Worker Owned Cooperatives

Worker-owned cooperatives are a distinctive breed of company. Ownership of the entity is wholly or primarily in the hands of the employees of the firm; for at least major decisions and policies, all members have an equal say on what happens, often through some consensus or consensus-like mechanism.

This is like a housing cooperative, in that collective ownership is vested in the hands of those most interested in, affected by, and able to change, the hows and whys and how-muches of a particular venture.

One particularly stunning example of worker-owned cooperative success is the Mondragon network of worker-owned cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. The network is, taken together, one of the the top 15 enterprises in Spain.

• Less than 60 years old, and basically a standard corporate entity now. Hardly a "stunning" example

• And of course as a standard corporate entity Mondragon is subject to investor scandals and speculation such as happened with Enron & WorldCom?, or opaque evil subcontracting such as happens with Haliburton. Dude, you are totally bogarting the joint!

This form of entity is more popular outside the United States than inside; there is even a world-wide federation of worker-owned cooperatives. The United States had several worker-owned cooperatives at the start of the 20th century, but very few at the start of the 21st.

Are there any examples of such organizations in the field of software development?

I have read about cooperative living communities that develop software, but I don't know of any cooperative groups that formed specifically to develop software. Software would theoretically be a good cooperative business, because typically it is difficult for cooperatives to raise capital (can't sell stock to outsiders, hard to find willing lenders), and software tends not to be too capital-intensive. It is possible that the wide apparent variation in software developer productivity would make it hard to hold a cooperative together. --MatthewWilbert

No more than holding a corporation together. See EgalitarianCompensation.

Btw, isn't worker-owned cooperative redundant? All cooperatives are worker-owned. Or do you mean exclusively worker-owned (ie, users do not get shares)? Would it still be a cooperative in that case?

You would think so, but actually in the USA the term cooperative (and credit union, union, progressive, left-wing, et cetera) is being greatly misused by, you guessed it, capitalists!