Control and Alternatives

The tech industry is a laggard when it comes to organizing, but that just means there's a lot of prior art we can learn from.

Labor and Passion

The achievements of organized labor are consistently underestimated by people who have grown up with them: the eight-hour workday, the two-day weekend, workplace safety standards that are actually enforced, prohibition of child labor, unemployment insurance, and employer contributions to healthcare and retirement. These were not conceded voluntarily by employers: they were won through sustained collective action, frequently met with private and state violence [Gordon2001].

Unions didn't arise because workers read pamphlets about class consciousness. They arose because individual bargaining consistently produced worse outcomes than collective bargaining. Once workers understood that, they were willing to accept short-term costs for long-term gains. The question is why it took so long where it did happen, and why in some industries and countries it has barely happened at all.

The British trade union movement traces through roughly 150 years of conflict with the state. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made union organizing a criminal conspiracy. Their repeal in 1824 was followed by a period of organizing that prompted restriction again. The Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported to Australia in 1834 for administering illegal oaths in the course of forming an agricultural union. The law shifted gradually through the nineteenth century toward grudging tolerance, and the union movement grew through the early twentieth century into a major institutional force. The General Strike of 1926, called in solidarity with striking coal miners, lasted nine days before the Trades Union Congress called it off without achieving its central demands—a failure that revealed the limits of sympathy action and the state's willingness to use emergency powers against organized labor. The Thatcher government's legislation in the 1980s systematically dismantled union power through restrictions on secondary action, changes to balloting requirements, and direct confrontation with the miners' strike of 1984-85. British unions have never recovered.

The German Mitbestimmung system (the word means codetermination) is structurally different than the adversarial model that evolved in the UK and US. Under German law, workers in firms with more than 2,000 employees hold half the seats on the supervisory board that hires and oversees management. This is not advisory participation; it is formal institutional authority over corporate governance. The system emerged from specific post-war conditions: Allied occupation policy that sought to break the power of the industrial combines that had supported National Socialism, the political strength of the Social Democratic party, and an industrial union structure that organized by sector rather than trade and could negotiate industry-wide agreements. None of those conditions existed in the same combination elsewhere, which explains why codetermination spread within Germany but was not replicated in comparable form in other wealthy democracies [Thelen1992].

South Africa's Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), founded in 1985, illustrates how labor organizing and political mobilization can reinforce each other in conditions where both operate against state repression. The apartheid state imposed restrictions on Black union activity that made conventional organizing dangerous. COSATU built power through industrial action, consumer boycotts, and explicit political alignment with the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. Strikes that shut down production in the mining and transport sectors imposed economic costs that the apartheid government could not absorb indefinitely. The combination of internal pressure from COSATU and community organizations, and external pressure from the international sanctions and divestment campaign, eventually forced the apartheid government to the negotiating table. Labor organizing did not produce South African democracy alone, but it was a necessary component of the coalition that did [Silver2003, Macintyre2020].

Workers are frequently persuaded not to organize in their own economic interest, and the mechanisms deserve careful examination. High individual compensation is the most direct approach: workers who are paid well relative to their labor market alternatives have less to gain from collective bargaining, and more to lose from conflict with employers who pay them well. Union avoidance is a formal management discipline with a consulting industry behind it: labor relations firms advise employers on how to structure workplaces and compensation to prevent the conditions under which organizing becomes attractive.

But structural barriers and employer tactics do not fully explain tech workers' resistance to organizing. The sociologist Erin Cech calls the deeper mechanism the passion principle: the expectation that workers should pursue work they find personally fulfilling, and that fulfillment is a legitimate criterion for choosing and evaluating a job [Cech2021]. What began as an aspiration of the professional class has, over the past several decades, been generalized into something closer to a moral obligation. The question of who captures the surplus when workers internalize this norm has a clear answer: employers. A worker who derives intrinsic meaning from a job will accept lower wages, longer hours, and worse conditions than a worker who treats employment as a transaction.

The passion principle does not eliminate the imbalance of power; it serves to conceal it. Mission-driven culture, equity compensation that vests over four years, elaborate campus amenities, and the language of changing the world are all intended to align workers' identities with their employers' interests. In exchange, tech workers accept the effective absence of collective bargaining rights, employment-at-will conditions that make them instantly terminable, and mandatory arbitration clauses that eliminate their access to courts. The exchange is not hidden: instead, tech companies brag about it. Organizing feels like betrayal: not because the employer has convinced workers that unions are bad, but because they've been convinced that they aren't really workers at all [Graeber2018].

Cech's research shows that the passion principle falls hardest on workers from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who have the most to lose from accepting its terms. Workers from more privileged backgrounds are better positioned to absorb the costs of passion-coded careers: family wealth provides a cushion, networks provide alternative paths, and prior social capital makes it easier to exit without losing everything. For workers without those resources, the passion principle is not a path to fulfillment. It is a mechanism that extracts years of discounted labor before returning them to the general labor market with depleted savings and credentials that do not transfer.

Precarious workers like gig workers and seasonal workers are hit hardest by this. Organizing takes time that precarious workers may not have. It also requires a willingness to accept risk of termination, which workers without income security cannot absorb as readily. Many precarious workers are formally classified as independent contractors, which in most jurisdictions removes them from the legal framework that protects organizing activity for employees. The legal boundary between employee and contractor has been contested in dozens of jurisdictions and in relation to dozens of firms, with outcomes that vary by jurisdiction and have been inconsistent even within jurisdictions. Over and over, rules are rewritten or re-interpreted to ensure that the workers most exposed to poor conditions and wage theft, who have the most to gain from collective bargaining, are least able to fight back [Jaffe2021, Kelly2022].

Women's Work

On October 24, 1975, ninety percent of Icelandic women refused to work at paid jobs, in the home, or anywhere else. They called it a "day off", though what they demonstrated was how much labor had been invisible. Schools closed, factories shut down, flights were cancelled, and men brought their children to work because there was no one else to care for them. The economy of Iceland effectively stopped. The women named what had been unnamed: everything they did without wages was work, and its absence was catastrophic.

The standard way economists measure an economy is through gross domestic product. GDP counts what is bought and sold, but not what is done without money changing hands. A woman who cooks dinner for her family contributes nothing to GDP, but if she hires someone to cook dinner and goes out to work herself, GDP goes up twice: once for her wages and once for the cook's. The economic system counts the second arrangement as more productive. This is not an oversight. Marilyn Waring, a New Zealand politician and economist, spent years documenting the specific decisions embedded in the UN System of National Accounts that made domestic and care labor invisible. Her 1988 book showed that these decisions were choices made by people who had never performed most of the work in question.

The consequences of that invisibility are far-reaching. Women have fewer pension entitlements because pension systems are built on formal wage labor. They have less access to credit because banks valued declared income, not the labor of raising children or caring for elderly parents. When Waring raised these issues in the New Zealand parliament, she was told that economics was a technical matter and not a feminist one. She pointed out that someone had already decided that preparing food counted as productive activity only if someone received a wage for it. If that is not a political decision, it is hard to know what is [Waring1988].

In Japan, the term sengyo shufu, meaning "full-time housewife", became widespread only in the postwar period, when rapid industrialization in the 1950s and 1960s created male industrial jobs and pushed women into domestic roles. The image of the sengyo shufu as a traditional Japanese institution is largely the invention of corporations and government policy from a period of perhaps thirty years. Before industrialization, Japanese women had worked extensively in agriculture, small business, and textile production. The "tradition" was assembled recently under identifiable political and economic pressure.

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent years tracking what happened when both partners in a household entered paid employment, which most households in wealthy countries had done by the 1980s [Hochschild1989]. She found that women in dual-income couples were coming home and working a second shift of domestic labor while their partners rested. Over the course of a year, the average woman in her study worked roughly a full additional month compared to her partner. Hochschild called this the second shift, and the pattern was consistent across Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Latin America: when women entered paid work, they tended to add paid hours on top of unpaid hours rather than trading one for the other.

Hochschild also found that the women she interviewed had largely rationalized the inequality by developing what she called "family myths": stories about why the division made sense in their particular case. The myths varied but the pattern was constant: women interpreted inequitable arrangements as choices, and blamed themselves when the choices felt unsustainable. This is the same mechanism as the passion principle: exploitation is most durable when those experiencing it explain it to themselves as freedom.

The historian Silvia Federici argued that the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which tens of thousands of women were murdered, were primarily a way to discipline female labor [Federici2004]. The women most often accused were those who lived outside household structures, like widows, healers, and midwives. The trials coincided with the enclosure of common land and the creation of a landless wage-labor force. Federici showed that enclosing women's reproductive and domestic labor inside the household, unpaid and culturally devalued, was an economic project as much as a cultural one; it produced a class of workers whose labor was essential and whose compensation was called love.

Today, the global economy depends on nursing, childcare, eldercare, and domestic service, which are all systematically undervalued because they are feminized. The workers are underpaid not because care work is unskilled but because the labor market for care work is structured differently from the labor market for work that men predominantly perform. In India, the national health system relies heavily on informal women's health workers, the ASHAs, who are classified as volunteers rather than employees and receive "incentive payments" rather than wages. This is not an oversight; it is a legal and administrative decision with direct economic consequences for nearly a million women. The ASHAs have organized and struck repeatedly for employee status and wage protections. The government has consistently refused.

Platform labor has reproduced the same structure with new interfaces. Apps coordinating domestic cleaning, childcare, elder companionship, and household maintenance present themselves as markets connecting independent contractors with clients. What they actually do is take informal, feminized labor that was already undervalued and formalize it while keeping the wages and protections of the informal economy. The worker bears the risk, and the platform takes the margin; the work is performed overwhelmingly by women (often migrant women) working for rates that reflect the historical devaluation of care.

Invisible labor is endemic to tech companies. Research has shown again and again that women perform more of the relational maintenance that holds teams together, such mentoring junior colleagues and managing interpersonal conflict, without receiving credit for it in performance reviews or promotion decisions. A study of a large software company found that women spent significantly more time on what the researchers called "non-promotable tasks" that benefited the organization but was invisible to the criteria used to evaluate careers. When it was pointed out that women were doing more of this work, the response from management was to encourage everyone to do less of it, which predictably meant that women continued to do it and men continued not to.

Five years after the 1975 strike in Iceland, Iceland elected its first female president, who went on to serve four terms. The organizing that preceded the strike built the political infrastructure that made the election possible. Fifty years on, though, the gap between men's and women's wages in Iceland has not closed, and women still perform more unpaid domestic labor [Folbre2001].

The Eight-Hour Day

On April 21, 1856, the stonemasons working on the construction of the University of Melbourne stopped work at midday, marched through the center of the city, and held a celebration at the Criterion Hotel. They had just won a reduction in their working day from ten hours to eight by walking off the job during a construction boom, when building contractors could not afford to wait them out. It was the first time anywhere in the world that workers had achieved the eight-hour day; they did it not through moral persuasion but by applying collective leverage at a moment of their opponents' weakness.

The demand itself was older. Robert Owen, the Welsh manufacturer and social reformer, had called for "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest" as far back as 1817. The slogan was catchy, but Owen could not make it happen through goodwill and argument. It took workers who understood that goodwill was irrelevant and that argument only mattered when backed by the capacity to impose costs. The Melbourne stonemasons made exactly that calculation. They are mostly forgotten now, which says a lot about whose history gets told [Thompson1963, Roediger1989].

What the Melbourne stonemasons demonstrated locally, labor movements across the world began demanding internationally. In May 1886, a general strike for the eight-hour day shut down factories across the United States. On May 4, a bomb exploded in Haymarket Square during a protest meeting in Chicago, killing both police officers and civilians. The bomb-thrower was never identified, but eight anarchists were tried anyway, and four were hanged. The Haymarket affair became a rallying point for the international labor movement; May Day was adopted as a workers' holiday across most of the world (with the notable exception of the United States and Canada, which moved their Labor Day to September specifically to avoid the association).

In 1889, the newly-formed Second International declared May 1 an international day of solidarity for the eight-hour day. The Second International's campaign, and the May Day commemorations that followed, spread the eight-hour demand across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. But spreading a demand and achieving it are different things. In most countries, forty years passed between the first serious campaigns for the eight-hour day and its legal establishment.

What actually closed the gap was not sympathy, but the end of the First World War, a political crisis of such severity that governments in Europe and North America feared a revolution like one that threw Russia into chaos in 1917. Germany had a workers' council movement in 1918 that briefly looked like it might go the same way, Hungary had a Soviet republic in 1919, and strikes were spreading in Britain, France, and the United States. Employers and governments that had resisted the eight-hour day for decades suddenly discovered they could live with it.

France legislated the eight-hour day in April 1919. Britain passed the Hours of Work Convention that same year. The first convention adopted by the newly created International Labour Organization in 1919 was an eight-hour day and forty-eight hour week for industrial workers. Then and now, labor gains were not won because employers and governments became convinced that workers deserved better. They were won because the cost of continued resistance exceeded the cost of concession.

On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the eighth floor of a building in Greenwich Village, New York. The managers had locked the stairwell doors to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to stop theft of fabric. 146 workers died, most of them young immigrant women, many of them Jewish and Italian. Some jumped from the windows. The owners were acquitted of manslaughter charges and collected the insurance.

The conditions the fire exposed —were standard practice at the time: locked exits, no sprinklers, overcrowding, and abusive supervisors. What wasn't standard was the combination of a catastrophic death toll and the organizational capacity that existed to exploit the political opening. The Women's Trade Union League, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and the socialist press had spent years building exactly that capacity. Within days of the fire, Rose Schneiderman gave a speech at the Metropolitan Opera House that reframed the debate. This was not a tragedy but a crime, and the perpetrators were not the invisible people who set fires but the visible people who locked the doors and blocked regulation.

The result was a legislative investigation that produced fifty-six pieces of legislation over three years covering fire safety, working hours, factory inspection, and child labor. The fire itself didn't produce the laws; it was the fire plus organized political capacity. Without the unions and the reform organizations that could turn grief into legislative pressure, the Triangle fire would have been grieved and forgotten like the hundreds of industrial disasters that preceded and followed it [Orleck1995].

It would be convenient if the story ended with legislative victory, but it doesn't work that way. Laws passed under political pressure are enforced under political pressure. When pressure falls, enforcement falls with it. The International Labour Organization's Convention No. 1 was adopted in 1919; a century later, most of the world's workers are not covered by it in practice, and enforcement is fragmentary or absent in many countries that have ratified it.

In the garment industry—the industry where the Triangle fire happened—workers are still dying in predictable, preventable ways. The Rana Plaza building in Dhaka collapsed on April 24, 2013, killing 1,134 workers, most of whom were making clothes for Western brands. The building had visible cracks that workers reported the day before; managers ordered them back to work anyway.

After Rana Plaza, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh—a legally binding agreement between brands and global unions—was signed within weeks. It covered over 1600 factories. This was a real gain, but it was also partial, contested, and reversible: the Accord expired, was replaced by a weaker voluntary mechanism, and was eventually renegotiated into a successor agreement after sustained campaigning. That was not a failure: two steps forward and one step back is still one step forward.

Tech workers currently occupy the same position as skilled craftworkers in the mid-nineteenth century. They are well-paid relative to most workers, which makes collective action feel unnecessary. They work under employment contracts that make collective action legally complicated. And they identify with their employers, which makes collective action feel like a betrayal, right up to the moment of a layoff.

Today, as their jobs are threatened by AI, tech workers are starting to care more about labor rights and organizing. What the history tells us is that in order for this to translate into effective action, what matters is organizational capacity, a moment of political opening, and the willingness to impose costs. The opening comes eventually, usually from a crisis or a shock. The organizational capacity takes years to build. The lesson from the eight-hour day is not that patience pays off. It is that you need to be organized before the opening arrives [Beckerman2022, Harvey1998].

The Taboos of Professional Culture

Every professional culture places certain topics outside the scope of legitimate concern, and those who choose to discuss them publicly anyway run the risk of being ostracized as radicals. Medicine was slow to discuss error and malpractice, while law was slow to discuss access and cost. A similar pattern is visible in the literature written for software engineers: thousands of pages on management, leadership, and technical decision-making, but almost nothing on workers' rights, collective action, or alternative ownership structures. As with medicine and law, the topics excluded are ones that threaten the interests of the profession's most powerful practitioners.

Medicine's encounter with its own error rate is a case study in professional taboo and its eventual failure. For most of the twentieth century, the dominant framework for medical error was individual blame: a bad outcome was the fault of a bad physician, and the appropriate response was to identify and punish the individual. This framework served the profession's interest in self-regulation and resisted external oversight. The finding that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans died annually from preventable medical errors was not new to researchers, but was taboo because it endangered the profession as a whole. Aviation-style checklists, which treat error as a predictable product of complex systems rather than individual failure, were resisted for decades by physicians who experienced them as an affront to professional judgment. The evidence that checklists reduced deaths in surgical settings was not in dispute. The resistance was to the implication that standardized protocols should constrain clinical practice [Gawande2009, Kohn1999].

The software engineering profession has its equivalent silences. The books I own on software engineering cover project management, software architecture, team dynamics, technical leadership, and career development. They do not cover workers' rights, the legal framework governing noncompete agreements and ownership of employee inventions, alternative ownership structures like cooperatives and worker-owned firms, or the systematic harassment and exclusion of women. The topics placed out of bounds are those that, if examined, would reveal tensions in the profession's self-understanding or power structure. The placement of a boundary is a form of power, exercised by those with enough standing to enforce it [Douglas2002].

There's More Than One Way to Do It

When you start a company here in Canada, one of your first decisions is what kind of firm to create. Most first-time founders treat this as a paperwork question, but it isn't. The legal structure you choose encodes assumptions about who controls the company, who benefits when it succeeds, and who bears the cost when it fails. Those assumptions vary enormously across history and across cultures, and the fact that most tech companies make the same choice tells you something about whose interests the dominant model serves.

A sole proprietorship is the simplest possible firm: one person owns it, operates it, and is personally liable for everything it does. If the business gets sued and loses, the owner's house, car, and savings are all at risk. Most small businesses start this way because of the minimal paperwork required.

A partnership divides ownership between two or more people. In a general partnership, all partners share liability; in a limited partnership, the limited partners risk only what they invested, while the general partner remains fully exposed. Law firms, accounting firms, and investment funds have historically used partnership structures, partly because unlimited personal liability concentrates the minds of the partners.

The limited liability corporation is the dominant modern form of company. As described in an earlier essay, the notion of "limited liability" was created by governments to encourage private investment in ventures too expensive or risky for one person to fund alone, and has evolved into a way for senior management to avoid accountability [Davies2025].

A public benefit corporation (PBC) is a newer form, legally requiring the company to consider the interests of employees, communities, and the environment, not just shareholders. The practical difference from a regular corporation is small in good times but matters when a company faces acquisition pressure or demands for short-term earnings.

In contrast, a cooperative is a firm owned and governed by its members, whether those members are workers, customers, or both. Profits are distributed as dividends proportional to participation rather than to capital invested. This fundamentally changes the incentive structure: a worker-owned cooperative has no absentee shareholders extracting returns, and no structural pressure to cut wages in order to improve margins.

The most ambitious experiment in worker ownership at scale is the Mondragón network, described in more detail below. Its founding in the Basque region in 1956 and the flexibility it demonstrated during the 2008 crisis illustrate what the cooperative structure makes possible.

Consumer cooperatives own the firm on behalf of their customers. In Switzerland, Migros and Coop together hold a majority of the grocery market, both as consumer cooperatives. Credit unions—the most common form of cooperative in Canada—are owned by their depositors and return surplus to members rather than to outside shareholders. Cooperatives can face difficulties raising capital can develop their own forms of bureaucratic inertia, but they show that the investor-owned model is not the only way to organize a business [Ostrom2015].

Beyond the Anglo-American Tradition

Germany's large manufacturing firms operate under Mitbestimmung, the codetermination system in which workers hold legally mandated seats on corporate supervisory boards. The Mittelstand (Germany's medium-sized family-owned manufacturers) often combine this formal worker representation with multi-generational ownership that is structurally indifferent to quarterly earnings reports.

Japan's keiretsu are networks of interlocked companies that hold shares in one another, maintain long-term trading relationships, and are often anchored around a major bank. Toyota sits at the center of one of the largest, with dozens of suppliers holding Toyota shares and Toyota holding shares in them. This mutual cross-shareholding insulates management from hostile takeovers and creates strong incentives for long-term investment in shared production quality, but it also insulates management from accountability when things go badly wrong, as Japan's long economic stagnation after 1990 demonstrated [Thelen1992].

The Islamic waqf is a form of charitable endowment with no direct equivalent in Western legal systems. Property dedicated as a waqf cannot be sold or inherited; instead, its income must be applied to specified charitable purposes in perpetuity. Universities, hospitals, mosques, and public fountains across the Middle East and Central Asia were historically funded through waqf endowments. At their peak in the Ottoman Empire of the eighteenth century, estimates suggest that as much as a third of agricultural land was held as waqf. European colonialism systematically dismantled waqf structures across North Africa, the Levant, and South Asia, converting endowed property to state ownership or private title—a transfer of wealth whose scale is rarely recognized.

In India, the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) has been a recognized legal entity for tax and property purposes since British colonial administration codified it in the nineteenth century. An HUF is not a firm in the Western sense but a patrilineal kinship group that can own property, run a business, and have its own tax identity. Tata, Birla, and other major Indian conglomerates grew from family-business structures in which the boundary between the family and the enterprise was deliberately blurred.

Alternatives That Scaled

In 1956, a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta gathered five workers in a converted school in Mondragón, a small town in the Basque region of Spain, and started making paraffin heaters. The school had been set up to train young workers who had no other way into higher education after the devastation of the Spanish Civil War. The stove factory was meant to give those workers somewhere to apply what they had learned; what Arizmendiarrieta wound up building instead was one of the most durable experiments in worker ownership the twentieth century produced.

By 2024, the Mondragón Corporation employed roughly 80,000 people across manufacturing, retail, financial services, and education. Its retail chain, Eroski, operates hundreds of supermarkets across Spain. Its finance arm, Laboral Kutxa, is one of the larger banks in the Basque Country, and its manufacturing division makes everything from machine tools to household appliances. None of this is run for the benefit of outside shareholders, because there are no outside shareholders. The workers own the enterprise. They elect the management, they negotiate pay scales internally, and when Spain's economy collapsed after 2008—collapsing hard enough that national unemployment hit 27 percent—Mondragón moved workers between cooperatives rather than letting them go [Morrison1991].

Mondragón is the most-cited example of worker ownership at scale, but it is not the oldest. In the 1860s, Friedrich Raiffeisen was running a rural municipality in what is now Germany and watching small farmers get crushed by moneylenders. Commercial banks weren't interested in lending to peasants—the collateral was uncertain and the administrative costs ate into profit margins—So Raiffeisen organized the farmers to lend to each other. Members pooled deposits, the cooperative extended credit to members at rates commercial lenders couldn't match, and the surplus stayed within the cooperative rather than flowing to outside investors.

The model spread across rural Germany to Austria and Switzerland and then to the rest of the world. Today the Raiffeisen network is one of Europe's largest banking groups, with operations in over a dozen countries and hundreds of billions of euros in assets. The World Council of Credit Unions estimates that roughly a billion people worldwide are members of credit cooperatives of one kind or another. That means a substantial fraction of the adult population of the planet choose to do their banking outside the shareholder model, but you wouldn't know that listening to conversations in Silicon Valley [Whyte1991].

Vienna in the 1920s faced a housing crisis that would look familiar to anyone paying rent in a large city today. The city had grown rapidly during the late nineteenth century, housing conditions for working-class residents were appalling, and private landlords had neither the incentive nor the capital to fix things.

The Social Democratic city government, elected in 1919 and governing what became known as Red Vienna, decided to treat housing as a public utility rather than a market good. Between 1923 and 1934, the city built roughly 60,000 apartments in large municipal complexes called the Gemeindebau. These were not the grim concrete towers that social housing became associated with in many countries. They were substantial brick buildings with courtyards, laundries, libraries, kindergartens, and clinics built in. The Karl-Marx-Hof, completed in 1930 and still standing today, is over a kilometer long and houses several thousand people. The whole program was funded by a progressive tax on luxury goods: people buying fur coats and racehorses paid for workers to have decent apartments.

The program did not stop in 1934. The city of Vienna still owns about 220,000 apartments directly and subsidizes roughly another 200,000 through a nonprofit cooperative housing sector. About 60 percent of Vienna's residents live in subsidized housing of one kind or another; rents are set by law rather than by the market. Vienna consistently ranks among the most livable cities in the world, and the housing policy is a big part of that ranking.

Amul is an Indian dairy cooperative founded in 1946 in Gujarat after farmers organized to break the monopoly of a single private contractor who controlled their access to the Bombay milk market. Today Amul is the world's largest dairy cooperative by volume, collecting milk from roughly 3.6 million farmer-members across India and distributing it through a network that reaches every major Indian city. Amul did not stay small and artisanal: it scaled.

Canada's credit union sector, which is one of the largest in the world per capita, also proves that cooperatives can scale. Desjardins, based in Quebec, was founded in 1900 by a journalist named Alphonse Desjardins, who had noticed that working-class Canadians were being charged usurious rates by commercial moneylenders. Desjardins is now one of the largest financial institutions in Canada, with roughly eight million members and assets over 400 billion Canadian dollars. Members own it, members elect the board, and surplus is returned to members rather than to shareholders. It survived the 2008 financial crisis in considerably better shape than many of the shareholder-owned banks that had been busy congratulating themselves on their sophistication.

Mondragón, Raiffeisen, the Viennese Gemeindebau, Amul, and Desjardins are not arguments in a seminar: they are institutions that issue annual reports. The claim that these structures cannot work at scale is simply false. The more interesting question is why the claim persists when the counterexamples are so large and so obvious. Part of the answer is that the people who benefit most from shareholder-owned structures are the same people who write most of the business press. They cannot easily see alternatives in the same way that a landlord genuinely cannot understand why anyone would object to market-rate rent.

The shareholder firm captures value for shareholders, transfers risk to workers and communities, and concentrates decisions in a board appointed to serve shareholder interests. The worker cooperative captures value for workers, distributes risk across the membership, and makes decisions through governance structures the members design and can change. Neither of these is natural or inevitable. They are all choices, and the choice that has dominated tech for the past forty years is not the only choice available [Baiocchi2005, Blasi2013, Phillips2019, Yunus2007].