The most communist FOSS company
The most communist FOSS company
Let's immediately acknowledge that the title is lighthearted, and that "communist company" is an oxymoron. The better choice would've been, "which is the most worker-owned, egalitarian, power-structures-free cooperative?", which SEO experts told me was too long of a title. With that said, let me tell you about Igalia and other tech cooperatives
I remember Huawei claimed that its employees owned the company. It would be nice to have a list of these "kind of odd" companies
Indeed they do
Ownership
Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd. is a private company wholly owned by 151,796 of its employees and retired beneficiaries, as of December 31, 2023. Mr. Ren’s investment accounts for nearly 0.73% of the company’s total share capital.
They are a massive megacorp though. It always leaves me to wonder "how much".
Tons of capitalist companies do stock options where "technically" the employees own a share of the company, though that percentage is usually extremely small, even collectively such that they have no decision power. I can't help but think that it is similar with huawei, but with better marketing.
Vivaldi is an employee owned cooperative
There is this showcased at the end of the article.
Wonder:
- How do they handle someone who may not be performing as well as others?
- What's the process for conflict resolution? Both professional and inter-personal.
- Not sure if they've been through a big global recession yet. That's usually when companies and their policies get tested.
Not to take away from their unique model. Just curious how the idealism handles the messy parts of human nature.
By the sounds of it the first point is handled by having essentially a year long probationary period, and then another two year period before someone becomes fully entrenched in the org as a full partner. This is almost certainly a long enough time to determine if someone is going to be a piss taker or not and so other instances of underperformance can be handled via supportive mechanisms.
It's worth highlighting that performance "curves" in some companies seem to lay off reasonably productive people and preserve people who are great at gaming the system/metrics.
For conflict resolution I don't know how they do it, but if I were in charge of this I'd probably have a dedicated body like an HR set up for this which would be democratically accountable but ultimately still deal with that kind of thing as a last resort (assuming it can't be sorted out between team members).
Many worker co-ops have been resilient to recessions as members often choose to temporarily lower their own pay/share of profits rather than having layoffs or other similar arrangements. https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/new-economy/2009/06/06/mondragon-worker-cooperatives-decide-how-to-ride-out-a-downturn
There was the 2008 crash they survived?
Yea, agree with the description for this post. This is an example of a worker cooperative, which is certainly a form of business that usually is much better for the workers involved, but calling it Communist is certainly a stretch, as Communism is more about full public ownership of an economy than it is carving a niche out of a broader Capitalist system. Not saying it's bad! Just that the title is definitely toungue-in-cheek, if I'm going to be annoyingly nitpicky.
Fascinating read. Thank you for sharing!
You're welcome 😊
This sounds awesome! Thanks for sharing!
Goddamn!
Amazing, thank for sharing!
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I'm not sure I'd be happy in a fully remote role where you've got hundreds of employees voting on how you build stuff, but I know that there are lots of people who dig this pattern, and they're clearly doing Good work.