A union is not a coop, so the forces are not the same at all.

Furthermore, it's not clear that "seniority" would trump "skill" in a co-op, either. Or that the opposite is true of a more "traditional" workplace.

The job of each worker-owner is, in part, to help other worker owners developer their strengths to their fullest for the benefit of co-op.

An employee-owned co-operative corporation (EOCC) governs as form of direct democracy. In my experience, your biggest obstacle is going to be collective decision-making. How well you do that is a test of the people in the co-op. Consider: management is just another skill, not a rank. You don't have a boss. You have people who are counting on you. Management serves at the pleasure of the worker-owners.

> You don't have a boss.

Unless everyone can make equally large payments on behalf of the company, you most certainly have bosses.

Find those people. They are the bosses. Everything else is theatre.

SamBam nailed it. For us, any large expenses must be approved by consensus of the whole group. For larger coops, they would need approval of a democratically elected and recallable board of directors.

Or large payments are approved democratically.

We are developing a "thrivable" payscale that rewards each of the following:

- relevant prior experience (before joining the coop) - longevity (aka seniority) - dependent care responsibilities - membership (a small raise once you become a member)

The prior experience piece is determined with a points system, designed to take as much of the self-advocacy (with all of its race/gender/class pitfalls) out of the process as possible.

The system also includes annual cost of living adjustments.

Hmm, how do you score people qualitatively, if you're using YoE as a factor? Whats the solution to someone having the same year of experience for 10 years?

In my experience, this is a common misconception. In the union contracts I've worked with and under (entertainment industry), seniority is not a factor in compensation. More senior work roles generally earn more, but individual employees do not earn more by being in the job longer. It can be hard to restructure, demote or terminate employees in senior roles, but there is always a mechanism to do so. The one place where longer-serving employees generally cost the company more is severance obligations, but from a management perspective this is usually a good thing. The presence of a severance clause generally gives management the ability to terminate the employee under more permissive terms.