ABSTRACT
The worker-owned cooperative has historically been an all-or-nothing creature. It tends to assume a workforce that already understands and appreciates the rights and responsibilities of democratic worker ownership. A hybridized Mondragon-type worker cooperative is a corporation where a certain percentage of the ownership rights is organized as a Mondragon-type worker cooperative, that is, with one vote per worker to determine total vote of workers’ shares and with workers’ residual allocated among them according to labor. Many useful ideas can be suggested by using the two ways of conceptually deriving the structure of a hybridized democratic firm. A worker’s internal capital account would be another account maintained for each person in the company. The workers’ portion of the ownership would be exercised in not only a democratic but a labor-based manner. A firm-wide decision might be made for some of the profits to be paid out in dividends on the shares.
