I remember Huawei claimed that its employees owned the company. It would be nice to have a list of these "kind of odd" companies
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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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
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.
There was the 2008 crash they survived?
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
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!
However, that comes with some extra requirements, such as having 85% of the partners be from Spain, a limitation that Igalia did not want.
How does that comply with EU law? Is not most discrimination between citizens of different EU member states prohibited by it?
Good point not sure. There must be some exceptions because I'm certain there are citizenship requirements in France for some jobs.
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.
Amazing, thank for sharing!