There are also quite a few with mixed founder / employee ownership. Publix for instance employ 250,000 people across their supermarkets and are employee / founder owned.
A recent list of the largest from Oct 2023:
Very cool to hear, dude will likely be better off than me. Employee owned corporations are good.
Of course in my neck of the woods (Silicon Valley) it's expected that all 50 year olds are multi millionaires, as all you need for that is have owned a house for a few decades.
It was indistinguishable from a normal corporation that periodically grants stock to employees, except other forms of retirement contribution were sub-par, and vesting periods for everything were LOL WTF long.
Working conditions and such were worse than many places in ways that definitely wouldn’t have been the case if it were a traditional ownership structure with a union rather than employee-owned.
They did love to put that up front when selling a job there, though. As if it actually meant something.
The original point is about companies where workers have actual control. That's what's important, that's what's interesting.
A house I lived in got our electricity from a Touchstone Energy cooperative[1] and our rate was dirt cheap and they even mailed us a dividend check every year. I've even received a few checks from them after moving out of the area and no longer being a customer of theirs. They had great customer service too. They were significantly better in every way than the regional monopolies and municipal power companies I've dealt with.
I got in as a minor, so I paid $5 for my startup share. (Adults are $25). They’ve been giving me a $5 dividend share every year for a few decades.
And charge me $0/month for a pretty full-service bank experience (not common at banks in Canada).
They’re on a North American network of ATMs (Exchange & Accel) so I have pretty good coverage out of town, can even deposit cash/cheques into CDN partner ATMs. In a lot of smaller towns, you can’t bank on every big bank having a branch, but a good chance of a partner credit union.
Much more narrowly, I wonder if it could work for certified flight instructors. Most CFIs are young, know little about business, marketing, tax compliance. And as a consequence are often exploited by employers who misclassify them as independent contractors only to pay them less, without benefits, and still direct their schedules, coerce them into noncompetes. A co-op would help protect their interests while raising standards, in a cost efficient way.
That said, yes there are co-op schools, with the Co-Op School in Brooklyn, NY, being prominent: <https://thecoopschool.org/>
In a very real sense, public schools are already customer-owned cooperatives governed by a set of trustees elected by the customer-owners.
That said, once you have a school owned by the teachers it's no longer a public school. Public schools are funded by and governed by the public. A cooperative school owned by worker-owners is by definition not a public school.
In many jurisdictions, a teacher co-op can already obtain a charter to have an "open to the public, funded by the public, and accountable to the public" charter school. If we're going to be pedantic I think that would fit your funded+governed definition. owned+operatred might be closer to what you are gesturing at though, or perhaps local democratic oversight? Regardless, the old public/parochial types of school categorization is not nearly nuanced enough to be particularly useful for where things are already, let alone soon headed.
The point that I was highlighting was that it comes down to the Articles of Incorporation and how ownership is managed on an ongoing basis. What happens when someone retires or you hire someone new.
If I were to retire and simply give my company to my 10 employees, Nothing would stop them from hiring new employees and not sharing ownership, leaving the company and keeping ownership, or selling their ownership to a third party.
Producer co-ops generally are at least somewhat prevalent.
Two notable former examples are Visa and Mastercard (they've since reverted to publicly-traded corporations, in the aughts). Both were originally formed as co-operative ventures among member banks, effectively a producer co-op.
I've looked into worker co-ops previously, and noted that most examples seem to have relatively simple organisational needs, with typical sectors being food-service (restaurants and cafes), publishers, acting troupes, and if memory serves, a political party. Mondragon is notable for being an industrial manufacturing company.
There are also worker-owned (though not necessarily co-operative) businesses, such as Bob's Red Mill (milling and cereal products).
Consumer co-ops saw popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, but have largely faded from view. A niche they had occupied, "natural food store" is now dominated by Amazon through its Whole Foods subsidiary, though there are some independent co-ops still extant, often in quite unexpected locations. Three Rivers Market in Knoxville, TN, comes to mind.
Credit Unions are another often overlooked case of co-ops --- both in terms of being neglected over commercial banks and not being recognised as co-operative businesses.
The Nonprofit Quartery ran a recent article on recent trends in co-ops in 2022:
<https://nonprofitquarterly.org/where-are-new-co-ops-emerging...>
News of a 2015 list of the top 100 US co-ops:
<https://www.thenews.coop/list-top-100-co-ops-usa-released/>
And the 2023 listing: <https://impact.ncb.coop/hubfs/Co-op%20100%202023%20Report%20...> (PDF)
Breakout:
- Ag: 47 firms, $187.6 billion (59%)
- Finance: 17 firms, $39.1 billion (12%)
- Grocery: 8 firms, $33.1 billion (10%)
- Energy: 22 firms, $26.8 billion (8%)
- Hardware: 3 firms, $18.6 billion (6%)
- Other: 3 firms, $13.4 billion (4%)
You missed a chance to mention PCC Community Markets, the USA's largest grocery store co-op, who are also located in Seattle!
(And just like Amazon, PCC was recently in a union labor dispute!)
When a Whole Foods opened across town, they shut down in less than a year largely because of the strength/quality/loyalty of the Davis Food Co-Op.
I think Bob basically gifted the company to the employees (they bought in over 10 years, but at a valuation far lower than Bob could have got selling the company to an acquirer).
Some discussion on the employee ownership here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39374158
Why this structure? Is it more advantageous in the US?
A trust with the employees as beneficiaries solves a lot of these problems. It also prevents the co-op members from taking the company public for a huge payday.
REI is a customer co-op, and in the past few years, hasn't exactly been a model employer.
https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/almost-half-l...
And agricultural co-ops are neither.
Of course, any publicly-traded company can be 'employee-owned' to whatever degree the employees buy shares. But this term usually indicates something else.
Beyond that, stock _options_ aren't stock, and stock _grants_ to employees are often in restricted classes... they're not meaningful employee ownership because they're structured to ensure that they don't represent any kind of employee control over the company.
Makes no sense to me.
Case in point example: SpaceX shares are very illiquid but also very very much up since SpaceX was founded.
If that company is a co-op in which only employees are allowed to own shares, the only people I can sell my shares to are other employees.
In general, more willing buyers (who in turn know they can they sell those shares unrestricted in the future to any buyer), increases the people willing to bid on those shares at any given moment in time. (It’s the same basic reason that you’d rather have $100 in cash than $100 gift card for Starbucks.)
That sounds like plain old profit sharing, not ownership.
Worker cooperatives are organizations that are governed by their workers for their workers, not owned as property to be traded or sold.
1: Lower liquidity usually goes hand in hand with higher transaction costs, which means a bigger gap between how much the buyer pays and how much the seller walks away with.
2: Time value of money: Suppose some liquid asset can be exchanged for $X right now, and an otherwise equivalent illiquid asset can be exchanged for $X by, let's say, a month from now. $X today is more valuable than $X in a month, so no one is going to buy the illiquid asset today for $X if they could get the liquid one instead.
(and possibly Sundar?)
Stock options in small percentages are a form of profit participation but a weak contributor to the question on if a business is a co-op.
Rank and file aren't really "shareholders". We hold an utterly insignificant stake compared to funds and other corps. They can take a board of directors and bend their beaks all they way back to their rectums, force them to act against a company's best interests.
Employee ownership means the employees decide what they do with the profits derived from their labour. The company itself tends to benefit as well, in terms of stability, quality of work life, and long-term profitability.