The Basque Mondragon Corporation [0] is actually very impressive:

  It is the seventh-largest Spanish company in terms of asset
  turnover and the leading business group in the Basque
  Country. At the end of 2012, it employed 80,321 people in
  289 companies and organizations in four areas of activity:
  finance, industry, retail and knowledge.

Without someone to have all the ideas, how could I build anything? It's a question for the ages

Answer: the boss isn't for the employee, the boss is for the people who are spending the money on employees they don't trust. Putting in a boss is the first of many measures to protect capital. Most of these measures are very flawed.

But even in a cooperative scenario, protecting capital is still a concern because an employee of a cooperative can also fuck off rather than working, thereby squandering jointly-owned capital. Big difference, not really.

Only if you have ways of doing business without requiring any capital, or where the worker puts their own capital on the line, is it going to stop being a need

>Meanwhile, credit unions — another form of cooperative — face stringent regulations on business lending.

This was thrown as an aside, but I'm wondering what they exactly mean by that. What are these regulations? Are they government imposed or member imposed? What exactly do the regulations say? I wish the article didn't just throw out "there's regulations" without explaining what said regulations are and how they effect co-op lending.

That being said, I'm a pretty big fan of credit unions and they usually rank higher in customer satisfaction,[1][2] and tend to have better rates. They tend to be more community oriented. Though some credit unions can suck too.

[1] http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=842677&...

[2] http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=855037&...

My children attended a charter high school run as a teacher's co-op - no principal or formal administration. It works very well, although I'm not sure it would scale as a model. Certainly, I've never seen such high levels of teacher satisfaction anywhere else, and I'm sure the cost of a principal and assistant principal easily funds three more teachers - a big deal at a small school.

I, for one, need a boss. I don't necessarily need that person to tell me what to do, but I do need someone to remind me that the things that I do, whatever they may be, should be in the best interests of our company and its revenue stream. And I need someone to give me positive and negative feedback on my work, so I can improve my own productivity.

What I really don't need is owners that are not personally involved in the business, yet can somehow tell those who are involved how to operate. Those guys are the ones that merge sick leave with vacation, slice off 6 days from the total, and then pay themselves an extra dividend.

On a completely unrelated note, does anyone else find media sites remapping left/right arrow keys to mean "move to previous/next article" completely annoying?

A worker co-operative seems like the ideal corporate structure for the typical consulting software shop. It can be set up to be very corporate-like or it can be set up as a loose group of freelancers who pooled together to share a health insurance plan, or anything in between.

Another success story of commercially successful cooperative society is Amul which is a cooperative dairy society. With 2 million + milk farmers as owners and is one of the forces that revolutionized milk production and distribution in India. Making India the largest producer of milk in the world [1].

The beauty is that, majority of these farmers own one or two cows and that is their main means of income for their whole family.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul [2] http://www.iitk.ac.in/ime/MBA_IITK/avantgarde/?p=1018

We built a co-operative web agency in France (http://www.joro.fr).

I don't know how it works in other countries, but I can give some more detailed info about the requirements in France, if anyone's interested :

- A partner can own 50% max. of the company.

- Whether you own 1% or 50%, every partner has the same voting power.

- You can have a maximum of 1/3 non-employed partners, and the combined non-employed partners cannot own a majority of shares (49% max). This assures that the "power" stays within the people that actually work in the company.

- This also means that 2/3 of the partners must be employed with a contract and a salary. This can be quite difficult when you build the company as you must, technically, start paying yourself and your partner (since you must be 2 partners minimum) on day 1.

- You need a minimum of 2 partners, but can also have as many employees as you want. This means you can technically be a co-op even if your company has 2 partners and 1000 employees.

- There are rules as to how you distribute your benefits : a maximum of 33% can be distributed as dividends to the partners, a minimum of 16% must be kept in the company for investment (reserves), and a minimum of 33% has to be distributed amongst all employees (following a calculation the employees can decide upon, like according to time worked, salaries, how long one's been in the company, or a custom calculation...). This tends to lead to high employee motivation and better ensure long-term health.

- Co-operatives have a few tax deductions that other companies don't. If you don't distribute any dividends and distribute it all to your employees + keep some for investments, and follow a certain number of other rules, you can practically be exempted of taxes on the company's benefits.

- On the other hand, you must go through a bunch of red tape to prove every year that you follow the rules of a co-operative, which costs time and a bit of money.

We built the company 2 years ago, and right now we're only 3 partner/employees so our day-to-day life is basically the same as any other similar-sized company, but we liked the philosophy, and it has actually been an interesting marketing feature.

Unfortunate Title. It's worth looking at some counter-examples, as Capital Structure (often) has precious little to do with management structure. Most non profits mimic the for-profit in organizational structure (ie, run by a CEO, with a staff of VPs...). On the other hand, many for-profit partnerships are quite flat and more egalitarian than their corporate cousins. Also, many co-ops still have a CEO (eg: REI, the outdoor goods store). The outgoing CEO for REI was in fact a banker previously and is now a government "boss" (a/k/a secretary of the interior).

Worker-owned coops are the kind of Communism that a capitalist can really get behind. Good show.

Also, Arizmendi Bakery is in fact delicious.

These places still have bosses, the question really is, "Who needs an owner?" If a business can get by with sweat equity rather than external financing, why not? I suspect there are limits to both scale and growth, but those aren't deal breakers.

It's one of those rare stories that doesn't claim to take cutting edge technology to make it successful. Just people working together and owning a business, together deciding on their next move. And it has proven to work well. Wow, very inspiring.

While I think co-ops can work very well in some cases, I wonder how well they cope with significant change for the worse in their environment. If you need to lose a third of the workforce suddenly, can a co-op decide on that kind of thing or will it lead to some unproductive compromise, or even worse, denial?

Sort of related, though freakishly religious, are the hutterites:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

The colonies are very successful, so much so local farmers have often lobbied successfully to make made them illegal.

The Cheeseboard Collective is another great worker-owned bakery collective for those in the Berkeley area: http://cheeseboardcollective.coop/

Amazing pizza and scones.

It's important to make the distinction between a boss-owner and a boss-manager. There are many employee-owned businesses that still utilize some leadership structure. The difference is that the leadership structure has been decided on by the employee-owners.

This is not a new thing, Yugoslavia had something similar some 30-40 years ago, it was called self-governing socialism. The difference is it was forced by government and it was the only form of ownership, there were no private companies, all of them were self-governed. It works if you have a small company but it didn't show so well in companies with few hundred workers.

Apparently, Shareefa featuring Ludacris: http://rapgenius.com/Shareefa-i-need-a-boss-lyrics

I work for myself and am my own boss. I have tried starting businesses over the years with many friends and co-workers. None of them worked out.

Most people just don't have the discipline to work on something for 8 hours/day without being told what to do.

I have also joined many meetup groups for various activities /meeting new people. When a group doesn't have a leader, it pretty much doesn't go anywhere until someone takes up the lead and keeps everyone on track.

If you ran a company this way, you would either vote on all decisions (which would be painful and slow) or you have a group of people make these decisions on your behalf (IE: leadership).

It's a small example of human nature and why we still need bosses.