What worker-owners actually vote on

A common picture of a worker cooperative is a room full of people voting on everything. That is not how it works. Most decisions at a co-op are made the way they are made anywhere else: by the person whose job it is. What members vote on is a short list of things that decide who runs the company and on what terms.

The decisions members control

These go to the membership, either directly or through the board the members elect:

• Electing and removing the board of directors
• Hiring and firing the general manager or executive director
• The pay structure, including any ratio between the highest and lowest pay
• How profits are split between members, reserves and reinvestment
• Major strategic moves: entering a new line of business, a merger, taking on large debt, closing a location
• Admitting new members and setting the buy-in
• Changing the bylaws

That is roughly it. At CPL Concordia, the 1,800-person Italian energy cooperative, the members' assembly elects the board and the board appoints a general director who runs the company day to day. At Equal Exchange, worker-owners elect the board and vote on the pay ratio. Neither has a membership vote on which customers to call this week.

The decisions managers make

Everything else. Hiring for a role, setting a team's priorities, choosing a supplier, approving a budget line, deciding how to handle a customer complaint. Co-ops have managers, team leads and project managers with real authority. A member who disagrees with a manager's call does not get to override it by being an owner.

What members do have is a way to change things at the governance level if a manager is consistently making bad calls. The board can replace the manager. That is the accountability, and it runs downward to the people doing the work rather than upward to investors.

A normal week

Take a 40-person co-op that does software work for clients. In a given week:

• A project lead scopes a new engagement and assigns two developers to it. No vote.
• The operations manager renews the office lease. No vote, it was in the approved budget.
• A developer proposes switching the team's main tool. The team discusses it and the lead decides.
• Two people are hired. The hiring manager decides, with input from the team they will join.
• The board meets. It reviews the quarter's numbers and approves the manager's plan to open a second office. That was a board decision because it commits significant capital.
• The annual member meeting is next month. On the agenda: electing two board seats, approving the profit distribution and a proposal to raise the pay ratio cap from 4 to 1 to 5 to 1 so the co-op can hire a senior specialist.

Most weeks the membership as a body does nothing at all. That is by design.

Where co-ops differ from each other

Some cooperatives push more decisions to the group. Small collectives with under a dozen people often run by consensus with no manager at all. Some use a consent process, where a proposal passes unless someone raises a specific objection, and apply it to more operational decisions than a board-and-manager co-op would. Larger co-ops almost always look like the model above: elected board, hired management, members voting on a defined list.

The size of the co-op is the best predictor. Under ten people, expect to be in most decisions. Over fifty, expect to work under managers and vote a few times a year.

The difference from a company that "feels democratic"

Plenty of conventional companies have open cultures: peer feedback, transparent salaries, managers who ask for input. That is good management and it is not the same thing. At those companies the openness lasts as long as leadership wants it to. At a co-op the members' authority over the board and the pay structure is in the bylaws. It is not a culture that can change with the next CEO, it is a rule that would take a membership vote to remove.

If you are interviewing, ask which decisions went to a member vote last year. The answer tells you where the co-op sits on this spectrum, and whether membership there means a real say or mostly a share of profits.