Speaking as an IAM union member, congratulations! now comes the hard part.

You're probably (still) going to hear a lot of FUD from your employer but dont worry, things really do only get better from here. Once you get a union youll get more quarterly insight into your companies profits, losses, and a MUCH better picture of what the company intends to do in the next six to twelve months. Youll also get a direct say in almost anything you think will help the business. Im not just talking about a suggestion box for the snack-o-matic, but real input to people with actual power.

the hard part is the election period. Kickstarter is going to pull out ALL the stops to change your mind. youll get harassing phone calls at night, weird letters in email, meetings intended for one thing but that end up as an anti-union rant (EX: Safety meetings that turn into anti-union propaganda immediately) and of course lots, and lots, of direct mail from people and organizations no ones heard of outside a union busters office. Youll also get invited to a ton of after-work "pow wow" or "support" groups that sound like they are union related, but arent. Keep your eyes on the prize, ignore the fliers on your windshield, and vote.

crankylinuxuser

I just formed a company back in December. Super easy to set up an LLC, C or S Corp. But I wanted it to be a worker co-op like Mondragon. And there's no real guidance or help.

Democracy is cool, until we look at companies. Then it's dictatorships as the norm. And trying to do it right from the ground up is high impossible.

As a obligatory comment: are there any other in the HN-sphere that focuses on worker cooperatives?

j4pe

Nice! I also ran a company as a worker coop - but I structured it as an LLC, just because it was far easier. Coop practices like revenue sharing were defined through company bylaws, not its legal ownership structure.

Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.