Worker Owned Cooperatives

facilitated by Mark Libkuman

Coops Present

• Openflows
• Design Action Collective
• Tadpole
• Radical Designs
• Palante Tech

This was a free-ranging conversation, but the topics discussed were:

Power and structure

• Acknowledging power, and the tyranny of structurelessness.
• Balance of informality with respect and structure
• There's no boss versus we're all the boss. Accountability practices to keep from taking too many liberties when there's no boss.
• Creating a structure that everyone can agree on.
• Challenges of diversity of roles; decoupling power structure from income.
• Having formalized community agreements/rules of operation.

Operations and self-care

• Running a the coop like professional services firm rather than reinventing the wheel, learning from the partnership model.
• Selling labor: selling hours leads to internalizing market dynamics
• Making work fun?directing the companies strategies toward what the workers find interesting.
• Caring about the worker as a whole person, their health, their family (however defined).

Pay

• One approach: Straight hourly wages; each worker gets paid the same wage, but more or less depending on total hours worked; patronage is distributed according to hours worked.
• Another approach: Flat monthly paycheck.
• Pay structure can reinforce power dynamics.
• Patronage/profit-sharing: how to deal with it.
• Questions about tracking time internally, both billable and non-billable.