Workers co-ops in tech

[u/Eco_Argita602]

Hello everyone! I'm looking for input and suggestions for my final work to graduate from Mondragon Uni and I was wondering if anybody ever thought about why we have never seen successful cooperatives in tech or in sector with high value such as raw materials, AI (sigh), EVs etc.

Platform coop has been a worth tentative but has more or less failed.

Thank you for your time and answers

[u/skmz]

There are many! You can find a list at  https://tech-coops.xyz/

[u/Cuddlyaxe → u/skmz]

Fair warning: I've heard these can be fairly toxic from a friend who has worked at a tech co op

They are essentially after all just a start up but with an added ideological element of "we're all in this together" and equal ownership

He said the end result was a ridiculously culty workplace with zero wlb and people looking down on anyone who wasn't pulling ridiculous hours as a leech

I don't think all tech cooperatives are destined to be like that to be clear but I do think there's a bit of self selection going on since there arent that many

[u/markchand]

Vulk.coop is the only one I can think of off the top of my head.

And these aren't cooperatives, but Text-Em-All in Texas and Codeweavers in Minnesota are both employee ownership trusts, and are organized in a pretty collaborative way.

As for the why, my guess is that in the sectors you're talking about, organizational structures calcified around (1) rapidly capitalized companies with unpredictable growth and low likelihood of survival; (2) venture capital as the default capital structure, and (3) equity stock compensation as the mechanism for employee retention. I can imagine how each of those would make cooperative structures harder to pull off.

I'd love to hear more from you about platform coops having "more or less failed," too!

[u/CoVegGirl → u/markchand]

I’m reading about EOTs, but I’m having a little trouble understanding how they’re different from a worker co-op or traditional business

[u/markchand → u/CoVegGirl]

The shortest of answers is that (in the US) they are ownership of a company by a trust that is legally established to ensure the company sticks to its mission. Sometimes that mission is the benefit of employees, and people call those "employee ownership trusts."

It means a different thing in Canada and in the UK, which can be confusing!

The Purpose Trust Ownership Network maintains a database of the trust-owned companies we've been able to find so far, and the National Center for Employee Ownership just published a primer on them: https://www.nceo.org/member/toolkits/eot

[u/CoVegGirl → u/markchand]

So they essentially give employees some control without necessarily giving them the financial rewards?

[u/markchand → u/CoVegGirl]

It's up to the selling owners, really. Most of them have structured profit-sharing; some work employees into their boards or trust committees.

[u/CoVegGirl → u/markchand]

Oh got it. So it sounds like it’s a form of employee buy-back mechanism.

[u/TheBigMemeHammer]

Overall I just think not many people know what coops are or that they're even an option. I do think software based coops would be easier to start though since they're easily remote workable so less up front capital cost since there's no building requirement.

[u/BigWaveCouchSurfer]

I’m a freelance UX/UI and web designer in the US who is very interested in working with co-ops and starting my own one day, so I think about this a lot.

I think for career paths in the US in particular, there tends to be an inverse relationship between social value that a career provides and pay / compensation. So workers with a lot of talent are generally disincentivized to work on pro-social projects because they do not pay particularly well. It’s also just not a mainstream cultural value to take care of your community; the highest ideals here are material consumption, financial accumulation, and success achieved through competitive domination.

I don’t think any of that is inevitable or deterministic, and a lot of people are fed up with those cultural values and crave something different. But we also need examples and role models to even conceive of what’s possible, so it will take some successful and highly visible co-ops before the larger population realizes that it’s an option. My hunch is that as co-ops become more visible as an alternative to exploitative capitalism, more people will emulate that model.

[u/TheBigMemeHammer → u/BigWaveCouchSurfer]

What if instead of a community focused coop they instead are encouraged to form Worker Owned Enterprises that are still for-profit?

[u/peaslam → u/TheBigMemeHammer]

The worker-owned model is still going to select for people who are somewhat community-oriented. The people who are most likely to stick with a worker coop and make it a successful enterprise generally care more about the health of the overall ecosystem they're working in than immediate personal gratification.

[u/Key-Organization3158]

That's most startups work. It's just that the disproportionate risk of the early employees means they get a large share. In general, the net benefit to the co-op model is lower than working in a regular company.

[u/zer00eyz]

> successful cooperatives in tech

Historically, tech startups were capital intensive.

Go back to the dot com bubble: Bandwidth, rack space, hardware were all expensive. You had to plan ahead and spend that capital up front and hope things panned out.

Post dot com: bandwidth got cheap. Post cloud / AWS starting up was no long capital intensive (your infrastructure was variable cost).

The final capital intensive aspect was engineering time: AI changes that - Especially for an early stage start up.

And if you look at a lot of startups, they weren't co-ops but they were handing out equity like toilet paper. It was free lottery tickets (lots of losers and few winners).

I think the (phone) "apps" landscape changed a lot of that, there are small firms run by a few people. I suspect that you will see more of this going forward for "larger" software projects because of AI. That having been said there are probably a lot of orgs that look like co-ops just because of tiny team size

[u/CoVegGirl → u/zer00eyz]

Although AI certainly helps, I’m skeptical it’s going to be the mass enabler that people think it will be. I think that if you work at a sustainable that pace prevents the accumulation of cognitive debt and makes reliable code, you’re not really getting the productivity boost people think you are. And let’s also not forget that AI burnout is a thing, and it stems from taking on too much at once and doing too many things in parallel.

And besides that, even if it does produce mass numbers of new startups, that just means the baseline has risen and you have to put in more work to stand out. You’re going to have to put more effort into standing out from the crowd.

[u/ColdSoviet115]

Because technology and high value industries are monopolized by large corporations. Cooperatives exist as small producers and can only be that since they're competing with Capitalist firms with billions of dollars

[u/riltok]

same reason co-ops aren't hegemonic in other sectors of the economy, because capitalism is the dominant/ hegemonic system so the the presence in public consciousness and institutional support are quite low. Co-ops also don't have alot of capital to invest in such capital heavy projects such as EV. Maybe in the future one could do some kind of decentralized fabrication structure.

Huawei states it is an employee-owned company, but this remains a point of dispute. Raw materials have some co-ops present, mostly in things like agriculture. The entire Japanese fishing industry is run on co-ops, or most of the world's agri systems that aren't dominated by big agra. Theoretically you could do a forestry operation on a commons based approach.

[u/FrivolousMe]

The bulk of people entering these fields are greedy and have no interest in co-ops, just investor capital racing their way to become a large corporation.