Cool, thanks for the explanations.

I’ve seen some attempts at worker-cooperatives before where workers had to buy-in, and it kinda put me off. Presumably, workers are looking for work because they need income, and such barriers would select for a certain type of well-off individual, harming diversity. I agree there definitely has to be a provisional period; both in ownership and decision making.

Reading more of the documents, I’m not sure I like that the CEO and President are compensated differently than the rest of the workers. I guess it makes sense from a incentives perspective, but it feels kinda wrong to me. In my mind, the CEO is just another role in a company.

I’d be interested in hearing what cooperatives you know about, as I’m always looking for success stories.

Most of the examples of flat orgs that I’ve heard of were not cooperatives. Early Valve, early GitHub, Gore-Tex, Morning Star (I remember reading “First, Let’s Fire All The Managers” in an Organizational Behavior course back when I was in college, and the idea always stuck with me). At Valve, there were leaders, but it was dynamic (if you can get people to follow you/work on your project, you are a leader). In my career as a software engineer, I’ve also worked in agile processes like Scrum. Though, not dynamic, Scrum is less about “hierarchy” and more about collaboration with some special “roles”/not necessarily leaders (Project Owner, Scrum Master, stake holders, etc). Though Scrum is usually collaboration within teams and not necessarily without hierarchy in an organization.

And lately, I’ve taken in interest in anarchism and alternative ways of organization, such as Boem and Graeber’s works studying the Innuit and pre-history humans; as well as modern anarch-ish communities such as the Zapitistas and Rojava, which were more-or-less successful (aside from dealing with external violence in the case of Rojava) while being radically different. A lot of ways to skin a cat I guess.

Oh, and I read Richard Wolff’s Democracy at Work a while back, where he proposed “Worker Self-Directed Enterprises,” that focus on workers being in control of the surplus from their labor, rather than having management control it; arguing that’s the most important aspect.

My worry about having a single person at the top is mostly about corruption I guess. Even if democratically elected, compromised/corrupted union leaders, for example, are not unheard of. I see the Zapatista’s system of “governance”/collaboration/federation as a possible mitigation of this. They go to great lengths to prevent people “getting too big for their britches,” like very frequently (e.g. every 2 weeks) rotating elected representatives. And they have various practices and customs that echo the “reverse dominance hierarchy” that has been observed by anthropologists.

Having an entire factory is quite a complicated endeavor

Yeah, I think the biggest hurdle with worker-cooperatives is acquiring capital. Factories and the machines in them are very expensive. I think there are organizations that offer loans to worker-cooperatives, but I doubt on the scale of a factory. I kind of like Argentina’s past “Occupy, Resist, Produce” movement as a solution to this :)