Hacker News Reader

Comment by hooverlunch | Hacker News Reader

There are lots of small tech worker coops in the U.S. and Canada. See https://techworker.coop.

I co-founded one, Sassafras Tech Collective, in Ann Arbor. It's been an amazing journey. I don't think I could ever go back to working in a non-democratic workplace.

View on HN

> It's been an amazing journey.

So you sold it, eh?

Heh, you can't sell a worker coop. One of the key defining features is a "de-mutualization" provision in the founding documents. You can only sell your own share, which has, in our coop, a fixed value of $1,000. And you can only sell that share back to the coop.

interesting, does the value ever change? did you pay that $1.000 at any moment or was discounted from work at any moment? what about new members?

No, it deliberately stays fixed to reduce barriers to entry for new member-owners.

Can I apply to be a member from abroad?

As of now we're only U.S. based, unfortunately. Adding international members adds a lot of complications that we don't have the scale to deal with.

This used to confuse me: don't co-op rules like this distort the value of the firm? But then I realized that I was missing the big picture: the ownership of the firm isn't valued! Worker-owners own a portion of the revenue during their time as worker-owners, and there is no need to put a price on the expected future revenue or profit of the company.

It's not co-ops that distort the value of the firm, it's that permanent ownership necessitates complicated and opinionated financial/statistical reasoning to put a number on what is fundamentally a weird social relation.

So any part of a journey can't be deemed amazing until the entire journey is over?

;-)

I've found this list of tech-coops useful as well: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

Cool, thanks for chiming in here.

> I don't think I could ever go back to working in a non-democratic workplace.

I would love to read a bit more about that sometime.

We are about to roll out a blog! Check https://sassafras.coop in a month or two...

Where did you register your .coop domain?

First at Gaiahost, which has since gone out of business. Now at gandi.net.

Can you speak to the downsides of a democratic workplace? How do you avoid the pitfalls of a union where people end up getting compensated for things like seniority instead of skill?

A union is not a coop, so the forces are not the same at all.

Furthermore, it's not clear that "seniority" would trump "skill" in a co-op, either. Or that the opposite is true of a more "traditional" workplace.

The job of each worker-owner is, in part, to help other worker owners developer their strengths to their fullest for the benefit of co-op.

An employee-owned co-operative corporation (EOCC) governs as form of direct democracy. In my experience, your biggest obstacle is going to be collective decision-making. How well you do that is a test of the people in the co-op. Consider: management is just another skill, not a rank. You don't have a boss. You have people who are counting on you. Management serves at the pleasure of the worker-owners.

> You don't have a boss.

Unless everyone can make equally large payments on behalf of the company, you most certainly have bosses.

Find those people. They are the bosses. Everything else is theatre.

Or large payments are approved democratically.

SamBam nailed it. For us, any large expenses must be approved by consensus of the whole group. For larger coops, they would need approval of a democratically elected and recallable board of directors.

We are developing a "thrivable" payscale that rewards each of the following:

- relevant prior experience (before joining the coop) - longevity (aka seniority) - dependent care responsibilities - membership (a small raise once you become a member)

The prior experience piece is determined with a points system, designed to take as much of the self-advocacy (with all of its race/gender/class pitfalls) out of the process as possible.

The system also includes annual cost of living adjustments.

Hmm, how do you score people qualitatively, if you're using YoE as a factor? Whats the solution to someone having the same year of experience for 10 years?

In my experience, this is a common misconception. In the union contracts I've worked with and under (entertainment industry), seniority is not a factor in compensation. More senior work roles generally earn more, but individual employees do not earn more by being in the job longer. It can be hard to restructure, demote or terminate employees in senior roles, but there is always a mechanism to do so. The one place where longer-serving employees generally cost the company more is severance obligations, but from a management perspective this is usually a good thing. The presence of a severance clause generally gives management the ability to terminate the employee under more permissive terms.

There are some in the UK: https://www.coops.tech/#members (I don't know much about them).

hey fellow arborite

Reply on news.ycombinator.com