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).<p>I really like this passage:<p>> “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.”<p>...and this one:<p>> “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.”
Happy to see this list here on which our coop startup appears! (<a href="https://kantree.io" rel="nofollow">https://kantree.io</a>) 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.<p>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! <a href="https://coopventure.fr/" rel="nofollow">https://coopventure.fr/</a><p>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.
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.
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.
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)<p>Why? Are there lessons we need to carry forward when creating new ones?
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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So a worker-owned cooperative could be thought of as ownership not exceeding 1/N employees.<p>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.
Notably missing (and disputed), Huawei also has an employee ownership structure:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Ownership" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Ownership</a><p>Edit: Found an ownership and governance explanation website from Huawei:<p><a href="https://www.huawei.com/minisite/who-runs-huawei/en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.huawei.com/minisite/who-runs-huawei/en/</a>
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://charlesriverfood.coop" rel="nofollow">https://charlesriverfood.coop</a><p>[2] Principle 6: Cooperatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.
can somebody explain how these organizations handle a bad actor or collusion towards bad goals?<p>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?<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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"<p><a href="https://windings.com/about-us/employee-owned/" rel="nofollow">https://windings.com/about-us/employee-owned/</a><p>> 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.<p><a href="https://windings.com/about-us/history/" rel="nofollow">https://windings.com/about-us/history/</a><p>They make "custom electric motors, generators, and related components".<p>Would they go on the list?
There are several states that have adopted a worker-coop LCA (Limited Coop Association) law from the ULC LCA <a href="https://www.uniformlaws.org/committees/community-home?CommunityKey=22f0235d-9d23-4fe0-ba9e-10f02ae0bfd0" rel="nofollow">https://www.uniformlaws.org/committees/community-home?Commun...</a>. There are also a couple of states not listed here that adapted the ULC draft to better fit existing corporate laws, for example, IL.<p>Coops interest me a lot because of the autonomy and I think codified autonomy is critical to longevity of health within an organization.
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.<p>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 <i>weren't</i> Cooperatives would tend to lose out in the marketplace (being beaten by the more efficient Cooperatives). But we don't see this happening.<p>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.