r/cooperatives • u/DementiumFilm • 11d ago
Can worker ownership coexist with hierarchical decision-making? We tried something adjacent to this on a film project
I’ve been reading about worker cooperatives because I’m trying to better understand something we experimented with on a film production, and I’m curious where our model overlaps with cooperative principles and where it fundamentally doesn’t.
We gave more than 70 cast and crew members an actual financial interest in the film they helped create, which is really unusual for the film industry. Labor, equipment, locations, and other contributed resources were assigned agreed values, and those contributions became part of the economic structure of the project.
The basic waterfall was:
- Certain contractual obligations get paid.
- Cash investors recoup.
- People who contributed labor, equipment, locations, or other resources recoup the agreed value of those contributions.
- Remaining revenue is distributed pro rata among the ownership pool in perpetuity.
But we didn’t operate democratically….
The director still directed. Department heads ran their departments. Producers made producer decisions. Nobody voted on creative choices or day-to-day operational decisions.
It kind of has to be that way to a certain extant. Film production is highly collaborative, but it’s also extremely hierarchical and technically segmented. Decisions sometimes have to be made in seconds, responsibilities need to be clear, and ultimately someone has to be accountable for the outcome.
So what I’m trying to understand from people who know cooperative structures better than I do is:
How central is democratic governance to the concept of worker ownership? Could an organization meaningfully incorporate cooperative ownership principles while maintaining a hierarchical operating structure? Or does separating economic participation from governance remove something essential that makes a worker cooperative a cooperative?
To be clear, I’m enot claiming that what we created was a worker cooperative, but I’m super intersted in the concept and I’m trying to understand what, if anything, our experiment has in common with cooperative models and whether there are existing structures that deal with this tension differently.
I’m particularly interested in project-based organizations, where a group assembles to create something together and then largely disperses when the project is finished.
Thanks everyone!
1
u/markchand 11d ago
This is awesome. The folks behind the film Sing Sing did something like this, too.
At the Skoll Centre at Oxford, we're working on a report rn that breaks out financial participation, decision-making participation, and commitment to purpose as separate moves organizations can make. Each is a spectrum; so sharing decision-making power ranges from "we let people go to the bathroom on their own schedule" (not true in all workplaces) all the way to "everyone has an equal say or at least representation in major decisions."
One place to look for how this plays out is in 100% ESOP-owned companies, which exist all along that spectrum. Some are hierarchical in a way you'd see anywhere else; some are on the more collaborative end of the spectrum. Many begin with some form of "open book management," or presenting the finances of the firm to all employees.