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Comment by mkolodny | Hacker News Reader

To anyone who has been part of a worker cooperative:

Does the amount of money different people make in your cooperative seem fair? How do you handle situations where one person seems to contribute a lot more to the cooperative than others (say they bring in bigger clients, or they're more skilled)?

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I’m part of a four-person consultancy and we have a transparent deal on profit sharing for projects, depending on who does what part. We adjust the deal every few years when the nature of work changes, so it’s an ever evolving thing, but my feeling is that as long as everything is transparent, and can be changed if someone feels it’s getting unfair, people will be happy.

We usually work in pairs, and invoice 90% to the coop of the amount that was invoiced to the client. That way everyone manages their own risk, but we can still rely on others if we get stuck, share common practices, etc.

We have flat salaries at Common Knowledge. Our wager is the cooperative as a collective wouldn't exist without everyone working on it, so think it is more fair if everyone earns the same.

However, a lot of other cooperatives have different rates that work around a matrix of: hours worked, skill level and life need. These are democratically decided by the cooperative and tend to also have a pay ratio - e.g. the top earner can only earn 3x from the bottom.

DEV have a nice page on how they work this out - https://www.dev.ngo/join/pay-principles/

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