Very little lol. I actually submitted a talk to conference.coop titled "Platform Cooperativism AKA A Worker Co-op with a Website."
But like any cooperative you can expand your membership to include any stakeholder. Users, workers, customers, investors, etc. It is mainly about aligning ownership incentives and control/voice according to whatever the design goals are of the company.
Do the workers then have to be considered as an employee of the coop as per the co-op law? We are running into that issue. Our freelancers are all over the world and we cannot figure out if they have to be reclassified as employees of the coop.
Hey Sorry just seeing this. Well this depends on your co-ops operating agreement. For us patronage (and membership) is defined by any person (like a beating heart human not "person" like entity) doing work for the cooperative on a per hour basis. So ownership in the form of dividends are allocated pro rata by time worked. We think that this is the most straightforward way of doing it, instead of tying equity to $ made, etc.
While mondragon is a great example of a "scaled" cooperative. There are other (somewhat smaller, but still meaningful) examples. Take Cooperative Home Care Associates (http://www.chcany.org) around 1500 homecare workers in NYC, or the Arizmendi bakeries https://www.arizmendi.coop/ that have 5 bakeries and other businesses all growing and providing living wage jobs in the Bay Area.
We chose to use a holding company model for our cooperative https://www.staffing.coop so that we could have many startups and conversions underneath one holding company worker cooperative.
Platform cooperatives in my opinion are just another name for a cooperative who conducts the bulk of their business online. this can be a worker cooperative (https://www.upandgo.coop/), a multi-stakeholder cooperative (https://www.savvy.coop/) or even a producers cooperative (stocksy.com). I think the term is actually a bit arbitrary. The more important thing to think about is a) who owns the equity, b) how does the business make money c) how do the members participate.
Well _I_ don't need a new term lol. The term was popularized by folks at the New School who brought people together under the name platform.coop. I actually think it is a bit problematic, because it creates a false narrative around the utility of a service. My biggest fear is people saying we should just make a "co-op version of X company". I think that doesn't really work in real life. Cooperatives are businesses first and foremost. They exist in the market and are not immune to market factors including competition. I would much rather people think about the value they are bringing to people first then build a structure around it that matches the value. IE basic stakeholder theory but baked into every facet of a business (including it's equity structure).
Why doesn't the phrase "we should make a co-op version of X company" fit well with the platform coop model? Or rather, the focus on employee happiness is a product all its own. Just like consumers are willing to pay higher prices for "organic" produce, simply being a coop is a product feature.
Yes, competition (from corporations) means it's not enough to say "we're a co-op" if the product doesn't actually work, but well-funded corporate competition could clone any feature that isn't linked to a more egalitarian equity structure. My "co-op for Doordash but we don't steal tips" is far harder to copy, business-wise than "co-op for Doordash, but with a 'food me now' button that picks food for me".
Sorry maybe I wasn't clear. I don't mean to say that there should not be a focus on member (employee or otherwise) happiness. Actually quite to the contrary. Co-ops do a much better job of aligning incentives for all stakeholders (especially worker-coops in the case of employees) and most track engagement as a business metric. I totally think that simply being a cooperative makes the business model more defensible, I just think it is not the only differentiator needed. So if you are a b2b saas business that just so happens to be structured as a worker-coop or a media outlet that is owned by media producers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press). It just boils down to designing around a business case first, then adding the layer of mutual aid.
Not sure why you felt the insult was necessary, but yes, that exactly!
Co-op doordash turns the entire concept of tipping on its head, contrary to traditional corporate governance, which has incentive to funnel money to a CEO and a board, compared to a more egalitarian co-op structure.
I think that there is real value in thinking more broadly about the cooperative model when building any new business! As a way to align incentives it makes a lot of sense.
I am part of a growing tech worker cooperative called Tribe Works (https://www.tribeworks.io). We are a platform cooperative that helps tech workers connect with businesses looking for contractors or direct hires. We were set up as an alternative to "gig platforms" (upwork, etc) and staffing firms, and quickly realized that the real value in our model was in longer engagements. We usually target roles that last at least 3 months so that our members can access healthcare through the cooperative if they are working full time and allow workers to buy in. The platform ties together the functionality of an applicant tracking software (ie jobvite.com) and professional employer organization (ie justwork.com) and we add recruitment process outsourcing as a service on top. We have only just launched our beta platform right now but hoping to fully launch when we reach 301 members (we are about 1/4 of the way there). We have community calls every other week as well for people interested in learning about the co-op.
We are an crowdsourced transcription service and are seriously exploring converting into a worker coop. I have been researching worker coops for a month now. How do we get started?
Has anyone looked into creating a cooperative data labeling service similar to Scale AI, except where labels are owned by the people who created them? Perhaps this might even increase label quality by aligning the interests of the labelers with the people who use them?
I'm very interested in answers to this question as well. I'm working near this space and have a lot of thoughts on what such a service would need to be successful, at least for image tasks. I think it could offer real value to the work forces that complete data labeling tasks, cutting out middleman companies with worker-owned labeling and marketplace software tools.
I have read "everything for everyone" and agree on some of the major points it and this article raises. I do think that there might be a bit of context missing from this thread and the article in general.
I think someone pointed out that "decentralization" is different from "democratization" and I would wholeheartedly agree. I think of both as independent variables which can be tuned in the construction of any organizational structure. Also to me the idea that democracy, as it pertains to business structures, should also be something that is tunable.
Projects like DAO's are great examples if highly distributed yet fairly undemocratic structures. As the core team creating them (and often monetizing them) do not nessecarily share power in the direction of the project. I am not advocating for or against that but just pointing it out.
But as history has shown there are real tradeoffs when you try and reach scale (in whatever metric) when you centralize democracy. It's my view that there is a sweet spot (and serious upside) for introducing decentralization and democratization into most projects, but it all depends on the use case. As a few examples take a look at the success of projects like stocksy.com (royalty based stock images company owned by the contributors), smart.coop (freelancers cooperative that handles contracts and billing). And of course Mondragon (https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/) which takes democracy in the workplace to an industrial scale.
At my current company (https://www.staffing.coop and https://www.tribeworks.io) we decided to form as a cooperative (instead of using a DAO) because it better fit our current needs. But we don't see this as a static choice.
I usually don't comment on these threads but felt the need to jump in. While I totally understand and agree that ANY business needs to turn a profit in order to stay in the market. I fundamentally disagree with the distribution of work vs risk in proportion to profit in a traditional consultancy model.
The assumption that seems to be present throughout this thread is that there is an owner/s (not necessarily the same person as the operator) present who needs to take a percentage from the bill rate. This model is inherently extractive and sets up a really bad set of incentives for the people doing the productive work. (productive in this case is actually writing code/solving client problems and maybe not doing the marketing, administrative, or sales work of the business.)
I know someone is going to raise the point that there has to be an owner to put up the capital/bear the initial risk of starting up, which is totally valid! This will always be true I just think that there should be a route/way for the productive worker to work towards a piece of that ownership pie.
Also, the fact that the bill rate vs pay rate is transparent is actually great. I know many staffing firms/employment agencies that keep that information hidden from thier employees. (Full disclosure I am a member-owner at a worker cooperative staffing startup staffing.coop, so I am biased towards employee ownership in general! )
If it's true that the "owner" is merely "extracting" value from the "productive" workers, then the productive workers should have no problem setting up shop for themselves. This is a consultancy we're talking about; the way you've framed it, there's no barrier to entry for the exploited consultants to set up competing firms with better terms for developers. In fact, they don't even really have to set up firms. They can just all quit, operate as sole proprietorships, and subcontract back to the owner's firm, who will have no choice but to 1099 them, at floating rates, when all their workers leave.
That this rarely happens in practice should tell you something about where the value in an established consultancy is generated.
As someone who ran a solo consultancy for a few years and probably was not exploiting myself, I think you're undervaluing what an employee W-2 consultant gets from their employer and also what the client gets from what you describe as the non-productive labor of the employer.
When I consulted, delivery was only a portion of the package. Sales work isn't just "Convince the customer to buy the engagement", it often required substantial (and often speculative) work on creating proposals, doing client education ("Why should I even send email anyhow?"), scoping projects, attending conferences, writing publicly (an activity which is both marketing and produced substantial value despite not being directly billable), etc etc. Clients were not strictly buying delivery; delivery came with a bundle of requirements like e.g. having to deliver while being insured. This produces client value, because they sensibly don't want to give a commit bit to someone who could accidentally bring down the business and has no meaningful assets if sued. Warren Buffet will happily take that risk off the client's hands, to their happiness, but he won't do it for free. Clients similarly can't engage consultants without lawyers being involved. Lawyers materially de-risk engagements; de-risking is something both sides very much want; professional labor is not free. Clients benefit from receiving trade credit (the consultancy will advance you $60k of value and you pay them back months later, with no interest charged, minimal underwriting, and functionally no recourse in event of default); trade credit isn't free.
From the perspective of a W-2 consultant, the things you get from the enterprise include having predictable work lined up by people who specialize in getting gigs and scheduling them so that you can focus on delivery. The set of technologists who can deliver is much larger than the set who can both deliver and convince software companies to pay premium rates for their time. (Trivial proof that this is true: look how many delivery-focused technologists say that business owners on HN are blowing smoke about rates clients are happy to pay every time that subject comes up.) The consultancy insulates the consultant from market risk; regardless of whether the consultancy is having a good month or a bad month in pipeline or cashflow management payroll happens on the day everyone expects it to in exactly the amount they expect it to. The consultancy invests in the professional development of their employees and in the specialization of their offering on the marketplace, which specialization increases the market value of their employees while at the consultancy and in the future.
There is a way for delivery-focused employees to get ownership. It is to become a principal consultant. Some firms offer promotion tracks which get one there. The faster option, if a delivery-focused employee thinks that the enterprise is not adding value, is to walk out the door and hang out their shingle. If the delivery-focused employee was right, they immediately have 100% ownership of the enterprise. If they were wrong, oh well, capitalism happens to capitalists.
The way to eventually get towards ownership is through increasing your billings whereby the client is hiring the productive worker, at which point, it's usually when you become a partner of the company (effectively sharing in profits and losses).
The assumption that marketing, administration and sales work of business as non-productive is an arrogant view. While as engineers, we tend to think that doing the actual work counts more than the rest, clients actually value the other stuff and would be willing to pay much more for it as well. You can easily see this with enterprise contracts that value $25k to $1m or more, where they usually have account executives, project managers, training programs, etc. in addition to the product.
I think you misunderstood my intention. I (generally speaking) classify work as either productive or reproductive. In this case the productive work being the engineering and the reproductive being sales, marketing, admin, Etc. Both play very necessary and valid roles within any healthy business. I agree that some engineers have a myopic view of their function/role within an organization. I didn't mean for that comment to be self-aggrandizing at all.
> eventually get towards ownership is through increasing your billings whereby the client is hiring the productive worker, at which point, it's usually when you become a partner of the company (effectively sharing in profits and losses)
I think that this might not be considering the inherent politics of work and the power dynamics present in every business. To be clear, I don't think the comment is coming from a bad place, I just think that it points to a common fallacy that any sort of "meritocracy" is possible in business as usual. When you have a small group of people holding power there are few incentives for them to share that power. And In my experience it is the person who is able to sell themselves the best that gets the highest reward, not the most productive.
Apologies for misunderstanding your intention. Genuinely curious but what's your definition of 'reproductive' work?
> I think that this might not be considering the inherent politics of work and the power dynamics present in every business. To be clear, I don't think the comment is coming from a bad place, I just think that it points to a common fallacy that any sort of "meritocracy" is possible in business as usual. When you have a small group of people holding power there are few incentives for them to share that power. And In my experience it is the person who is able to sell themselves the best that gets the highest reward, not the most productive.
You're absolutely right and I see it with my experience as well. The highest rewards don't usually tend to fall naturally and equally to everyone whom we deem to be the most productive. And while there may be few incentives to share the power in small groups, one would hope that the goodness of an individual's heart would lead them to do so.
There generally is a way for them to work towards that isn't there? That's what getting made a partner is.
Beyond that, consulting has low startup/asset costs, there isn't much of a barrier to entry. So if a worker at a consultancy doesn't feel like they're getting as much value as they're generating, they can always just start their own. Plenty do.
Thanks for your effort in the reentry space! The struggle for returning citizens is real and constant and I love seeing things like this on HN. At one point I worked for a company apploi.com that had a similar business model but targeting a different demographic. I would love to share some things I learned from that experience. I also started a similar venture corestaffing.us that is hyper-focused on the Baltimore/Washington area. Let me know if you are interested in chatting!
But like any cooperative you can expand your membership to include any stakeholder. Users, workers, customers, investors, etc. It is mainly about aligning ownership incentives and control/voice according to whatever the design goals are of the company.