it
| was the model inherited from the Industrial Revolution, and it's
| been hard to shake. The thinking goes like this: if you break a
| complex operation down to its individual components and then have
| people specialize in those components, batching the work and
| letting people get good at tiny slices of it leads to greater
| efficiency. This works well for stations on an assembly line but
| not so much for writing software."
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think whether the comparison is appropriate boils down
| heavily to what kind of software developer you're talking
| about.
|
| For example in the games industry I think there's a quite a few
| smaller companies in particular that work like this. A lot of
| people being generalists and taking over business functions and
| social aspects of the job.
|
| But I think a lot of engineers de facto do work like assembly
| line workers. Much of software development is not 'knowledge
| work'. If you're in a company toiling away at some gigantic
| Java codebase you're not going to have much in common with
| someone managing a law firm.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Most law firms are very small (relative to tech companies). In
| very large law firms, you'll see more of the typical managerial
| organizational chart at play, even though almost everyone
| employed there has passed the bar. Big law firms like Latham &
| Watkins for instance have a CEO and c-suite.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think the problem is that "assembly line" manufacturing has
| always been the wrong analogy for software engineering. A
| better analogy would be like a construction contractor or a
| machine shop. How many machine shops are not run by a
| machinist?
|
| Perhaps an interesting extension of the machine shop analogy is
| that many organizations do not run their own internal machine
| shop. If they need a part, they find a shop that can make it.
| Software naturally tends need more ongoing maintenance and
| attention than machined metal parts, but I think there's an
| argument to be made that perhaps companies should be less eager
| to hire software engineers, and more eager to hire an agency.
|
| Moreover, assembly line manufacturing is suited to a very
| particular scenario that software engineering is almost never
| in: high volume, high rate production of exactly identical
| things, which can be broken down into individual components.
| ghaff wrote:
| >How many machine shops are not run by a machinist
|
| Well, I think that's probably overall true of a lot of small
| businesses of that general type. The odds that I'm going to
| wake up some morning and decide to open a machine shop,
| electrical supply store, etc. and just hire people people who
| know what they're doing (not that I would necessarily know)
| are probably whole lot less than someone with some savings
| who has worked in the business their whole life.
|
| It's not just the trades and adjacent though. I worked for a
| small IT industry analyst firm for a number of years and the
| founder/CEO had worked for a bigger such firm for a long
| time. And that's a very common pattern.
| gernb wrote:
| Does this analogy really fit? I can imagine a software
| consulting firm targeting small businesses could work where the
| individual programmers are "in charge" and they hire some
| support staff because each individual contract is small enough
| that one or 2 programmers can handle it.
|
| OTOH I can't really imagine teams making large projects not
| specializing. A browser, a AAA game, or an OS for example. Some
| programmers know GPU techniques. Some know Database stuff. Some
| know Video compression/decompression. Others know USB driver
| level details. Others know networking issues. Another few know
| audio related stuff.
| hkt wrote:
| Even so, the fact is that the more hierarchy there is, and
| the greater the bounty at the top, the more perverse
| incentives for managers and would-be managers there are. Good
| management is, by its nature, very minimal.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Lawyers also operate within a sort of guild, culturally and
| otherwise. They make a lot of their own rules, which is
| especially relevant to a rule-based business.
|
| One of the guild-like rules that often exists limitations in
| the types of organisation types lawyers can form. There are
| rules against listing law firms and cashing out. Lawyers are
| required to manage themselves.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 'One of the guild-like rules that often exists limitations in
| the types of organisation types lawyers can form.'
|
| This makes little sence - How would the limitation that you
| are talking about even work?
|
| The person at the top is not required to be a lawyer in the
| first place. There are plenty of corporate layers that work
| for public or private shareholder-held companies.
| kbutler wrote:
| Lawyers can work for a corporate client, but those
| corporations can't offer legal advice to third parties.
|
| Law firms that take on clients must be lawyer-owned.
|
| "Under Attorney Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4, law firms
| are barred from offering ownership or other
| investment/revenue-sharing opportunities to non-lawyers.
| Some recent developments in several states, however, offer
| the possibility that these long-standing restrictions could
| be scaled back, creating potential for dramatic changes in
| how litigation matters are funded and managed."
|
| https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/practice-
| in...
| bsedlm wrote:
| I wanna get on this list but it seems like founding one of these
| is the most plaussible way to do it.
| paradite wrote:
| Notably missing (and disputed), Huawei also has an employee
| ownership structure:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Ownership
|
| Edit: Found an ownership and governance explanation website from
| Huawei:
|
| https://www.huawei.com/minisite/who-runs-huawei/en/
| [deleted]
| goodpoint wrote:
| Based on the paragraph on Wikipedia, Huawei is very clearly not
| a coop.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| This account seems to be more detailed :
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEk...
|
| It seems that Huawei is a mix between a cooperative and a
| private company owned by its founder.
| leereeves wrote:
| > Although employee shareholders receive dividends, their
| shares do not entitle them to any direct influence in
| management decisions, but enables them to vote for members of
| the 115-person Representatives' Commission [which governs the
| company] from a pre-selected list of candidates.
|
| Who chooses the pre-selected candidates?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| They are supposedly nominated by the Huawei Trade Union and
| can be vetoed by Ren Zhengfei, according to this : https://dr
| ive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEk...
| ihm wrote:
| Going to make a PR to add our company O(1) Labs. It's very rare
| in that it's VC-funded by prominent VCs, but still majority
| worker-owned and fully worker-governed.
|
| The board is composed of workers, selected by workers on the
| basis of one person on vote, and we hold General Assemblies for
| workers to make and vote on proposals.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I'm really curious what's in it for VCs with funding a coop?
| Usually VC wants an exit possibility, if not plan, but it's
| hard to imagine exits that aren't essentially destructive to
| worker ownership (at which point are coop workers going to be
| happy with golden handcuffs and such?).
| zackmorris wrote:
| Does anyone know if there's a term for structuring a corporation
| where one person can own no more than a certain percentage of the
| company?
|
| I believe that the central cause of wealth inequality isn't so
| much about taxation or regulatory capture etc, as it is about
| individuals going to great lengths to maintain control of their
| companies. So someone can be worth a billion dollars with a 51%
| share but not be able to convert any of those stocks to cash, for
| fear of losing their power.
|
| That's why they resist even a modest property tax on their stock,
| while the rest of us must pay property tax on our homes. This is
| self-evidently unjust and one of the major loopholes which allows
| the accumulation of extreme wealth while countless millions of
| people spend the entirety of their lives working to make rent
| under a negative net worth.
|
| A possible solution to that might be to limit individual
| ownership to something equitable, say less than 1/3, 1/5 or 1/7
| (my preference) of the total.
|
| So a worker-owned cooperative could be thought of as ownership
| not exceeding 1/N employees.
|
| That would give us a spectrum of possible structures rather than
| having to choose between the extremes of public and private
| ownership. Apologies if this concept already exists or is
| commonplace.
| 7steps2much wrote:
| In a lot of countries it is possible to simply change the way
| share based voting works.
|
| By default 1 share equals one vote. But quite a few
| jurisdictions allow companies to define a different voting
| scheme, allowing to f.e. limit a person's votes to at most 20%
| of the total amount of votes, regardless of their share
| ownership.
|
| This of course depends on the jurisdictions in question.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| One of the chapters in Radical markets* talks about doing this,
| but primarily as a means of stopping the anticompetitive
| actions of active investors like Blackrock, which have an
| interest in coordinating the actions of their investments.
|
| *
| https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
| stormbrew wrote:
| > I believe that the central cause of wealth inequality isn't
| so much about taxation or regulatory capture etc, as it is
| about individuals going to great lengths to maintain control of
| their companies.
|
| I'm not really sure what you're basing this on? Most of the
| richest people in the world don't have controlling ownership of
| their businesses. Zuckerberg is the most notable exception
| here, and he took a lot of risks to get there. But companies
| knocking on trillion dollar valuations that aren't public and
| don't have diluted ownership structures are the exception
| rather than the rule as far as i can see.
| whoopdeepoo wrote:
| How do co-ops handle downsizing/layoffs?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Denocratically
| missedthecue wrote:
| So everyone votes for who gets the misfortune of being sent
| to the chopping block?
| teddyh wrote:
| https://www.usworker.coop/home/
| emixam wrote:
| Happy to see this list here on which our coop startup appears!
| (https://kantree.io) It is very challenging to raise funds as a
| coop indeed but we have managed to do it on small amounts (a few
| hundreds of thousands). We are one of the few product based coop
| and not service based.
|
| France (where we are based) is actually a very interesting market
| for coops. There is a very good legal framework around coops and
| a growing percentage of them. There's even an investment fund of
| tech coop as of recently! https://coopventure.fr/
|
| I think coops are a great ownership model for the future and for
| a more responsible economy. It is too bad that there is still
| very little support and recognition around it.
| BrainInAJar wrote:
| Do these qualify for the French tech worker visa? Could someone
| who wants to move to France decide to just start a co-op ?
| emixam wrote:
| From what I understand, there is no limitation regarding the
| type of company when it comes to the French Tech Visa (as
| long as it qualifies on the other requirements which focus
| more on the innovation aspect). (my coop would be eligible
| for example)
|
| Starting a coop is like starting any other kind of company so
| same rules apply. (You must be at least 2 people of course!)
| mtremsal wrote:
| Very interesting. Within France, would a tech coop typically be
| structured as a SCOP?
| emixam wrote:
| Not necessarily (the coop I work for is one though). There
| are 3 possible types of coops in France: SCOP, SCIC and CAE.
| To make it short:
|
| - SCOP: adheres to the international definition of coops
|
| - CAE: a coop of freelancers. You are an employee of the
| structure (with a work contract) but you have to bring in
| your own revenue to pay your salary. A percentage of your
| revenue goes towards the coop budget for shared services
| (accounting, hr, ...) and cash reserve
|
| - SCIC: a multi-party coop. A good use case would be
| platforms where you could have multiple groups of
| stakeholders: employees of the platform, users and service
| providers. (eg. with a Uber like coop: employees, users and
| drivers could all be separate groups of owners). Each group
| has a voting percentage. No group can have more than 50%
| ownership.
|
| I see great potential for the 2 other types of coops that
| France has in the context of tech. I do not know of any
| equivalent elsewhere (but would be happy to learn it exists!)
| 5555555 wrote:
| 5555555 wrote:
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