Not a direct response to OP's question, but I wanted to give some general background info on worker cooperatives and coops in general. A cooperative is type of

Not a direct response to OP's question, but I wanted to give some general background info on worker cooperatives and coops in general. A cooperative is type of a business entity that does not have outside shareholders. Rather, its members are its owners. So, in the case of a worker cooperative, the people who work for the business are its member-owners. (In the case of a consumer cooperative, its patrons are its member-owners.) What are some benefits of cooperative businesses? For one thing, because the business is not beholden to outside shareholders, who typically only have an interest in the financial health of the company, it can make decisions that a for-profit company might not be at liberty to make. For instance, a for-profit bank, under shareholder pressure, might introduce sneaky hidden fees to increase its bottom line -- but at the expense of irritating its patrons. That just wouldn't happen with a credit union (a form of cooperative), because the investors and patrons are one in the same, and their interests are aligned. Another big benefit, and this is especially true with tech companies, is that the member-owners are invested in the company's success in a way that mere employees are not -- and they have the decision-making power to actually influence how the company operates, because coops are democratically controlled. A lot of tech companies grant stock options and offer profit-sharing programs, but stock options can be a crap shoot (there are a lot of ways for them to end up being worthless, even when the company is profiting handsomely), and profit-sharing doesn't necessarily mean power-sharing. There are two major downsides to operating a business as a coop, though. One is that you have to raise all of your capital from your members, rather than relying on outside investment. That can be really tough, especially when you're just starting out. The other downside is regulatory. I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but in the U.S., there are a lot of restrictions and hoops you have to jump through. For instance, consumer cooperatives must restrict membership based on some type of common bond -- a geographic area or an alumni association, for instance. But some types of businesses just don't flourish unless you open them up to everyone. This is less of a problem, though, for worker cooperatives. I'm a big fan of the cooperative movement, and the broader distributist movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism), and I wish more people knew about the benefits coops offer.