Co_Reentry

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.

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.

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.

This sounds rad! Feel free to reach out if you want to chat about it joseph at tribeworks.io

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).

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.

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 also part of a larger cooperative called the Staffing Cooperative (https://www.staffing.coop) which is a holding company owned by every worker. Here is a webinar we were recently on describing the holding company structure: (http://transformfinance.org/investor-resources)

I am part of a cooperative called Tribe Works (https://tribeworks.io). We are currently in beta but definitely looking for new members!

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 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.

Don't do any of these things until someone wants to pay you for what you are selling.

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! )

Richard,

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!