Re:Every company should be owned by its employees
by vidarh on Thursday July 25, 2024 @04:39AM
(#41066299)
Coop is not a worker cooperative. It's a consumer cooperative, owned by its members, not workers.
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Re:Every company should be owned by its employees
by dash2 on Thursday July 25, 2024 @05:18AM
(#41066547)
Thank you for this info! This is true, but workers can join for just £1, so I would expect very many workers to be members too: https://colleagues.coop.co.uk/colleague-membership-informati...
Re:Every company should be owned by its employees
by vidarh on Thursday July 25, 2024 @05:21AM
(#41066569)
I'd presume most workers are members, but they have ~5 million members and about 56k employees, so even if all of them are members they amount to ~1% of the votes.
EDIT: In the UK, the most prominent retail workers coop of sorts is the John Lewis Partnership. It has more employees than Co-op, at ~80k (in addition to John Lewis and Peter Jones it owns Waitrose), and it could be argued that in some senses it may not strictly be a workers coop - it's owned by a trust for the benefit of the workers of the business so its employees does not have the same direct say in the operation as a pure workers coop - but the terms of the trust makes it somewhat close.