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From the article:

    At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios
    between executive work and field or factory work
    which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range
    from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and
    average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an
    average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than
    5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage
    paid in their cooperative. For most workers, this
    ratio is smaller because there are few Mondragon
    worker-owners that earn minimum wages, because
    most jobs are somewhat specialized and are
    classified at higher wage levels. The wage ratio
    of a cooperative is decided periodically by its
    worker-owners through a democratic vote.

Afaik this is the biggest worker coop in existence. Does anyone know of any sizable examples of this ownership-model in tech?

edit: added "worker" to "coop" (as I'm not interested in non-worker coops)

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The interesting thing about this wage ratio is they had to increase it in the beginning of the cooperative because very few people were willing to take more responsibility for little more pay.

So maybe there is a study to be done about what could be the optimum wage ratio that allows a company to attract top talent for management positions and at the same time is not perceived as injust and exploitative by the lower workers.

top talent +/- makes far beyond what regular workers would perceive as unjust.

There is a difference between pay so poor no one is willing to take the job and pay good enough to get top talent. Clearing the first hurdle doesn't say anything about the second.

But the same is true for all the lower ranks. It's one thing to pay enough to get someone to do the job and another to get the best for the role. A believable promise that the employer won't suppress low end wages for the benefit of C-suite compensation can be very attractive, even if the initial offer has exactly the same numbers on it.

A weak CEO with strong people beneath him can still very much succeed, but the best CEO in the world won't help a company with otherwise sub-par employees.

And it's not just hiring: a company where people are not financially punished for sticking to what they are best at can have a huge advantage over a competitor ravaged by the Peter Principle because that's the only way to get a party of the pie.

The myth of top talent is overrated, especially in managerial positions for companies where the workers have more say in decisions.

And in those cases you'd certainly be more concerned about getting top talent and passion out of workers anyway.

It's nothing compared to Amul - a dairy behemoth in India which employs about 3.6 MILLION people.

They brought in the "White Revolution" making India the largest milk producer in the world!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul

This Amul a worker coop? I'm only interested in worker coops, should have specified that.

> Formed in 1946, it is a cooperative brand managed by a cooperative body, the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (GCMMF), which today is jointly owned by 3.6 million milk producers in Gujarat.[4]

I mean, kind of? idk if India has the concept of a worker's cooperative company but this is not super far away from it

This is a producer coop and its not a worker coop

I guess so.

> It is important to note that Amul Federation passes on 80-85% of consumer rupee back to milk producer members thus encouraging them to produce more milk.

https://amul.com/files/pdf/GCMMF-sales-Turnover-2017-18-0104...

Yup producer coops are quite commonplace for milk production in other places too.

A great resource on this is Nathan Schneider's book Everything for Everyone: https://nathanschneider.info/books/everything-for-everyone/

Backlogged this, I'm highly interested in this considering the old rat race seems out of style to me.

Found these two lists, from the top of my mind i know the developers of Loomio are a coop https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2564... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634152

Does it matter if it's large? I was just talking to a friend who started a small company, merged with a bigger company and thought he had done everything right. After a few years, he regretted selling the company. Small is beautiful. We learned this as children. Challenge the mantra of size and growth.

it matters but not in the sense that everybody should aim for a super large corporation.

It matters because it validates that cooperatives can grow very large, and refutes the claims such as "yes it's nice, but of course it works only for small ventures and could never grow)

But the answer to that shouldn't be "here's an example of a large one" but "why do you care so much for growth, it's fine to be small".

No it shouldn't (even if I agree with your sentiment about company, growth and probably life in general). People interested in coop model have a legitimate interest in proving that it can work for various business size

I agree but let's also understand the damaging dynamics we see on HN everyday where some people consider a multi million dollar operation a "lifestyle business".

"Lifestyle business" is generally not a very good term. On the one hand there's a small company that isn't very growth-oriented, throws off a modest amount of cash, and is very full-time job for the owner/operator. (Think a lot of franchise/retail or solo consulting.)

On the other hand, you have a business that generates a decent largely passive income that lets the owner take lots of time off and basically not work any harder than they want to.

I consider the latter a lot more lifestyle-businessy than the former.

I think from an aesthetic perspective, there's no difference between large and small, but from an efficiency perspective, sometimes it's important for things to be large.

And this isn't heartless, capitalist efficiency, sometimes there's a large environmental cost to distributing work across a population, like if everyone dumps a little bit of waste into the sewer because it's too expensive to treat (or burns their own coal for cooking), where a much larger entity has the efficiencies to treat the waste properly (or generate electricity much more cleanly) and the government can actually monitor the single entity.

Additionally, a lot of things are only affordable to most people because they are mass produced. There's a very good argument that a lot things that are produced are just utterly unnecessary, but that doesn't invalidate the point that some very necessary things are only affordable to the poor because they are made by the million.

Fixing the quote format so people can read it:

> At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in their cooperative. For most workers, this ratio is smaller because there are few Mondragon worker-owners that earn minimum wages, because most jobs are somewhat specialized and are classified at higher wage levels. The wage ratio of a cooperative is decided periodically by its worker-owners through a democratic vote.

Wait, what most here are not discussing is the true nature of this organization. Historically, this cooperative was designe as a system to pay out the Basque cause, a separative movement with is Spain. This cooperative has/will be discriminatory based on your political views. Also, it’s imperative to say that most of it’s financing has at times come into question as they have received strong and at time ilegal funding from the Basque government, creating an unfair compete climate where other business could not thrive and where forced to concede to go into the group or just fail. Their business practices come from a captive market (with a strong political pressure to be in the status quo or else) which keeps competition on the sidelines. If you are a serious contender with in the Basque region of Spain, you wake up to pickets, and your factory on fire, so it might sound good at first, but there is nothing but smoke and mirrors in this organization. So, sure with a favorable financing, wage control, and captive market, you can really build a corporation that can then expand and compete outside of their core “captive” markets. Anybody know of a good dictatorial nations to start another model company like this?

> Does anyone know of any sizable examples of this ownership-model in tech?

There is a tech-aligned version of the worker co-op called a platform co-op, with some examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative#Examples .

That is a producer coop not a worker - part of KFC I structured that way

The John Lewis Partnership in the UK employs about 83,000 so perhaps a bit bigger. Not strictly a co-op, but very close.

there's also The Co-op in the UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_Group

Im not sure if this is a worker-coop. I'm actually only interested in worker coops. Should have clarified that.

I am a former coop member in the UK

The Main Uk coop is both a worker and consumer coop.

John Lewis is a bit of an edge case is sort of a worker coop its doesn't call its self a coop for branding purposes and its governance has some diferesnce form what a real worker coop does.

The Size of Mondragon? No. But https://www.coops.tech/ lists some small ones.

I know a handful of them in Galicia, but they look small-ish. Mondragon had a tech consultancy company but I can't find them.

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