[jlokier]

Startups that give out shares are rare. Startups tend to give options. Options take years to accumulate, and don't give any significant rights by themselves, such as voting or profit share. Employees can typically only afford to exercise options at key company financing events, because they have to sell many of the resulting shares to cover the cost of exercising and cost of tax.

Most startup employee recipients of options never get to exercise them for various reasons, often unable to due to cash flow or restrictive timing reasons, or because they aren't profitable (the employee would take a large financial loss). Many of those who do exercise the options get their shares after leaving the company or they're about to leave. And finally, of the small subset of employees who have shares as a result of exercising while still employed, the number of shares they have is a tiny percentage even in aggregate, so they have effectively no influence at shareholder meetings, if they choose to attend, and if their shares have voting rights which they don't always have.

In co-operatives, the majority of shares as well as voting rights are usually held by a high proportion of employees, so that's a completely different dynamic. As well as voting rights, it means any profit distributed as a dividend tends to go to employees as well.

[dogma1138]

Outside of startups that might not amount to anything never it’s a pretty poor habit to sell shares to cover the cost of tax. It’s nearly always more beneficial to finance the tax due through other means including taking a loan even today after the base interest increase.

But the rest is more or less correct even when the options mature and you can exercise them you usually do not get voting rights it’s nearly always restricted shares.

Also note that unlike cooperatives there is also quite often restrictions on how much stock you can own as a regular employee in a public or even private company the employee shares in cooperatives usually have a different legal framework than regular company shares.

One of the key differences is quite often as someone already mentioned is that shares in cooperative grant a single voting right to a shareholder rather than per share.

You can also have some more complex tiered holding structures such as where all the employee held company shares are issued to a single entity that represents the employee shareholding collective and that entity then grants a single share to each employee, alternatively other models than direct shareholding can be used such as trusts where the trust holds the company shares and the trustees get voting rights.