Employee-owned companies aren't entirely unheard-of in the US. Legally, they're structured as companies where employees own more than 50% of its shares via an ESOP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_stock_ownership

A fun example along those lines is the Green Bay Packers[1]. They are a public non-profit whose shares are largely owned by members of the Green Bay community. Shareholding is mostly a matter of community pride, as it confers very few rights[2].

It's actually a pretty good model, and I wonder why it isn't used for other municipal assets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bay_Packers,_Inc.

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TOTALB-269

Legally speaking I think that might be in a different category than what I was referring to (nonprofit vs corporation). And there are other legal structures, like co-operatives (and credit unions?), with similar ideas.

I agree it’s a great model! Unfortunately the NFL has banned it (last I heard) - https://web.archive.org/web/20110813051753/http://www.sports...

It's also meh. The money gets tied up in the company until the shares vest (my wife had to wait like 8 years or something). It's performance is tied to the performance of the company and you can't diversify. Lots of times it doesn't end up giving you all that much extra. I'd much rather just get a bonus I could invest elsewhere.

ESOPs were invented as a way for owners to cash out. Not really an altruistic thing that works well imho.

I cannot stress this enough - employee-owned companies are still dictatorships, the employees being shareholders doesn't change that at all. Employees get zero, and I mean ZERO, say over day-to-day operations or even major decisions.

The SOLE difference between a non-employee owned company and an employee owned company is who the shareholders are.

Source: personal experience working at multiple employee owned companies

So what's a viable framework where employees can get an official say?

My mind went to DAOs where employees all allocated governance tokens and anyone can propose a new idea and others can use their tokens to vote.

Check out sociocracy. There is overhead cost to operating this way though.

In your model, what happens when you get outvoted?

Cooperatives

We don’t need to bring crypto into it for some amount of control. The poster above is referencing the same problem with any direct democracy which what you get with employee ownership being just shareholders and what you would get with handing out tokens. The solution is to vote on a representative/s who sit on the board much like the German example I mentioned.

Feudalism lives on beneath a thin veneer of electoral democracy