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kingsfoiltoday at 3:12 PM1 replyview on HN

"Mutualism" by Sara Horowitz was an interesting book that discussed some of the history of this style of worker owned businesses. She traces some of it's history, and points out other examples of this style of worker or member governance showing up in other organizations: https://www.porchlightbooks.com/products/mutualism-sara-horo...

Great read, highly recommend.


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kingsfoiltoday at 3:26 PM

The National Center for Employee Ownership also maintains a list of 100 employee owned businesses in the USA: https://www.nceo.org/research/employee-ownership-100-largest...

Employee ownership is not a silver bullet to every problem. The governance model and governing body of employee-owners has to be well constructed as with anything. As a philosophy generally, it has a lot of potential to avoid certain common problems with more traditional business models.

In this space it's also important to understand the difference between cooperatives and collectives: https://institute.coop/about-worker-co-ops/worker-cooperativ...

Credit Unions tend to be a more commonplace example of member/worker governance, though in my experience it's somewhat rare for the average member to engage much with the governance.