Re: A worker-owned cooperative concept

Someone called "emptyhallway" has posted about worker-owned cooperatives. The post goes into some detail about how such a thing might be structured as a company.

A worker-owned cooperative concept

My writings about organisational structures in the UK

This engages a couple of my interests. In particular, I use Gemini to publish parts of my research into membership organisations and their structure. But more relevantly, I actually set up a company structured similarly to what emptyhallway has been proposing. The articles of association of the company are available online here:

Trumpington Meadows Cafe Limited, filing history

To see the articles of association, you'll need to select the first document on that list, filed 21 September 2021, and scroll down to the articles of association, but the details are all there, of having different share classes and one-member-one-vote, and so on.

The UK has a category of legal entity called a "registered society", which is one-member-one-vote, rather than one-share-one-vote. These bodies are not companies, but they enjoy limited liability in the same way that most companies do. The best known registered society is the Nationwide Building Society, a customer-owned body which is one of the country's major mortgage providers. Most registered societies are much smaller. It is possible to convert a company into a registered society, and that was our intention with the Trumpington Meadows Cafe Limited. In the case of our community cafe company, we opted in to the one-member-one-vote system, but allowed people to buy variable numbers of shares. Because of the intent to convert to a type of legal entity where votes-per-share are fixed by statute, we built the one-member-one-vote rules into the company articles themselves so that there'd be no change of control when converting to a society.

Being a registered society has benefits and drawbacks, and in particular it is harder to get bank accounts and do normal lifecycle operations, as the UK centralises these functions on Companies House, which banks use for authentication, and Companies House has decent citizen-facing IT systems and APIs, whereas registered societies must work through the Financial Conduct Authority, which is technologically in the slow lane.

In the end, we dissolved the company and released cash investors had pledged, because we couldn't prove that the cafe we wanted to open would be commercially viable. I hope that in a year or two we'll be able to run those numbers properly, and if so, we'll re-register the company.

Anyway, emptyhallway, if you're reading this, do look up our little effort, and drop me a line.