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Tech worker co-operatives - a growing alternative to traditional employment? (diginomica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (8 children)

You also don’t have to make redundancies once the contract’s finished. It’s a universal fact that being a co-op is a tick in your favor.

I'm interested in specifics on this. If the co-op is purely doing contract work and the contract ends, how are they able to continue to pay workers on the bench? How long are workers allowed to be on the bench if they can't be place on contract work?

We did some work with a couple of corporates and our developers hated it. So, we said we’d focus on charities and NGOs, the public sector and education.

There are a limited number of charities and NGOs, and many times these customers are the most squeezed for budget, meaning lower amounts of income to the co-op.

Another significant hurdle is salary competitiveness. Generally, programmers can secure higher wages outside the tech worker co-operative sector in both countries.

I think this is the buried lede. How much is income reduced to tech workers vs traditional employers? Without strong social safety nets in the country a co-op with a much lower salary may not be a viable option because unemployment would leave the former workers without resources to live on.

If anyone has any experience with tech co-ops and can fill in the gaps of my understanding, I'd be interested to hear it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Didn't really understand if the salary quote was about the same coop then the salary one, but in general of you want to work for public sector, education, NGOs etc one should anyway expect lower salaries compared to working for cooperations. So these should be the benchmark to compare and not all over market averages.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Certainly, but this is a different animal. What you're describing is non-profit organization that retains employees doing IT. Like a for-profit, the employee has the expectation of a job irrespective of the level of project work the organization has. The non-profit will have a similar reporting structure and expectations on the IT worker, with the upside that the IT worker is deriving not only benefit from their salary, but from the good the non-profit is doing.

Contrast that with the IT contracting world were rates for IT work are much higher than a standard retained IT worker. The reason the pay is higher is because of the risk to the worker they may be unemployed with the work dries up. So from what I gather from the article this tech co-op is the worst of both worlds: low pay, low job security.

I'd love to be corrected if anyone has IT co-op knowledge/experience.

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