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List of Worker-Owned Tech Cooperatives Worldwide

424 points by cheshire_cat 4y ago

dccoolgai 4y ago
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.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Partnership Consultancies exist. But neither law firms nor standard consultancies typically have staff in on ownership.
  - ncphil 4y ago
    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.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Yeah, LLPs/PLLCs might have the credentialing requirements. However, I am not sure law firms have to organize with those structures -- I admit ignorance in that case. I was thinking more generally.
- leereeves 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
- rsweeney21 4y ago
  Law firms are not co-ops. They are partnerships where a small number own and control the company.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    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?
    - jasode 4y ago
      >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 4y ago
        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...
    - jsonne 4y ago
      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.
    - 4y ago
- DANK_YACHT 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      Creating GitHub.com takes the same amount of time whether they have 1k customers or 1M customers
      - throwaway14356 4y ago
        or creating 1000 gihubs
    - treasurebots 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
  Start one.
teddyh 4y ago
https://www.usworker.coop/home/ https://www.usworker.coop/home/
zja 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    This is a nonprofit who helps companies transition from private (capitalist) to cooperative (socialist) ownership structure. https://project-equity.org/ https://project-equity.org/
  - spaceprison 4y ago
    With many businesses using contract labor instead of full time workers, creating a worker co-op that operates as a contracting firm could be like a shadow union.
BrianOnHN 4y ago
- mr90210 4y ago
  Love your comment!
- dwmbt 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - dabsurdo 4y ago
aetherson 4y ago
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 4y ago
  A coop can provide 100% of the profit in salaries, or dividends or equity or goods - whatever is more effective.
  - yucky 4y ago
    ...and 100% of the losses.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      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.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        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.
      - missedthecue 4y ago
spaniard89277 4y ago
Igalia has plenty of mentions here in HN
paradite 4y ago
Notably missing (and disputed), Huawei also has an employee ownership structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Ownership 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/ https://www.huawei.com/minisite/who-runs-huawei/en/
- leereeves 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    They are supposedly nominated by the Huawei Trade Union and can be vetoed by Ren Zhengfei, according to this : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEkF4_sG/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEk...
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Based on the paragraph on Wikipedia, Huawei is very clearly not a coop.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  This account seems to be more detailed : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEkF4_sG/view?usp=sharing 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ihm 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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?).
qrush 4y ago
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 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.
ankaAr 4y ago
I have friends working in gcoop, it was working for years and they are very nice people sharing their knowledge with the community.
- dwmbt 4y ago
  your comment about its success is written in past-tense, does this mean it's no longer stable or alive? just curious.
  - ankaAr 4y ago
    Oh Nono, My mistake, they are working and growing a lot :)
Gaessaki 4y ago
A shameless plug for our Montreal-based multistakeholder food delivery coop: Radish Cooperative (https://radish.coop https://radish.coop).
- jtr1 4y ago
  I’m fascinated by multistakeholder cooperatives, but can’t seem to find much reading material on the mechanics of them. Any recommendations?
  - michaelthompson 4y ago
    what does multistakeholder cooperative mean?
    - qrush 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Credit unions are also examples of customer owned cooperatives
orzig 4y ago
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?
- qrush 4y ago
  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.
- jcims 4y ago
  > 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.
- michaelbrave 4y ago
  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/mondragon-university-cooperative-university https://www.mondragon.edu/en/international-mobility/mondrago... [2] https://uwcc.wisc.edu/ https://uwcc.wisc.edu/
ruffrey 4y ago
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.
emixam 4y ago
Happy to see this list here on which our coop startup appears! (https://kantree.io 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/ 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.
- mtremsal 4y ago
  Very interesting. Within France, would a tech coop typically be structured as a SCOP?
  - emixam 4y ago
    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!)
- BrainInAJar 4y ago
  Do these qualify for the French tech worker visa? Could someone who wants to move to France decide to just start a co-op ?
tomatowurst 4y ago
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.
- abyssin 4y ago
  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: “élection sans candidat”), etc.
  - tomatowurst 4y ago
    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.
    - keskival 4y ago
      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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
tra3 4y ago
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.”
- dalbasal 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    '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.
l0rn 4y ago
Greetings from ctrl.alt.coop, Berlin. Glad to See us on the list. It's the best working environment ive ever been in
zackmorris 4y ago
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.
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  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/radical-markets https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
- stormbrew 4y ago
  > 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.
- 4y ago
whoopdeepoo 4y ago
How do co-ops handle downsizing/layoffs?
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Denocratically
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    So everyone votes for who gets the misfortune of being sent to the chopping block?
    - kqr 4y ago
      It's a bit sad that so many people think democracy means "voting to select the least bad option". The employees work together to find solutions that cut costs. That might involve sacking some people, but it might also involve people volunteering for a temporary pay cut, or renegotiating with a landlord, or a million of other things that reduce expenses. What never happens, though, is that the CEO "sends people to the chopping block" to protect his own bonus.
      - missedthecue 4y ago
        See, from my perspective, democracy isn't a very good form of governance, and I don't understand why it should be applied as an end in and of itself in every area of life. This is in relation to co-ops, but also to the recent "democratization" drive in general. I think it's the least bad form of governance for states because it seems to result in atrocities and genocide less regularly, but when it comes to other systems, (such as businesses) centralization and hierarchies are far more efficient and the decision makers are generally much more informed with the relevant data. With democracy, you spread the decision making across a vast number of under-informed people, which seldom results in superior outcomes. Sure, incentives matter, I agree with you there. But the incentives aren't corrected when you add a democratic vote of all employees to the mix. The incentive alignment stay the exact same, where everyone is trying to save their own skin even at the expense of others or the firm as a whole. The only thing you've changed is reduce the liklihood of a data-driven decision, and increased the cost, complexity, and response time of dealing with dynamic and rapid changes affecting the organization.
georgewsinger 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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).
carapace 4y ago
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/ 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/ https://windings.com/about-us/history/ They make "custom electric motors, generators, and related components". Would they go on the list?
bsedlm 4y ago
I wanna get on this list but it seems like founding one of these is the most plaussible way to do it.
amelius 4y ago
How does this work when a worker enters or leaves the cooperative?
5555555 4y ago
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davidjfelix 4y ago
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?CommunityKey=22f0235d-9d23-4fe0-ba9e-10f02ae0bfd0 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.

424 points by cheshire_cat 4y ago

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.

tomrod 4y ago
Partnership Consultancies exist. But neither law firms nor standard consultancies typically have staff in on ownership.
- ncphil 4y ago
  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.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Yeah, LLPs/PLLCs might have the credentialing requirements. However, I am not sure law firms have to organize with those structures -- I admit ignorance in that case. I was thinking more generally.
leereeves 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
rsweeney21 4y ago
Law firms are not co-ops. They are partnerships where a small number own and control the company.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  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?
  - jasode 4y ago
    >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 4y ago
      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...
  - jsonne 4y ago
    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.
  - 4y ago
DANK_YACHT 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Creating GitHub.com takes the same amount of time whether they have 1k customers or 1M customers
    - throwaway14356 4y ago
      or creating 1000 gihubs
  - treasurebots 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
Start one.

teddyh 4y ago

https://www.usworker.coop/home/ https://www.usworker.coop/home/

zja 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  This is a nonprofit who helps companies transition from private (capitalist) to cooperative (socialist) ownership structure. https://project-equity.org/ https://project-equity.org/
- spaceprison 4y ago
  With many businesses using contract labor instead of full time workers, creating a worker co-op that operates as a contracting firm could be like a shadow union.

BrianOnHN 4y ago

mr90210 4y ago
Love your comment!
dwmbt 4y ago
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 4y ago
[deleted]
- dabsurdo 4y ago

aetherson 4y ago

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 4y ago
A coop can provide 100% of the profit in salaries, or dividends or equity or goods - whatever is more effective.
- yucky 4y ago
  ...and 100% of the losses.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    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.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      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.
    - missedthecue 4y ago

spaniard89277 4y ago

Igalia has plenty of mentions here in HN

paradite 4y ago

Notably missing (and disputed), Huawei also has an employee ownership structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Ownership 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/ https://www.huawei.com/minisite/who-runs-huawei/en/

leereeves 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  They are supposedly nominated by the Huawei Trade Union and can be vetoed by Ren Zhengfei, according to this : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEkF4_sG/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEk...
goodpoint 4y ago
Based on the paragraph on Wikipedia, Huawei is very clearly not a coop.
sudosysgen 4y ago
This account seems to be more detailed : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_9ncG_yCHKeRPDEkZ5zxxnAJGEkF4_sG/view?usp=sharing 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ihm 4y ago

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 4y ago
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?).

qrush 4y ago

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 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.

ankaAr 4y ago

I have friends working in gcoop, it was working for years and they are very nice people sharing their knowledge with the community.

dwmbt 4y ago
your comment about its success is written in past-tense, does this mean it's no longer stable or alive? just curious.
- ankaAr 4y ago
  Oh Nono, My mistake, they are working and growing a lot :)

Gaessaki 4y ago

A shameless plug for our Montreal-based multistakeholder food delivery coop: Radish Cooperative (https://radish.coop https://radish.coop).

jtr1 4y ago
I’m fascinated by multistakeholder cooperatives, but can’t seem to find much reading material on the mechanics of them. Any recommendations?
- michaelthompson 4y ago
  what does multistakeholder cooperative mean?
  - qrush 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Credit unions are also examples of customer owned cooperatives

orzig 4y ago

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?

qrush 4y ago
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.
jcims 4y ago
> 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.
michaelbrave 4y ago
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/mondragon-university-cooperative-university https://www.mondragon.edu/en/international-mobility/mondrago... [2] https://uwcc.wisc.edu/ https://uwcc.wisc.edu/

ruffrey 4y ago

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.

emixam 4y ago

Happy to see this list here on which our coop startup appears! (https://kantree.io 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/ 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.

mtremsal 4y ago
Very interesting. Within France, would a tech coop typically be structured as a SCOP?
- emixam 4y ago
  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!)
BrainInAJar 4y ago
Do these qualify for the French tech worker visa? Could someone who wants to move to France decide to just start a co-op ?

tomatowurst 4y ago

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.

abyssin 4y ago
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: “élection sans candidat”), etc.
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  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.
  - keskival 4y ago
    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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

tra3 4y ago

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.”

dalbasal 4y ago
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 4y ago
  '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.

l0rn 4y ago

Greetings from ctrl.alt.coop, Berlin. Glad to See us on the list. It's the best working environment ive ever been in

zackmorris 4y ago

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.

wardedVibe 4y ago
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/radical-markets https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177502/ra...
stormbrew 4y ago
> 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.
4y ago

whoopdeepoo 4y ago

How do co-ops handle downsizing/layoffs?

guerrilla 4y ago
Denocratically
- missedthecue 4y ago
  So everyone votes for who gets the misfortune of being sent to the chopping block?
  - kqr 4y ago
    It's a bit sad that so many people think democracy means "voting to select the least bad option". The employees work together to find solutions that cut costs. That might involve sacking some people, but it might also involve people volunteering for a temporary pay cut, or renegotiating with a landlord, or a million of other things that reduce expenses. What never happens, though, is that the CEO "sends people to the chopping block" to protect his own bonus.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      See, from my perspective, democracy isn't a very good form of governance, and I don't understand why it should be applied as an end in and of itself in every area of life. This is in relation to co-ops, but also to the recent "democratization" drive in general. I think it's the least bad form of governance for states because it seems to result in atrocities and genocide less regularly, but when it comes to other systems, (such as businesses) centralization and hierarchies are far more efficient and the decision makers are generally much more informed with the relevant data. With democracy, you spread the decision making across a vast number of under-informed people, which seldom results in superior outcomes. Sure, incentives matter, I agree with you there. But the incentives aren't corrected when you add a democratic vote of all employees to the mix. The incentive alignment stay the exact same, where everyone is trying to save their own skin even at the expense of others or the firm as a whole. The only thing you've changed is reduce the liklihood of a data-driven decision, and increased the cost, complexity, and response time of dealing with dynamic and rapid changes affecting the organization.

georgewsinger 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
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).

carapace 4y ago

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/ 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/ https://windings.com/about-us/history/ They make "custom electric motors, generators, and related components". Would they go on the list?

bsedlm 4y ago

I wanna get on this list but it seems like founding one of these is the most plaussible way to do it.

amelius 4y ago

How does this work when a worker enters or leaves the cooperative?

5555555 4y ago

davidjfelix 4y ago

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?CommunityKey=22f0235d-9d23-4fe0-ba9e-10f02ae0bfd0 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.