Can you tell me the exact things the government is preventing people from doing in this case?
Perhaps the same statement would apply to workplace control. Most people have a general apathy to their workplace governance and only care about their pay and benefits.
I really don't know how you make people care about things, but compelling a change that people are free to make today by government force is last on my list of things to try.
There's also situations where dominant players make it difficult for smaller competitors to survive. In a loose analogy, Microsoft's monopolistic strategies in the '90s can be compared to the past decades' weakening of laws protecting unions.
Strengthening unions, or rather reversing the weakening of unions in this country, doesn't really require oppressive government force. That's in line with the misconception that considers America's sickly unions- who are an absolute paper tiger at this point in history- to have any considerable strength.
https://psmag.com/economics/what-caused-the-decline-of-union...
OSX and Windows work because the make it easy for end users to use them; and run the applications/games they want to play.
There are a good number of hackers who would consider Linux superior to the dominant OS's, which is why I made that arbitrary comparison.
To follow your tangent, I actually did a little bit of not terribly formal research on this at one point (maybe about 15 years ago now), calling up a variety of people in different volunteer organizations and asking them about their background and motivation for their volunteer work.
Generally, the anecdotes I gathered all roughly corresponded with their volunteer work tying in in some way with other facets of their lives.
For example, a man who had received books in prison from a volunteer organization joined that organization after he got out because he believed in the value of what they were doing. A mom volunteered on an organization that arranged activities for kids, which hers participated in. That sort of thing.
My takeaway was not terribly revolutionary: you can't -make- someone care about things, but their circumstances will increase the chance that they will care about related things.
Why cooperatives do poorly? Maybe people usually are not very good at governance, that's understandable, you can have trade-offs - slightly worse pay for better working conditions, or better dignity. Does it work like this?
I don't think you have evidence to back this up. The reality is that cooperatives are very rare, so 99% of people don't even have to option to work for one. It's probably not even clear to the vast majority of workers that such a thing is even possible. This says nothing of the extreme aversion to anything even remotely resembling collectivism in the US.
I have seen economist claim that cooperatives tend to be pretty inflexible. Slack was a communication tool for what is now a failed gaming company. If the company was owned by game developers, artists, and story writers, how many of them would have voted to sack themselves and pursue a chat application?